UDAY PRAKASH

Joseph: the Victim of Ancient Human Trafficking

2012-01-03T22:32:00.000-08:00

Man Who Brought a Food Security Bill and Made Egypt a Super Economic Power

By Madhu Chandra

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Joseph’s story is not just a Biblical narrative. It gives us insight into the human condition. In this narrative it is the issue of selling human beings for money and subsequent slavery. The world has declared that human trafficking is the largest crime next to armed drug trafficking. The story of Joseph will help people to understand the grave concerns involved with the victims of human trafficking. It can also serve to encourage the anti-trafficking initiatives.

For Joseph, it was God who helped him throughout, from the cistern, to being sold to the Midianite merchants, to slavery in Potiphar’s house, to enduring sexual abuse by family members, to being falsely accused and imprisoned. For Joseph, it was God’s intension that he testifies to his brothers when they asked for his forgiveness.

Joseph, the 11^th son of Jacob and first son of his mother Rachael, was a victim of ancient human trafficking. He also became head of the 11^th tribe of Israel and a unique part of Israel’s history. Joseph was abducted, trafficked for domestic work, brutalized, sold and resold to bounded labor, a victim of attempted rape repeatedly by a woman, abused, imprisoned, and ignored, yet became a man who brought a food security bill for the whole Egyptian nation and made the nation a super economic power during years of severe famine.

The narration of Joseph found in the Bible is often thought of as a Biblical story and not connected with the contemporary issues facing us around the world today. Reviewing Joseph’s narrative, not from a theological and evangelical perspective, will throw light on the challenges of modern slavery systems and human trafficking. Perhaps, it will be helpful for those who are struggling to accept the challenges of human trafficking from Christian or Biblical perspectives.

His stepbrothers misled Joseph, which is similar to many cases in current human trafficking. People familiar with the victims mislead them with false promises of giving jobs and free education etc. Joseph, being thrown into a cistern by his stepbrothers, indicates the confinement that victims experience in most human trafficking cases.

His stepbrothers sold him to Midianite merchants for twenty shekels of silver. Twenty shekels of silver is equivalent to eight ounces of silver. Today, twenty shekels is approximately equal to $143. Perhaps, this was the first recorded instance of selling human beings for money. The Midianite merchants resold Joseph to Potiphar, an official of Pharoh. He became the captain of the guard as a slave. His sole purpose was domestic work as a bounded laborer. He was faithful to the service of his master, found favor in the eyes of Potiphar, and was thus given charge of his household.

Like many domestic female servants, Joseph was sexually abused. His master’s wife attempted to rape him repeatedly day after day. Because of his commitment to his master and fear of God, he overcame these rape attempts. When Potipar’s wife saw that she could not succeed, he was charged with an allegation of sexual abuse, which landed him in prison for years.

In prison he met two government officials of Pharaoh, a cupbearer and a baker, who were facing serious allegations against them. They were depressed due to these allegations, lost jobs, and justice denied. Joseph the interpreter of dreams at his father’s house, in the prison, and Pharaoh’s court, consoled the cupbearer and convinced the baker by interpreting the dreams that they each had. The baker was executed for the crimes he committed as Joseph foretold, and the cupbearer was reinstated into Pharoh’s court. Interestingly, the cupbearer forgot the consolation received from Joseph for two years until someone was needed to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, and Joseph was summoned.

Finally, Joseph was rescued from bounded labor when he was able to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams of seven years great abundance and seven years severe famine. Joseph found favor in the eyes of Pharaoh and was appointed as governor of Egypt.

Joseph, the dreamer, made a food security bill for Egypt and the surrounding tribal nations after he was rescued from human trafficking. A bill of agriculture was issued for a tax in order to prepare and store food grain from all over the land of Egypt during the abundant seven years so that the nation would not fall to ruin during the seven years famine. Joseph stored up quantities of grain, like the sand of the sea. It was so much, that he stopped keeping records.

Indian government managed to introduce a must awaited Food Security Bill 2011 on December 22 and it needs to go through both upper and lower houses before it becomes a law for the nation to secure food for over one billion people in India. Joseph knew the importance of the bill in order to save lives of many under his care.

Then the seven years famine began and spread all over the land of Egypt and surrounding nations. No food stores were left in the region accept in Egypt, and people from all over the region came to Egypt to buy food including his stepbrothers and his father Jacob. Egypt became a super economic power due to these great reserves of grain.

But for modern man, hundreds of thousand who are trafficked into forced sexual bondage, bounded labor, domestic work, and mafia thugs, who will be their voices and who care to redeem them? Who is there to restore hope to their lives?

Seema (name changed) a 13 years old girl, now 15, is a victim of Orissa’s Kandhmal communal violence, which took place in 2008-09. Hundreds of home, churches, and lives were destroyed. Thousands were rendered homeless and displaced. Seema’s parents were displaced, and her village and home destroyed. A known villager with false promises of work deceived her and her 19-year-old sister, along with two other girls. They were sold and brought to a placement agency in Delhi in early 2010.

They were sexually abused and raped repeatedly for five days by different people in the placement agency before they were sent to work as domestic workers in different homes. They worked without pay or proper food, and were abused by family members.

An anti human trafficking team rescued them after 9 months when the matter was reported to the All India Christian Council. Three of them were rescued from Delhi and a neighboring state. Seema’s sister is still untraceable even after the Delhi High Court ordered the Delhi police to find her. Two of Seema’s friends have been restored to their families in Orissa after they were rescued. Seema continues rebuilding her life under the care of the All India Christian Council’s shelter home in Delhi.

Seema’s future is finally being restored after she has been given coaching class to read and write in English and half way through a beautician vocational training. Once she completes her course, will able to get a livelihood for herself and her poor parents living in an isolated village in a think forest in Orissa.

Indian Dalit and tribal women and children are vulnerable to human trafficking. North Eastern communities are in great danger at the hands of human traffickers. The issue remained unchallenged with the current socio-economic, educational, and employment crisis in the North East India region. More challenge will face in the region, when the International Highways are soon opened as per as Indian government’s “LOOK EAST” policy with ASEAN countries, where the region could become a hub for entry and exit of human trafficking.

With care and concern, many victims of human trafficking, like Seema, can find hope and a future like Joseph, who became a man rescued, made a food security bill for the nation and helped to make Egypt a super economic power.

Madhu Chandra is a social activist and research scholar based in New Delhi.

Wishes for 2012 : The New Year

2012-01-02T00:46:00.000-08:00

Helena Hagglund

There is no Christmas calm in Egypt. The protests and marches continue, as do the attacks and killings by the army. The second wave of revolution continues.

In less than a month, Egypt will celebrate the anniversary of the January 25th uprising. The Supreme Army Council is said to be planning its own festivities that day, something that the revolutionaries cannot accept. Many fear new controversies.

The scenes in Tahrir Square and its neighbouring streets are scary: people getting abused and killed, choking on tear gas, dying from gunshot wounds. The list of martyrs grows longer. It is easy to see pictures of this and wish for an end to the unrest.

And an end to the unrest is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are looking for. They exhort to calm and claim to be looking for a peaceful democratic electoral process. Calm is also what the ruling military council says it wants. In a time of crisis it is easy to play the stability card if you already have institutionalised power and influence.

But for those who dedicated their lives for the revolution, for those who quit their jobs, for those whose friends or sons or daughters have been killed, for those imprisoned - for all of them calm would be devastating. If they surrender their demands for the downfall of the military council in order to gain calm and stability, the struggle will be lost. Even Mubarak offered calm and stability.

"Stability" is something the powerful incessantly call for. Stability means an end to visible violence but nothing when it comes to ending the silent violations of human rights: the starvation of the poor, the murder of the unwanted in police cells, the daily abuse and exploitation. A calm and quiet people who do not collectively organize themselves in protests are a people easy to control. Hence every dictator this year has pointed out the stability and the calm that he can provide as an opposite to the rowdiness of the revolutionaries. Calm and stability is good for business and rich and powerful nations needs calm to plan and guarantee business deals.

But stability is devastating. If this was the goal, no revolutions would have ever occurred, there would be no real political change. Chaos, unrest and instability is necessary in creating a new future. A subdued people know to expect the onward grind of oppression. But a people ruling themselves do not have a clue what the future will bring, the only thing they know is that they are taking power from the powerful.

That is why the revolutionaries of Egypt are continuing to fight. They know that a revolution is more than overthrowing a dictator. They know that it will probably take years of uncertainty and unrest to ensure that their demands of freedom, justice, social equality and bread are met. The Left in Europe needs to follow their lead and listen to their demands, and not fall for media narratives of "successful elections" or "a gradual transition to a new Egypt".

So this is why I hope for a 2012 that follows on from what the Arab Spring started. I hope for a boiling, unstable 2012 that continues to change the world.

Helena Hagglund is a freelance journalist based in Cairo and Stockholm. The piece was first published in Swedish on www.seglorasmedja.se

Beyond Fukishima

2011-03-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

By Danny Schechter

What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the “dawn” of the nuclear age?

Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.

“It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world.”

The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.

As Hiroshima becomes yesterday’s distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies don’t want to alarm the public.

Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimized, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticizing Japan for a lack of transparency.

On August, 6, 2008, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimizing public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:

“But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the "mainstream" media and the "alternative." Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report”

Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call “50 years of denial.”

One reviewer explained, “The authors examine what they perceive to be a conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about the actual bombing, Truman's decision to drop the bomb, and the birth and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating psychological effects of the bomb.”

Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half century.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O’ Connor and Richard Bell coined the term “Nuke Speak” to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry’s PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.

And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out, President Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear plants.

Others stress more parochial concerns. The TV Production community fears a shortage in Japanese made magnetic and recording tape. Consumers are being told that they may face a delay in ordering new iPads so get your orders in now. And, the Israeli new service YNET says people there worry about a sushi shortage.

Meanwhile, in Germany, more than 50,000 activists took to the streets in protest, but, so far, there has been no organized outcry here in the U.S. At the Left Forum in New York, the issue was barely addressed in the opening plenary.

On the right, flamboyant talking head/provocateur Ann Coulter defended the imagined health benefits of a release of radiation to counter what she calls the alarmism of the environmentalists. She calls it a “cancer vaccine.”

In a talk during a recent visit to Iran, which insists it is not making nuclear weapons, I raised questions about what their government said they want to do: expand their nuclear power plants. When I questioned the wisdom of that approach, I was jeered because they felt I was challenging their “right” to have what other countries have, their right to “progress.” The thought that the plants could be dangerous was dismissed,

What they don’t seem to know and what millions in Japan are finding out is this technology—with spent rods that are never “spent” and the nuclear waste that will outlive us all-- is inherently unsafe. Jonathan Schell makes this point well in a recent essay in the Nation:

“The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind.

The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.”

As the “incident” records of our own Nuclear Regulatory Agency make clear, these are not just Japanese problems. The Christian Science Minitor reports, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to resolve known safety problems, leading to 14 'near-misses' in US nuclear power plants in 2009 and 2010, according to a new report from a nuclear watchdog group.”

We don’t even know the full of the extent of the accidents, unintentional releases of radiation and other problems in this country much less in others with fewer rules and less oversight. No one expected Chenobyl to explode, claiming so many lives; no one knows where the next disaster will occur.

Bernie Sanders is calling for a full investigation of nuclear safety here. Ralph Nader writes, “"The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States - many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis."

The global nuclear roulette game goes on. Even moderate and restrained criticisms are dismissed until there is an “event” that cannot be denied. Nuclear energy supporters promise that “Gen 4,” the next generation of reactors, will be much safer.

Problem solved? Not everyone thinks so. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists carries an assessment by Hugh Gusterson on “The Lessons of Fukishima.”

“To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.

This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents.”

We are still debating if nuclear power is worth the risk as irradiated clouds float over Los Angeles and there is a panicked run in the public to buy iodine pills. The industry’s marketing machine is in crisis response mode and hasn’t missed a beat, while many of us look on with a sense of impotence as we are told, once again, what’s in our best interest.

(News Dissector Danny Schechter began covering nuclear power plant controversies in the early 1970’s. He blogs for Mediachannel.org. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org)

Why People of India are skeptical becoming a Nation

2010-11-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

The problem

ANANYA VAJPEYI
(Seminar, Nov.2010)
Sixty years of constitutional democracy and the rule of law in India would seem, on the face of it, like an occasion for taking stock and for celebrating the great Indian political experiment. The founding fathers and mothers put a structure in place, enshrined a nation’s dreams in an impressively liberal text, and six decades later, it appears we still abide by that vision. All around us, there are polities in various kinds of malfunction – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar – and to our north, a prosperous but authoritarian China. India’s Constitution makes the country an oasis of rights, representation and justice in a desert of flailing, failing or otherwise flawed states.

If only. ‘Between the idea/And the reality…/Falls the shadow,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in his great poem, ‘The Hollow Men’. So much of India is in such deep crisis that the promise of the Constitution, our proudest possession, our charter and our pillar, is beginning to seem utterly hollow. For millions of Indian citizens, the mere existence of the Constitution does not alleviate poverty, dispense justice, provide security, guarantee rights or compensate for long-standing inequity. Tribals, religious minorities, Dalits, women, and the poorest of the poor, oftentimes overlapping categories, suffer so acutely that they may as well be living in a rudderless state, where no organ – electoral, legal, legislative, administrative or military – looks out for their welfare. In the border states of the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir, a state of exception to the rule of law, designated by the extraordinary dispensation, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), suspends the constitutional regime in any case, so that citizens may not even have the expectation, if only to be disappointed, that their rights will be protected.

It could be argued that the Constitution, as the textual blueprint of the republic, is not responsible for its own marginalization, violation, or suspension. That it was conceived in a certain era, written in a certain spirit, and promulgated in good faith by the best political and legal minds active in India around the time of independence. That a document first articulated and steered by the likes of B.R. Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Rajendra Prasad, K.M. Munshi and Constitutional Advisor B.K. Rau, continuously guarded and carefully interpreted by three generations of lawmakers since, is as good as it gets for an overly large, unremittingly poor, vexingly diverse and precariously free post-colony like India. That we may criticize the Constitution; we may lament its disrespect or point out its inefficacy in many parts of India, but without it, we would still be colonized, if not by the British then by undemocratic, militarist, communal or other sorts of nonprogressive strains within the Indian political spectrum.

Better to have an excellent constitution in the letter if not in practice, than no constitution at all, the objector says, and we should be grateful for the moral commitment and practical foresight of our founders. They took three years to draft the text and tried to correct for every problem that they could think of. They overcame tremendous disagreements to achieve consensus. Without that inaugural effort and investment we would be nowhere today, as a nation or even as an idea.

There is some merit to these objections. The Constitution provides a stable point of reference, so that we are able to describe egregious attempts to hijack state power, undermine democracy, disturb the peace and deprive citizens of their rights as ‘unconstitutional’. We may also amend the constitution to make it more responsive to present-day needs and to unanticipated developments in the polity, economy or society. The Indian Constitution has been amended a hundred times, a factor that arguably contributes to its survival. If there were no constitution, or if it did not look anything like it does, we would not be in a position to criticize, condemn or resist some of the gravest challenges the republic has faced thus far: the Emergency, Ayodhya, the over-extension of the AFSPA in Kashmir, to name just a few of many.

The Constitution is an orienting mechanism, a talisman, a symbol, an everunrealizable ideal and a permanent mirror held up to our nation. Governments may come and go, wars and insurrections may disrupt normal life, ideologies may wax and wane, the economy may ebb and flow. But in principle it’s always possible for India, as a nation with a democratic, pluralistic, flexible and durable Constitution, to perform a reality-check and pull itself up by the bootstraps. Survivors of the Holocaust like Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi used to say the worst thing about the Nazi regime was that anything was possible in that world without the law. The Constitution preserves the aspiration that in India at least, it is not the case that anything might be possible; that beyond a point, you cannot desecrate the rule of law and keep on getting away with it. The buck stops somewhere, even if only at a vanishing point, infinitely far from the here-and-now.

The Constitution of India, as an intellectual artefact, owed its inspiration and its form, in the first place, to its American, French, Canadian and Irish predecessors, to the legacy of English parliamentary democracy, to Anglo-Indian law, and to British jurisprudence. Indian liberals and modernists are quick to emphasize this genealogy of the Constitution. But this document did not come into being in an epistemological vacuum, as it were – and it hardly arrived in the mail, from overseas.

Rather, it was born into a culture with a long and complex history of legal and legislative discourse, one or more textual traditions dealing with the law, and protocols of argumentation, exegesis and interpretation that are among the most ancient, the most rigorous, the most exacting and the most continuous in any part of the literate world. Many of the members of the nationalist movement, of the Constituent Assembly and of the first legislature were formally trained as lawyers in England, but also conversant with Indic legal and political traditions, and with ideas of ethical sovereignty, righteous rule, and normative justice derived from Brahmin and Islamic codes of pre-colonial provenance.

To this mixed inheritance of the founders of the republic – modern and traditional, Western and Indic, Christian, Hindu and Muslim, imported and indigenous – should be added the lessons of the preceding thirty years of Gandhian politics. Gandhi’s harnessing and shepherding of disparate anti-colonial, radical and nationalist energies was successful in ousting the British Raj and establishing Indian sovereignty, but the Mahatma himself never thought in terms of translating swaraj into a Constitution. His assassination in early 1948 forever ended the possibility of any eventual compromise he might have made with the idea of a constitution. Others tried to theorize a so-called ‘Gandhian Constitution’, incorporating some ideas about village-level democracy and panchayati raj, without much uptake from the Constituent Assembly as a whole.

Ambedkar’s closing address to the Constituent Assembly at its penultimate session in November 1949 explicitly asks that ‘the bloody methods of revolution’ – in which he includes, somewhat incoherently, ‘civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha’ – be left behind in favour of ‘constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives.’ The Chairman of the Drafting Committee went on to say: ‘These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.’1 In other words, he was closing the chapter on Gandhian struggle. In the same speech he chastises Socialist and Communist critics of the Indian Constitution, invokes the American Thomas Jefferson and the British John Stuart Mill, and reminds his colleagues of democratic tendencies in the long-ago Buddhist republics of the subcontinent.

The struggle over the genealogy of political thought in India is apparent even at the very moment that the Constitution is completed and presented to the nation. Hardly two years after independence and soon after Gandhi’s death, Ambedkar is making it clear how he wants to locate the Constitution in a longer history of state-building in India: a position that by no means goes uncontested by his colleagues both within and outside the Constituent Assembly. Tellingly, within another few months, Ambedkar had already resigned his position as Law Minister in Nehru’s cabinet.

Historians of decolonizing and post-colonial India, and of the republic’s foundation and subsequent fortunes, from Granville Austin to Ramachandra Guha, have pointed out the different strands in the Constitution’s DNA: the Government of India Act of 1935, which provides an element of ‘colonial continuity’; the examples and models of other constitutions belonging to modern democratic republics older than India; Gandhian swaraj, a dormant gene or a road not taken; a ‘national revolution’, whence the imperative of democracy, and a ‘social revolution’, whence the impetus for equality.

Yet Ambedkar is right to caution his fellow-founders that while liberty, recently achieved, is to be celebrated, neither equality nor fraternity have deep roots in Indian society. He even goes on to make a fine distinction between the idea of India being based on a ‘people’ versus a ‘nation’, and points out that mere political independence for India does not entail or guarantee Indians becoming a ‘nation’ in the true sense of that term. These notes of scepticism and criticism at the very dawn of the republic are jarring, but also indicative of how genuine Ambedkar’s engagement was with the problem of constructing a new political paradigm for India. He wasn’t going to pretend that simply writing a constitution was an answer to India’s long history of entrenched inequality and persistent injustice: and in this respect, we can do no better than follow in his footsteps today, on a significant anniversary of the Constitution.

Of course, it should also be immediately apparent that to an extent Ambedkar’s rejection of what he calls ‘the Grammar of Anarchy’ is premised on a misreading or misrepresentation of the Gandhian revolution, because it completely elides and ignores its core value: non-violence. But then again, perhaps this is understandable, given the fundamental differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar on a number of issues, including caste, religion and passive resistance – differences that were never reconciled to the very end of either man’s life, and have not been reconciled by their respective followers to date.

The late D.R. Nagaraj showed us in his brief but important career as a social theorist interested most of all in inequality and emancipation, that the disagreement between Gandhi and Ambedkar on caste was no minor quibble. Caste goes to the very heart of the people, the nation, the state and the Constitution of India. We could say that the Constitution was the most comprehensive attempt ever made to undo caste society and rebuild India on the basis of equal citizenship, fundamental rights, and compensatory social justice.

Six decades later, the goal of an egalitarian and just society still being elusive, this continues to be one of the Constitution’s main raisons d’être. While the Constitution seeks to create a flat community of citizens in place of an intricate hierarchy of caste-based groups, the historical complexity, the political potential, the religious meanings and the social practices associated with caste identities have in large measure remained intractable to the legal and administrative measures envisaged by the founders, principally Ambedkar. The alignment between the social teleology of the Constitution and Indian social reality has gone progressively awry.

Caste, after an initial recession in the Nehru years, has enjoyed a new lease of life in post-Mandal, globalizing India. Questions around caste-based political activity, electoral democracy, reservations in education and employment, and most recently around the idea of a caste census, continue to be central to Indian politics and legislation. If the Constitution, and especially Ambedkar among those responsible for its drafting, anticipated a withering away of caste identities as the republic evolved, this has not occurred – quite the opposite.

Besides caste, another area of public life in which the Constitution is at the very centre of attention, is at the margins of the Indian Union, i.e., in the eight states where the AFSPA is in effect, either because it was imposed sometime in the past and never removed, or because it is seen to be actively needed in an ongoing way. Arguably, if the government is inclined to suspend the rule of law and enforce what is effectively martial law, then it can hardly worry that the Constitution is not sufficiently respected in these parts of the country. Rationally, the state cannot both suspend constitutional rights and at the same time demand the citizens’ allegiance to the Constitution of India.

But this is precisely the situation in the Northeast and in Jammu and Kashmir these days, particularly in the latter. Except for the provision of periodic elections, the Constitution is not available to the people of these regions as their bulwark and their appeal against state excesses, especially military brutality. When these very people, beleaguered and cast into a state of exception, disavow their faith in the Constitution, they are characterized as antinational and secessionist. When they then go on to really demand separation from the Union, we wonder why they do not feel love and loyalty towards our splendidly liberal and democratic Constitution.

This cycle of exception and alienation has gone on for over 50 years in the Northeast and over 20 years in Kashmir. The breaking point may well be upon us, as far as Kashmir goes. The message is clear: a constitution in suspension is a recipe for rebellion, secession and the implosion of the Union so painstakingly and so tenuously constructed in the early years of the republic, by use of a combination of methods, fair and not-so-fair. The Indian state must rethink the purpose, the efficacy and the implementation of the AFSPA, as well as a host of other extraordinary laws that undermine, weaken and can ultimately destroy the writ of the Constitution or worse, engender in the public opinion a terminal aversion against it.

A priori, every single part of this country deserves to be governed by the representatives of the people, duly elected and installed in office, and authorized to administer the full panoply of institutions of the executive, the judiciary, the legislature and the armed forces. The sun of the Constitution ought to shine in every dark corner of India. Simply put, those who are left out for long, want out for good – rightly, if regrettably, so.

Tracts of India directly affected by Maoist insurgencies, inhabited by autochthonous populations, rich in mineral resources and potentially the most attractive to capitalist corporations, are also, increasingly, zones of constitutional crisis. Again, logic very similar to the inflamed borderlands can be seen unfolding before our very eyes in the tribal heartlands: people don’t want a constitution that fails to protect their interests or guarantee their basic rights, livelihood and security – not because it is hostile to them in and of itself, but because it is unavailable to them on account of some or other type of emergency.2

The mere holding of elections from time to time has not contained unrest nor reconciled disaffected populations to state power, in many parts of the Northeast, in J&K, and in Naxalite areas. State and non-state actors complain that separatist and insurgent leaders, whether Kashmiris or Nagas or Maoists, don’t want to come to the table for talks; refuse to contest elections and form elected governments; insist on using armed methods to spread their ideology and make their demands; counter policy with violence; invite deadly counter-insurgency operations upon themselves and hapless civilians and, in general, do not uphold constitutional norms of negotiation. Indeed.

Rebels against the idea of India have picked up the gun at every point since the very inception of the republic. But it has been the state’s prerogative to either follow suit and abandon the constitutional path, or hew close to the Constitution’s liberal vision and attempt to bring in estranged sections through a combination of persuasion and incentives. By enforcing extraordinary laws, by sending in armed forces, by granting impunity to soldiers and paramilitaries for their actions against armed or unarmed civilians, by denying citizens redress, justice or compensation, by creating a war-like situation for a population that has political, social, cultural and economic grievances possible to address without force, it is the state that sets aside the Constitution. The Indian state has done this too many times, in too many places, and for too long.

It is time for citizens in the so-called ‘normal’ parts of the country to consider how they want to defend their Constitution against such misuse and ill-treatment by the state, a procedure that leaves millions of people exposed to both everyday as well as excessive violence, and ultimately turns them against India. If the Indian Union sees any attrition to its territory in the coming years on account of separatism and civil strife (not such an unlikely scenario as hawkish policy-makers like to believe), this will have come to pass at least partly because the state allowed the cancer of exception to eat away at the body politic, and did not administer the medicine of constitutional reinstatement and restitution in time. It bears repeating that periodic exercises in the electoral process do not always prove to be a sufficient counterweight to the toxic effects of the AFSPA, even if elections are relatively free and fair (a tough challenge), and even if significant percentages of the relevant populations do turn out to vote.

The state’s reasoning for why military, paramilitary and police must replace civil agencies in the work of everyday governance, a step which can and does go horribly wrong, is that disruptive violence (from secessionist and insurgent groups) has to be met with restorative counter-violence (from the state) in order to ensure overall security for the population, and preserve the integrity of the Union of India. Defenders of the AFSPA insist that this is a sound rationale. But inevitably, questions arise: What are the limits of the immunity that such an extraordinary law grants to the armed forces, when does the justifiable control of terror become overkill, and when should a quantitative assessment about the necessary degree of force give way to a qualitative judgment about whether force is necessary at all, over and above alternative – peaceful – means of addressing the situation?

There appears to be a dire need for a system of checks-and-balances, perhaps also originating from the Constitution, to be instituted, so that the explicitly democratic mandate of the Indian republic may be strengthened against an always lurking authoritarian tendency (a legacy of the post-colonial state’s colonialist and imperialist predecessor).

It may be true that extremist and terrorist organizations have as little regard for civilian life and safety as do trigger-happy paramilitaries, and that both sides violate human rights and abuse their armed power. But because the state is by definition the stronger party, and the one authorized to govern, the responsibility of exercising restraint, minimizing collateral damage, and setting an example of honourable conduct lies first and foremost with the state. This is a responsibility that it cannot ever relinquish, no matter what the provocation, and no matter how difficult the conditions for negotiation and dialogue with enemies of the state. The Constitution is what can make the difference between India and centrifugal anarchy (Pakistan), India and soulless growth (China), India and exclusivist notions of citizenship (Israel), India and unchecked consumerism (the US), India and any form of power that might be unethical and inimical to human flourishing.

The Constitution of the Republic of India, in a country that has produced more texts in more languages for more centuries than any other nation in the world, is a singular text. It is comparable to no other text: not the Bhagavad Gita or the Qur’an, not the Holy Bible or the Guru Granth Sahib, not the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, not Manu’s Dharmashastra or Kautilya’s Arthashastra, not the edicts of Ashoka or the diaries of Babur, not the inscriptions of Samudragupta or the poems of Bahadur Shah Zafar, not Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Nehru’s Discovery of India, not Tagore’s national anthem or Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma. It is completely unique and unprecedented in the history of India, crowded as that history is with innumerable texts.

For those who ask, ‘What can a mere text do?’ we need only turn to places where this text has been suspended, neglected, ignored or transgressed, and we find injustices and atrocities of every kind rampant. A text like the Constitution can do exactly what such a text is supposed to do: nothing more, and nothing less, than upholding the world. After 250 years of colonial rule, nearly a century of imperialism, incessant soul-searching, and the most profound political and intellectual effort undertaken by hundreds of thousands of individuals across the length and breadth of the subcontinent, India finally became an independent nation-state on 15 August 1947. After three years of Constituent Assembly debates, on 26 January 1950 India gifted itself the chance to unlock its society and set itself free.

Given a very old and civilized culture, the Indian nation, protected by its founding ideals, served by resilient institutions, and fired by new economic opportunities, ought to be able to find a way to allow its people to live with dignity, in peace, and with the means and the prospects to better their lot. If 60 years after the founding of the republic millions of citizens still remain deprived of their liberty, then somewhere along the way India has forgotten that the key to its emancipation lies in its own priceless, peerless Constitution.

* Thanks to Ramachandra Guha, Dilip Simeon and Sanjib Baruah for detailed comments on earlier drafts of this essay. D.R. Nagaraj’s classic The Flaming Feet has just been reissued from Permanent Black (2010), together with his previously unpublished writings and a critical introduction by Ashis Nandy, edited by Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi. The complete text of the Indian Constitution is accessible at: http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html

Footnotes:

1. Constituent Assembly, Friday, 25 November 1949.

2. If anything, the 5th Schedule of the Constitution specifically addresses Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Areas, but are ruling parties implementing it in the states affected by Maoism?

Hindutva versus Hinduism

2010-10-21T05:08:00.000-07:00

SARAL JHINGRAN

Hinduism is the most difficult religion to define as it does not have a Book, a prophet or a common creed. Consequently, both its supporters and critics can take up any one of its various aspects and present a conception of it that is nowhere near the reality. This is exactly what is being done by the protagonists of Hindutva.

First, let us take up the conception of Rama. They project Rama as the sole Deity of Hinduism, a symbol not only of Hinduism, but of nationalism. This is a fantastic assertion. Rama cannot be a symbol of nationalism, because religious faith and nationalism belong to two entirely different conceptual frameworks. Nationalism is a modern conception and is territorial and political in its connotation. Religious faith is a matter of heart, or soul if you wish, and is not related to territory or political sovereignty. More importantly, Rama could not be a symbol of Hinduism even, as the latter has so many gods, and Rama is but one of them, and that too a later entrant in the Hindu pantheon. If at all the votaries of Hindutva want to establish the historicity of Rama, they must depend on Valmiki’s Ramayana; and there is no suggestion of Rama’s divinity therein. It is in Tulsidas’s Ramacharita Manas that Rama is declared divine. But this was written approximately one and a half millennia after Valmiki’s Ramayana and cannot be cited to prove Rama’s historicity.

Second, granting that Rama is probably a historical figure in view of the depth of feelings for his story; also granting that Rama was born in Ayodhya, it is hard to believe that the exact spot of Rama’s birth can be pinpointed with accuracy. The declaration that the spot at which Rama was born is determined by faith is stretching the meaning of faith. Here it should be remembered that the greatest difference between Hinduism and the Semitic religions is that, unlike the latter, Hinduism has no historical beginning. If tomorrow, it could be proved that there was no historical Jesus Christ, Christianity would be destroyed. But if it were to proved that Krishna was not a historical person, it would not diminish the Gita’s authenticity. The same holds true for Rama. Hinduism is Sanatan dharma, marked by its content, attitudes and values, and not by its historicity.

Thirdly, the Hindutva people have destroyed the conception of Rama which the Hindus have worshipped through the ages. Rama is maryada purushottam, the embodiment of all Aryan virtues. An extreme dedication to duty, respect for elders, affection for juniors, compassion for all and peace (shanti) characterise him. He hardly ever gets angry and is unwilling to attack anybody unless absolutely necessary. His idols have traditionally portrayed Rama in shanta or abhaya mudra — with the right hand raised in a gesture of blessing and a beatific smile on his face. Also, traditionally, Rama, like Krishna, is never worshipped alone but always with his consort. The Rama of Hindutva stands alone, with bow held aloft, ready for aggression. Both innovations go against the traditional conception of Rama.

Fourthly, there is hardly anything common between traditional Hinduism and Hindutva. Traditional Hinduism worships many gods, and declares that all Gods are but different names of one Supreme Divine Reality. But the ideology of Hindutva seems to declare that there is but one God called Rama, who is the symbol of both Hindusim and Indian nationalism. The core of traditional Hinduism is religious toleration and even ahimsa which, though borrowed from heterodox sects, has been so internalised by Hinduism that it can be safely assumed as belonging to the core of Hinduism. In contrast, Hindutva’s central message is aggression and destruction of enemies, real or imagined.

Fifthly, Hindutva has distorted the meaning of religious symbols. The project of distributing trishuls is an example. That Shiva has been portrayed holding a trishul does not mean that every Hindu should carry one. Vishnu is portrayed as carrying four things in his hands—shanka, chakra, gada, padma, Rama carries a bow and arrow, and Kali is supposed wear a garland of skulls. Does it mean that a Hindu should carry these things?

The Hindutva people have randomly picked varied elements from all these traditions to project Hinduism as an aggressive religion, without learning about the intrinsic characters of their Gods. Rama is God of righteousness, compassion; Krishna of Vrindavan is a God of love; Krishna teaches one to do one’s duty selflessly; and Shiva is declared Hole nath, a simple-hearted God who is easily appeased. None of this holds value for the Hindutva lot.

Hindutva is an attempt at semitising Hindusim. The uniqueness of Hinduism lay in its extreme liberalness, toleration and vision of one Divine Reality residing in all. By trying to project Hinduism as a self-assertive, aggressive, and strictly monotheistic religion, Hindutva could destroy it.

(Indian Express, 31 October 2003, Chandigarh)

It's a Danger Signal

2010-09-24T23:38:00.000-07:00

This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan

Thursday 23 September 2010

by: T. Christian Miller

Eyrnis security personnel, contracted to provide security for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, pose at the Baghdad parade field. (Photo: jamesdale10 / WikiMedia)

Labor Department figures show that more than 44,000 contractors have reported injuries since 2001, compared to about 40,000 U.S. troops. The figures are not entirely comparable, since contractor injuries include minor workplace injuries.

More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.

More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor, which tracks contractor deaths. In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.

This milestone in the privatization of modern U.S. warfare reflects both the drawdown in military forces in Iraq and the central role of contractors in providing logistics support to local armies and police forces, contracting and military experts said.

Steven Schooner, a professor of government contracting at George Washington University Law School, said that the contractor deaths show how the risks of war have increasingly been absorbed by the private sector. Private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan provide fuel, food and protective services to U.S. outposts — jobs once performed by soldiers.

“It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture.”

Schooner, who conducted a recent study of contractor fatalities published in Service Contractor (PDF), an industry newsletter, said contractors now make up more than 25 percent of total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — a proportion that has grown steadily throughout the conflicts. Official figures show that 5,531 troops and 2,008 civilian contract workers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of hostilities in 2001 and June 2010.

Many working under U.S. contracts are local civilians, often working as translators for troops, or are hired from third world countries to do basic labor, such as cleaning kitchens and toilets.

Previous ProPublica stories have noted that companies employing such workers often fail to report their deaths and injuries to the Labor Department, as required by law. Government figures likely understate the total number civilian contractor deaths.

The rising fatalities have received little public attention, concealing the full human cost of the war, Schooner said. When President Obama spoke of troop deaths in Afghanistan earlier this month, he made no mention of fatalities among the private workforce that feeds and fuels U.S. forces.

“I'm not accusing either the Bush or the Obama administration of intentionally deceiving the public,” Schooner said. “But when a president applauds a reduction in military deaths but fails to acknowledge the contractor personnel now dying in their place, someone isn't telling the whole story.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most privatized in American military history. Today, there are 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. As of March 2010, there were more than 200,000 private contractors, though that number is believed to have declined with the drawdown of U.S. forces.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a plan last month to sharply reduce the number of contractors, saying the Pentagon has become overly dependent on private workers to carry out jobs once done by soldiers.

A recent Congressional Research Service report (PDF) found that the heavy use of contractors had exposed troops to supply shortfalls, wasted taxpayer money, and stirred anger among locals. In several high-profile incidents, heavily armed private security contractors have killed unarmed Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

“Some analysts believe that poor contract management has also played a role in abuses and crimes committed by certain contractors against local nationals, which may have undermined U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the report found.

Marcie Hascall Clark, an advocate for contract workers, said that contractor deaths and injuries reflected contractors’ importance in fighting the wars.

Labor Department figures show that more than 44,000 contractors have reported injuries since 2001, compared to about 40,000 U.S. troops. The figures are not entirely comparable, since contractor injuries include minor workplace injuries.

“I don’t think most contractors expect to be treated as nobly as our soldiers, but they don’t expect to be forgotten, either,” said Hascall Clark, who runs a group called American Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think there should definitely be some recognition of what they do.”

We are Dirt Poor of India

2010-09-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

C'mon, Time To Re-Brand Your Life!

By John Pilger

Friday, September 17, 2010

In India, a similar re-branding is under way for next month’s Commonwealth Games. In the country that has most of the world’s malnourished children, the capital Delhi has been re-branded a “world class city” at a cost of $2.5 billion. A school for 180 slum children has been bulldozed so that a vast estate of luxury apartments can be built for visiting athletes. “They told us we were a security threat so we had to go,” said the headteacher.

The year before England won the 1966 World Cup, I interviewed its captain, Bobby Moore. Having not long arrived from the antipodes, where “soccer” was a minority sport beloved by Italians and Croats, I did not have a clue about the game. Nevertheless I had been assigned to write a “human interest” piece on the West Ham star by the same convivial assistant editor who had hired me believing I could play cricket, because I was Australian, and so assist the Daily Mirror team in its grudge match against the Express. I could swim and row and had done time in a rugby scrum, but cricket, no. (He forgave me). I met Bobby Moore outside West Ham tube station, and we walked round the corner to a greasy spoon that was filled with Woodbine fug. People beamed and shook his hand, reinforcing my impression of a gracious, modest man. Here was a star in every sense – talent, looks, fame – and yet he seemed genuinely surprised by the fuss. In the queue for tea and coffee he patiently engaged an elderly fan who was hard of hearing. When I unwisely feigned knowledge of the game, he let me down gently. As we parted, he said, “Look, this is a bit embarrassing, but I’ve got this agent and he’s asked me to ask for 50 quid for the interview.” I said I would pass it on to my editor; I don’t know if he was paid, and I doubt if he cared.

I remembered Bobby Moore when I read about another sporting star, Lleyton Hewitt, the Australian tennis seed and famous air-puncher. For all his classy, often tireless play, Hewitt’s behaviour on court has always been difficult to watch, because he gives the impression only he matters. His aggressive “C’mon!” and fist pumping are his trademark, literally. He is not merely a tennis player; he is Brand Hewitt, which is owned by Lleyton Hewitt Marketing Pty Ltd which owns the rights to two “C’mon” logos.

Lleyton Hewitt Marketing, or LHM, recently suffered a defeat against a sports fan in Australia, Josh Shiels, who since 2004 has used “Come-on” to promote his struggling sportswear business. In a statement, LHM says that it has no problem with other parties owning trademarks incorporating “C’mon” and “Come on”; however, having been “threatened” by Shiels and asked to “surrender” its own trademarks, it requested that the Trade Marks Office cancel one registered to Shiels on the basis that he failed to use it.

At an intellectual property hearing in Canberra, Shiels said that his wife and daughters had designed the logo and his business had sold “about 10 shirts”. He pointed out that “come-on” had been a popular catch cry in Australia since world series cricket began in the 1970s; there was even a song. The hearing officer decided that, however meagre Shiels’s business, he had the right to make use of the words. Shiels is left fearing he will face a re-match.

The stark contrast between Bobby Moore and Brand Hewitt is telling because it represents what has been lost and is a reminder of the ubiquitous nature of extreme corporatism. It seems that no idea, no event, no talent, no personality, no resource of nature has value unless it is owned and branded. When the public water supply of Bolivia’s second city, Cochabamba, was sold off to a foreign consortium, rainwater was included. The clouds became the property of multinationals – until the people fought back, and won.

The pursuit of profit in sport seems unrelenting. Having said goodbye to foreign sports writers and their platitudinous eulogies for the “rainbow nation”, the South African treasury reckons it put $5 billion into the World Cup while corporate sponsors took home more than $4 billion in tax-free profits. All those corporate parties, free tickets, kickbacks and other “gifts” merely indulged a post-apartheid elite which presides over the most inequitable society on earth. Since 2008, during the feverish building of stadiums, several of them unnecessary, more than a million people lost their jobs. In the wake of the World Cup, 1.3 million public sector workers have struck for a living wage. The South African police now have paramilitary powers comparable with the apartheid era. A new Protection of Information Bill before parliament will conceal the corruption of the ruling African National Congress “wabenzi” (identifiable by their large silver Mercedes). “If journalists have to be fired [or go to prison], because they don’t contribute to the South Africa we want,” said the ANC spokesman, “let it be.”

Corporate sport has enriched Rupert Murdoch, corrupted cricket and much of football, subverted numerous other play and appropriated the Olympics and similar spectacles. Its language is that of business schools, PR companies, consultancies and banks. Its “philosophy” is that everything is for sale and monopoly rules. Just wear the logo, pump your fist and bellow, “C’mon!”

Beyond Violence And Non-Violence

2010-07-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Resistance As A Culture

By Ramzy Baroud

Resistance is not a band of armed men hell-bent on wreaking havoc. It is not a cell of terrorists scheming ways to detonate buildings.

True resistance is a culture.

It is a collective retort to oppression.

Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people, resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine's Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence.

The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody conflicts.

Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly ‘strategic' discourse has robbed many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance - as both concept and culture.

Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of resistance as violent and terrorist and the ‘alternative' defacing of an inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost. The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements: no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda; no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers, intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish to debate about how to suppress their resistance.

By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said's elucidation of "culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration." When cultures resist, they don't scheme and play politics. Nor do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic. They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant.

If resistance is "the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with", then a culture of resistance is what occurs when an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable element - often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion, tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture's past experiences, but it is very much an internal process.

It's almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex since it isn't always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza:

"It's not easy to isolate specific dates and events that spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed." (My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story)

Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient, destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a culture its unique identity and inner strengths - and thus defuse the culture's ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be achieved through soft means of control. Many ‘third world' nations that boast of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures - through globalization, for example - they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of their desired objectives.

In Gaza, Palestine, while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same culture of resistance that Gaza has witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word ‘martyr', and destroyed homes. Throughout, the word ‘victory' is persistently used.

When I was in Iraq, I witnessed a local version of these kids' drawings. And while I have yet to see Afghani children's scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

From : Countercurrents.org

Losing in Afghanistan

2010-07-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

By Marjorie Cohn

Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the President a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan. Democrats voting for the second amendment included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine Republicans. Both amendments failed to pass.

The new appropriation is in addition to the $130 billion Congress has already approved for Iraq and Afghanistan this year. And the 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending programs combined.

Our economic crisis is directly tied to the cost of the war. We are in desperate need of money for education and health care. The $1 million per year it costs to maintain a single soldier in Afghanistan could pay for 20 green jobs.

Not only is the war bankrupting us, it has come at a tragic cost in lives. June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In addition to the 1,149 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, untold numbers of Afghan civilians have died from the war - untold because the Defense Department refuses to maintain statistics of anyone except U.S. personnel. After all, Donald Rumsfeld quipped in 2005, “death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

There are other “depressing” aspects of this war as well. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal reported just days before he got the axe, there is a “resilient and growing insurgency” with high levels of violence and corruption within the Karzai government. McChrystal’s remarks were considered “off message” by the White House, which was also irked by the general’s criticisms of Obama officials in a Rolling Stone article. McChrystal believes that you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan. “The Russians killed 1 million Afghans and that didn’t work.”

He and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, likely disagree on the need to prevent civilian casualties (known as “Civ Cas”). McChrystal instituted some of the most stringent rules of engagement the U.S. military has had in a war zone: “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force.” Commanders cannot fire on buildings or other places if they have reason to believe civilians might be present unless their own forces are in imminent danger of being overrun. And they must end engagements and withdraw rather than risk harming noncombatants. McChrystal knows that for every innocent person you kill, you create new enemies; he calls it “insurgent math.” According to the Los Angeles Times, McChrystal “was credited with bringing about a substantial drop in the proportion of civilian casualties suffered at the hands of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and its Afghan allies.”

While testifying in Congress before he was confirmed to take McChrystal’s place, Petraeus told senators that some U.S. soldiers had complained about the former’s rules of engagement aimed at preventing civilian casualties.

According to the Rolling Stone article, Obama capitulated to McChrystal’s insistence that more troops were needed in Afghanistan. In his December 1 speech at West Point, the article says, “the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It’s expensive; we’re in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then,” the article continued, “without ever using the words ‘victory’ or ‘win,’ Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested.”

Both Obama and Petraeus no longer speak of “victory” over the Taliban; they both hold open the possibility of settlement with the Taliban. Indeed, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, chief of operations for McChrystal, told Rolling Stone, “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win.”

The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan. Fareed Zakaria had some harsh words for the war on his CNN show, saying that “the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem.” Noting that CIA director Leon Panetta admitted that the number of Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan may be 50 to 100, Zakaria asked, “why are we fighting a major war” there? “Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan,” he said. “That’s more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month.” Citing estimates that the war will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone, Zakaria observed, “That’s a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year.” He queried, “Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?” And Zakaria responded to the argument that we should continue fighting the Taliban because they are allied with Al Qaeda by saying, “this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler’s regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany.”

There is also division in the Republican ranks over the war. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele made some gutsy comments about the war in Afghanistan, saying it is not winnable and calling it a “war of Obama’s choosing.” (Even though George W. Bush first invaded Afghanistan, Obama made the escalation of U.S. involvement a centerpiece of his campaign.) Steele said that if Obama is “such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Everyone who has tried, over 1,000 years of history, has failed.” Interestingly, Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain slammed Steele and jumped to Obama’s defense. Rep. Ron Paul, however, agreed with Steele, saying, “Michael Steele has it right, and Republicans should stick by him.”

Obama will likely persist with his failed war. He appears to be stumbling along the same path that Lyndon Johnson followed. Johnson lost his vision for a “Great Society” when he became convinced that his legacy depended on winning the Vietnam War. It appears that Obama has similarly lost his way.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She is co-author (with Kathleen Gilberd) of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. See www.marjoriecohn.com.

Israel is a Rouge Nation ...US must distance from it

2010-06-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

Reflections On The Flotilla Massacre

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Join ZSpace

Israel’s premeditated murder of the Mavi Marmara’s peace activists could become the turning point for the Palestinian struggle. Or, if the wrong conclusions are deduced, there’s a lot more misery ahead for the people of Gaza. A week after the event, it is time to ask some key questions and suggest answers.

Question: The decision to attack the 6-ship flotilla and stop it “at all cost” was a deliberate decision by the Israeli government. Given that international condemnation would surely follow, how can one understand Israel’s decision to go ahead?

Answer: The attack had little to do with “restoring Israel's deterrence” or capping the peashooters in Gaza. To understand Israel’s decision, one must hark back to Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who in 2002 said that “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

The flotilla attack was aimed to send a clear message: foreign nationals and peace activists will be treated just as violently as the inmates of the Israeli gulag. The Israeli bulldozer that crushed Rachel Corrie, the 23-year old American-Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, stands ever-ready to crush challenges to absolute Israeli supremacy. It scarcely mattered that the world was watching or that on board was a Holocaust survivor, white-as-lilies members of parliament from European countries, and even a six-month baby of unknown color and descent. Discounting those from Muslim countries, including three from Pakistan, the constellation of those calling for an end to Gaza’s blockade was impressive. The hope of a violence-free ending was therefore reasonable. But that did not happen. Israel wanted Gazans to know that even the international community cannot save them. It reasons that a hopeless people would eventually give up fighting.

That the peace flotilla was attacked in international waters, and that a Hamas leader was murdered this year by the Mossad in Dubai, is also noteworthy. Israel, in effect, has declared that it knows no boundaries. It is truly a rogue nation.

Question: Why did the United States refuse to condemn the Israeli action, even though the cost it shall pay will be large?

The cost is indeed huge! Imagine that the US had allowed a meeting of the UN Security Council to criticize Israel, and had called for an open investigation by the International Court of Justice. In a jiffy, the key US interest across the world – that of fighting Al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism – would have been immensely strengthened. This one act may have bought more security for the US than increasing its defense budget by 100 billion dollars. The world would have felt so much better about America. The steam would have gone out of rabid jihadist organizations. Conversely, in refusing to condemn the atrocity, the United States lost an opportunity to rescue its tarnished international image of being a slave of Israel.

It is unprecedented in history for one state to set aside its own security, and that of its allies, in pursuing the interests of another state. So what on earth makes the US behave in this way? This is a fascinating question. Most people think that this is because of shared US-Israeli strategic interests and/or some compelling moral imperative.

But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two leading American academics whose book caused a storm, argue that neither is true. Unqualified US support for Israel, they say, is unnatural and unnecessary. Far from being a loyal ally, Israel regularly spies on its principal patron. Moreover, Israel is racist while the US is democratic. Unlike the US, where people enjoy equal legal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state where citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Indeed, even Pakistan’s America-hating ulema think this way – they line up to send their children to the US and pray for grant of their Green Cards.

But, say Mearsheimer and Walt, America’s uncritical support for Israel actually owes to the Israeli lobby in the US. AIPAC (American Israel Public Action Committee) is a hugely influential organization that was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. Thus, during the bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the House of Representatives passed a resolution of total solidarity with Israel by 410 votes to eight. Today the Israeli tail wags the American dog. This is remarkable: Jews belonged to the oppressed people of America until a few decades ago, and only conditionally allowed to set foot on American soil although Hitler was sending them off to be gassed.

Noam Chomsky, my guru and friend, who was turned away from entering the West Bank some weeks ago, has long argued that Israel’s time is running out. Decades ago he wrote that “Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long.”

Is Chomsky right? Maybe. America’s formerly unqualified support for Israel is now qualified. Polls show that Democrat voters are unwilling to give Israel a blank check anymore. And, a glance at the Israeli press shows that while President Obama refused to condemn the massacre, his clear disapproval has made him Israel’s enemy number-one. But Obama, like other US presidents, is helpless before a political establishment which has internalized a belief that Israel should never be criticized. The consensus on Israel-can-do-no-wrong is only just beginning to crack.

Question: why are the Palestinians losing so badly when others have won against larger, more powerful, enemies?

The fact is that Vietnam lost a million people but won; Timor finally achieved independence from Indonesia; Cuba has withstood siege for 50 years; and Venezuela under Chavez is resisting America.

The usual excuses for Palestinian failure can be trotted out: grand conspiracies, disunity, and lack of firepower. But surely it’s time to get to the real reasons. The first is that of poor tactics: the weak cannot behave as the strong do. The leadership made disastrous decisions in Lebanon in 1982, then Lebanon again in 2006 (Hasan Nasrallah admitted his mistake), and Gaza in 2009. In arguing Palestine’s case before the Western world, Palestinian leaders and diplomats have performed pathetically, and American Zionists readily shot holes into them. But they viewed men like Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad with great alarm because, with passion and reason, these stalwarts of secular humanism refuted Israeli propaganda in an idiom that the world could understand. Alas, they are gone.

Human history is a long story of injustice and cruelty. In our times, nothing stands out more vividly than Palestine. But, tragically, this struggle for justice has been turned into a religious cause. When the secular PLO led the Palestinians, it commanded power and respect. After the 1982 debacle in Beirut, Hamas took over. Sending suicide bombers on to Israeli civilian targets decimated international support, heightened Israeli repression, and led to The Wall.

The tragic loss of life notwithstanding, the flotilla episode is a huge moral victory for Palestine and a defeat for Israel. Israel was shown up to be paranoid, dominated by fundamentalist nuclear-armed crazies, and trigger happy. The moral high ground has again turned out to be the Palestinian’s principal weapon. It must not be wasted by firing off a few toy rockets from Gaza. Israelis love war and fear peace. This is why struggle for Palestine must be fought with different tactics.

Question: why are we Pakistanis so hyped-up about what Israel does but blind to what we do to our people and those in neighboring countries?

Let’s face the truth: Israeli crimes are extremely serious but they pale in front of those committed almost daily by religious extremists in Pakistan. Israel murdered nine peace activists of the Mavi Marmara, but just hours earlier jihadists had killed over ninety Ahmadis peacefully praying in a mosque in Lahore. Israel starves Gaza, but the Taliban have imposed an even more brutal blockade of Shias in Parachinar and Kurram. Israel does not amputate the limbs of its enemies or decapitate them, but the Taliban do. Israel has destroyed schools for Palestinians in Gaza, but the Taliban have blown up nearly a thousand schools.

Of course, it is not just the religious extremists but also our state – the Pakistani state and army – that is guilty of atrocities. Israeli forces have never been accused of mass rape, but the Bengalis have never forgiven the Pakistani army for what it did in 1971. Israel is responsible for many abductions and disappearances, but does anyone have an estimate for the number of “disappeared persons” in Baluchistan? One could go on. So, instead of riding the moral high horse and using different yardsticks here and there, it is time for us Pakistanis to also reflect upon the crimes of those from within us – and stop more wrongs from happening.

The author teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad

Monsanto :The Principal Enemy of Peasant Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty for People.

2010-05-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

By Beverly Bell
A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the executive director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti "a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds ... and on what is left our environment in Haiti."(1) Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto's offer of Roundup Ready GMOs seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMOs.

Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto's director of development initiatives, called the news that the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation "a fabulous Easter gift" in an April email.(2) Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, especially GMOs seeds, in both the global North and South, including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, they then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year, under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford.

The hybrid corn seeds Monsanto has donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram.(3) Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. Pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label, the EPA ruled. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, because it assumes that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing.(4) Monsanto's passing mention of thiram to Ministry of Agriculture officials in an email contained no explanation of the dangers, nor any offer of special clothing or training for those who will be farming with the toxic seeds.

Haitian social movements' concern is not just about the dangers of the chemicals and the possibility of future GMOs imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for local consumption, in what is called food sovereignty. Monsanto's arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to this.

"People in the US need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They're ruining our chance to support ourselves," said farmer Jonas Deronzil of a peasant cooperative in the rural region of Verrettes.(5)

Monsanto's history has long drawn ire from environmentalists, health advocates and small farmers, going back to its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Exposure to Agent Orange has caused cancer in an untold number of US veterans, and the Vietnamese government claims that 400,000 Vietnamese people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of their exposure.(6)

Monsanto's former motto, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible," has been replaced by "Imagine." Its web site home page claims it "help[s] farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods ... while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment."(7) The corporation's record does not support the claims.

Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half of the world's seeds.(8) The company holds almost 650 seed patents, most of them for cotton, corn and soy, and almost 30 percent of the share of all biotech research and development. Monsanto came to own such a vast supply by buying major seed companies to stifle competition, patenting genetic modifications to plant varieties and suing small farmers. Monsanto is also one of the leading manufacturers of GMOs.

As of 2007, Monsanto had filed 112 lawsuits against US farmers for alleged technology contract violations of GMOs patents, involving 372 farmers and 49 small agricultural businesses in 27 different states. From these, Monsanto has won more than $21.5 million in judgments. The multinational appears to investigate 500 farmers a year, in estimates based on Monsanto's own documents and media reports.(9)

"Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else's genetically engineered crop [or] when genetically engineered seed from a previous year's crop has sprouted, or 'volunteered,' in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year," said Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety.(10)

In Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million from the US government for providing Roundup Ultra in the antidrug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Roundup Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional ingredients to increase its lethality. Colombian communities and human rights organizations have charged that the herbicide has destroyed food crops, water sources and protected areas, and has led to increased incidents of birth defects and cancers.

Vía Campesina, the world's largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the "principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples."(11) They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs. They also claim that the agribusiness giants contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters, an outgrowth of industrial agriculture.(12)

The Vía Campesina coalition launched a global campaign against Monsanto last October 16, on International World Food Day, with protests, land occupations and hunger strikes in more than 20 countries. They carried out a second global day of action against Monsanto on April 17 of this year, in honor of Earth Day.

Nongovernmental organizations in the US are challenging Monsanto's practices, too. The Organic Consumers Association has spearheaded the campaign "Millions Against Monsanto," calling on the company to stop intimidating small family farmers, stop marketing untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods to consumers and stop using billions of dollars of US taypayers' money to subsidize GMOs crops.(13)

The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge to Monsanto that has just made it to the US Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the US Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety's case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending.(14)

"Fighting hybrid and GMO seeds is critical to save our diversity and our agriculture," Jean-Baptiste said in an interview in February. "We have the potential to make our lands produce enough to feed the whole population and even to export certain products. The policy we need for this to happen is food sovereignty, where the county has a right to define it own agricultural policies, to grow first for the family and then for local market, to grow healthy food in a way which respects the environment and Mother Earth."

Many thanks to Moira Birss for her assistance with research and writing.

1. Group email from Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, May 14, 2010.
2. Email from Elizabeth Vancil to Emmanuel Prophete, director of seeds at the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, and others; released by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, date unavailable.
3. Ibid.
4. Extension Toxicology Network, Pesticide Information Project of the Cooperative Extension Offices of Cornell University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University and University of California at Davis.
5. Jonas Deronzil's comments are from an interview in April. He was not specifically discussing Monsanto.
6. "MSNBC," January 23, 2004. "Study Finds Link Between Agent Orange, Cancer." The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2008. "Last Ghost of the Vietnam War."
7. www.monsanto.com
8. La Vía Campesina, "La Vía Campesina carries out Global Day of Action against Monsanto," October 16, 2009.
9. Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," November 2007.
10. Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson, Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," 2005.
11. La Vía Campesina, October 16, 2009, Op. Cit.
12. La Vía Campesina, "La Vía Campesina Call to Action 17 April 2010 - Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle," February 23, 2010.
13. Organic Consumers Association, "Taxpayers Forced to Fund Monsanto's Poisoning of Third World," Finland, Minnesota.
14. Center for Food Security, "Update: CFS Fighting Monsanto in the Supreme Court," May 11, 2010.

Am I A Maoist?

2010-05-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

By Gladson Dungdung

I appeared in public life through my human rights works, writings and speeches. However, I reached to a larger audience when I got a chance to appear in CNN-IBN and NDTV-24×7 debates on the issue of Naxalism last year. After these debates, I got immense positive and negative responses from across the country. I was upset for sometime precisely because of the most negative responses I got from youth who are running behind the market forces unknowingly. They ruthlessly questioned me about whether I get money from Pakistan, Nepal or China for speaking against the Indian State. I responded to a few of them with detailed explanations, but many believe P Chidambaram’s theory of this side or that side; therefore they are not ready to accept my rational arguments.
Meanwhile, I continued my work of raising the genuine issues of the marginalized people of India. Amidst, the so-called operation green hunt (OGH) was also launched in the state of Jharkhand in the name of cleansing the Maoists. I passionately attempted to bring out the truth of the OGH, intention of the state behind the OGH and sufferings of the villagers caused by the OGH. As a result, so-called educated people intensified more personal attacks against me. There are also some e-groups where they attempted to coin me as a Maoist sympathizer and supporter. Finally, they have portrayed me as a Maoist Ideologue. I just laugh, laugh and laugh. Precisely, because how can a person suddenly become a Maoist ideologue without having an in-depth study on Maoism? I have never read about Maoism.
I deliberately do not read about any ideology because I know that Maoists teach the Adivasis about Maoism, Gandhians preach them about Gandhism and Marxists ask them to walk on Marxism; but no one bothers about Adivasism, which is the best ‘ism’ among these, which perhaps leads to a just and equitable society. I have been raising questions about how the Indian State has deliberately destroyed the Adivasism. The Adivasi religion was not recognized by the Indian constitution, traditional self-governance was neglected, culture was destroyed, lands were grabbed and our resources were snatched in the name of development. But what do we get out of it? Should we still keep quiet? Are we not the citizens of this country who need to be treated equally? Do they care about our sufferings?
I’m one of those unfortunate persons, who have lost everything for the so-called development of the nation and am struggling for survival even today. When I was just one year old, my family was displaced. Our 20 acres of fertile land was taken away from us in the name of development. Our ancestral land was submerged in a Dam, which came up at Chinda River near Simdega town in 1980. We lost our house, agricultural land and garden but we were paid merely Rs.11 thousand as compensation. When the whole village protested against it they were sent to Hazaribagh Jail. Can a family of 6 members ensure food, clothing, shelter, education and health facilities for whole life with Rs.11 thousand?
After displacement, we had no choice but to proceed towards the dense forest for ensuring our livelihood. We settled down in the forest after buying a small patch of land. We used to collect flowers, fruits and firewood to sustain our family. We also had sufficient livestock, which supported our economy. Needless to say that the state suppression continued with us. When we were living in the forest, my father was booked under many cases filed by the forest department (the biggest landlord of the country) alleging him as an encroacher and woodcutter. There was no school building in our village - therefore we used to study under the trees, and when there was rain our school was closed. But my father taught us to always fight for justice. Though he was struggling to sustain our family, he never stopped his fight for the community.

Unfortunately, on 20 June 1990, my parents were brutally murdered while they were going to Simdega civil court to attend a case and 4 kids were orphaned. Can anyone imagine how we suffered afterwards? The worst thing is the culprits were not brought to justice. Can anyone tell us why the Indian State did not deliver justice to us, who snatched our resource in the name of development? Why there is no electricity in my village even today? Why my people do not get water for their field whose lands were taken for the irrigation projects? Why there is no electricity in those houses, who have given their land for the power project? And why people are still living in small mud houses whose lands were taken for the steel plants? It seems that the Adivasis are only born to suffer and other to enjoy over our graves.

After a long struggle, we all got back to life but my pain and sufferings did not end here. When I was working as a state programme officer in a project funded by the European Commission, a senior government officer and an editor of a newspaper (both from the upper caste) questioned my credentials saying that being an Adivasi, how could I have gotten into such a prestigious position? Similarly, when my friend had taken me to meet a newly wedded couple of the upper caste in Ranchi, I was not allowed to meet them saying that being an Adivasi if I meet the couple, they might become unauspicious and their whole life would be at stake. Was I a devil for them?
However, when I joined another firm, I was totally undermined and not given the position which I highly deserved. I was racially discriminated against, economically exploited and mentally disturbed. Can anyone tell me why I should not fight for justice? Can those so-called supporters of the unjust development process, who have not given even one inch of land for the so-called national interest, coin me as the Maoist ideologue, sympathizer and supporter respond to me: why should I shut up my mouth and stop writing against injustice, inequality and discrimination?
I have lost everything in the name of development and now I have nothing to lose therefore I’m determined to fight for my own people because I do not want them to be trapped in the name of development. I have taken the democratic path of struggle, which the Indian Constitution guarantees through Article 19. A pen, mouth and mind are my weapons. I’m neither a Maoist nor a Gandhian but I’m an Adivasi who is determined to fight for its own people, whom the Indian State has alienated, displaced and dispossessed from their resources and is continually doing it in the name of development, national security and national interest even today.

Gladson Dungdung is a Human Rights Activist and Writer from Jharkhand. He can be reached at gladsonhractivist@gmail.com

Their Final Letters

2010-05-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Farmers' Suicides

By P. SAINATH
Seeking authenticity for his letter to the Prime Minister and the President, Ramachandra Raut composed it with care on Rs.100 non-judicial stamp paper. Then he added a few more addressees, including his village sarpanch and the police, in the hope that it got home someplace. Then he killed himself. A mere digit in the nearly 250 farm suicides that hit Vidarbha in four months; but a villager desperate to be heard on the reasons for his action: “The two successive years of crop failure is the reason.” Yet, “bank employees came twice to my home to recover my loans”. (Despite a government order to go slow on recovery in a region hit by crisis, crop failure and more recently, drought).
Raut's suicide being the third in a month in Dhotragoan in Washim district, the village wants to see it spreads no further. “We try and meet every evening for an hour, all of us, anyone who will come,” says Nandkishore Shankar Raut from Dhotragaon. “The idea is to keep people's morale up.” So Dhotragaon counsels itself. Ramachandra Raut's letter was also an appeal not to be misunderstood. “Don't trouble anyone in my home,” it tells the police. “I am fully responsible for my action.” The stamp paper suicide note carries the seal of the deputy treasury officer of Mangrulpir tehsil dated March 29, and that of the stamp vendor who issued it to Raut on April 7. Raut filled it in and took his life the same day.
The family owes the banks Rs.1.5 lakh ($3,285). His village pooled money to observe his 13th day ritual, sparing Raut's indebted family further expense.
Unique
Vidarbha's farm suicides have been unique in one respect. Some of those taking their lives have addressed suicide notes to the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister or the Finance Minister. In August 2006 Rameshwar Lonkar of Wardha complained, in his note, to Dr. Manmohan Singh, just a month after the Prime Minister went to his region. “After the Prime Minister's visit and reports of a fresh crop loan, I thought I could live again,” Lonkar wrote. But he found himself rebuffed at every stage while seeking that loan. Sahebrao Adhao's last testament in Amravati the same year painted a picture of usury, debt and land grab.
In November 2006, cotton grower Rameshwar Kuchankar addressed the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in his note. He scribbled it down moments before taking his life in Yavatmal. “We are fed up with the delay in procurement and crashing prices ... Mr. Chief Minister, give us the price.” He also warned State Home Minister R.R. Patil that if the price did not improve at once, suicides would soar. They did.
“These notes are the last cry of despair of people trying to tell their government the reasons for agrarian distress,” says Kishor Tiwari. Mr. Tiwari heads the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a body fighting for farmers' rights. “We set up expert committees to tell us why farmers commit suicide when they are themselves telling us the reasons with such clarity in their suicide notes.” The notes often speak of debt, soaring cultivation costs, high cost of living and volatile prices. Some of them trash regressive policies and a credit crunch that have destroyed thousands of farmers here in the past decade. Crop failure and drought coming atop these, ruin fragile lives.
Two years of crop failure in a single crop district can mean 34 months with no income. Vidarbha gained little from the 2008 Farm Loan Waiver which addressed only bank debt. The waiver excluded those farmers holding more than five acres, and made no distinction between dry and irrigated holdings. In Western Vidarbha, farmers take more loans from moneylenders than from banks. And, the average land holding is around seven acres in this mostly unirrigated region.
Of the five states that account for two-thirds of all of India's farm suicides, Maharashtra is by far the worst. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) the State logged 41,404 farm suicides between 1997 and 2008. That is, more than a fifth of the national total of nearly 200,000 in that same period. Of those 12 years, NCRB data show, the years 2006-08 have been the very worst. Within the State, Vidarbha has been the focal point of the tragedy.

Back to square one
However, the situation here seems like a throwback to that of 2005-06, before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit. Hit by a spate of suicides at the time, the State government spoke in many voices. In mid-2005, it gave out a figure of just 141 distress suicides across the whole State since 2001. Challenged in court, it revised this to 524. When the National Commission of Farmers team led by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan visited later the same year, it conceded there had been over 300 in the single district of Yavatmal. The final figure for the whole State that year, put out by the NCRB, was actually 3,926 suicides.
“For a while,” says Mr. Tiwari of the VJAS, “the State revealed real numbers on the website of the Vasantrao Naik Farmers' Self-Reliance Mission. That was because of Dr. Singh's visit and a lashing from the courts.” In fact, those figures were far higher than anything even the VJAS had recorded. This year, however, the website's columns for 2010 are so far blank. The Agriculture Ministry's reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, based on State claims, says just 23 farm suicides occurred between January and April 8.
This, even as other arms of government (and the Leader of the Opposition) put out figures ten times as high. The Vasantrao Naik Mission has itself given out signed data confirming there were 62 such deaths in January alone. (Though it has not put this up on its website.)
The numbers are routinely lowered by tagging hundreds of suicides as “non-genuine”. That is, “ineligible for compensation”. Aimed at curbing the amounts the State has to fork out to bereaved families, this move has caused much damage. “We are deluding ourselves,” says a senior official. “No wonder Ramachandra Raut felt the need to address his letter on stamp paper to the Prime Minister and President as well. He knew nothing would be taken seriously here in Maharashtra.”

(P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India's Poorest Districts. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com)

Voices of Resistance Becoming Clearer

2010-04-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

Chidambaram's Dominoes Are Beginning To Fall

By Trevor Selvam

17 April, 2010

The dominoes are knocking over each other at such a rapid pace that India should not be surprised if Naxalites and Maoists find curious backers in the highest echelons of the State. Not because people up there are particularly endeared to Naxalite strategy and tactics, but some of them are reconsidering their options and have realized that in this insane rush towards ramrodding India into a neo-liberal Valhalla, a large majority of the citizens of India are being ripped apart, torn asunder and shoved into the gutters, sewers, swamps and bogs of this nation. Something is going wrong and if a course correction is not made now, things are going down the tubes to hell in a hand basket. The collateral damage has been so obvious that no less than the Central Government’s own offices have declared the attempts at displacing the “poorest of the poor” (the PM’s own words), and the forced evacuation and hamletization of aboriginal people, as the “biggest land grab since Columbus. ” Whoever drafted that phrase or statement is an extraordinarily thoughtful and historically wary person. Because she or he knew what was around the bend. And it has come about faster than the powers ever imagined. It was supposed to have been done surreptitiously, quietly and with the fanfare and dog and pony show associated with 9% growth drowning out the screams of the displaced. It did not pan out that way.

Indians, be they analysts, economists, bureaucrats, historians, scientists, advocates, IAS officers and even retired senior commanders in the services are not unconscious and ahistorical babblers. After all Indians bore the brunt of the British Empire for two hundred years. The process of colonization is such that it leaves behind a genealogy of awareness, of remembrance, the ability to connect the dots and not be taken for a ride. Indians pass on the lessons of their parents’ generation to their next in line. To put it bluntly, Indians are not fools. They do not take kindly to the incessant repetition of official speak. Just as Iraqis and Afghanis aren’t either. Indians know that occupation, whether it is by goras or by their proxies are never tolerated quietly.

The sons and daughters and the grandchildren of freedom fighters, of Gandhian activists, of Sarvodaya activists, followers of Vinoba Bhave, of the Congress Socialists, of the followers of “Nehruvian socialism”, of the followers of JP Narayan, of those the British chose to call “terrorists” and old-style retired Communists from the Tebhaga and Telengana period, know where “the buck stops.” They may not be supporters of the Maoists, but they know that this time around, something is going terribly wrong and this mad race to “modernize” India has only one group of takers—those who salivate over the glam and glitter of Ratan Tata, Narendra Modi, the Ambanis, the Jindals, the Mallyas and their main backers, Chidambaram, Ahluwalia, Kamal Nath and a handful of others.

The dominoes are beginning to fall. And despite the clear cut statement by the PM’s office that all statements on the Maoist issue will only come from the Home Minister’s office, within twenty four hours, Mr. Digvijay Singh spoke up, and he is no small fish.

“He (Mr Chidambaram) is treating it purely as a law and order problem without taking into consideration the issues that affect the tribals," Digvijay Singh, wrote in the Economic Times. Further on he went on to say, “We can't solve this problem by ignoring the hopes and aspirations of the people living in these areas... In a civilised society and a vibrant democracy, ultimately it is the people who matter," he added.

Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the former Minister of Petroleum and Panchayati Raj had at one time this to say about Chidambaram. “His deposition over four sessions in the witness-box has shown him up to have been a most incompetent minister of state for internal security (1986-89) and most negligent as minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination from May 24, 1995, till his defection to the TMC on April Fool's Day, 1996. ” And in an add-on to Digvijay Singh’s recent article in the Economic Times, Aiyar said, "Digvijay is not one hundred per cent right, he is not even one thousand per cent right, he is one lakh per cent right." At an MSN India site, the following is stated. “ And at a conference on The Dynamics of Rural Transformation, organised by Planning Commission member Mihir Shah, Aiyar presented a paper which said "the consistent failure of the state governments concerned, and the total lack of conscientiousness on the part of the Centre in urging the states concerned to conscientiously implement, in letter and spirit, the provisions of PESA -- Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act -- have contributed more than any other single factor to the aggravation of the situation in forest areas. This has facilitated the mushrooming of insurgency directed against the state in the heart of India."
In the article in The Economic Times on Wednesday, Digvijay Singh further accused Chidambaram, of "intellectual arrogance". There are many in the Congress, including those who are close to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and her son, who have maintained a significant distance from the genocidal verbiage of “wiping out, sanitizing and cleansing” that has come from the entourage of Mr. Chidambaram, his Police and Paramilitary as well as the loyal mainstream media. In the final analysis, there is nothing sanctified about “law and order” and they know it. Because lawlessness has been a defining character of governance in the Indian countryside.

The chips are going to fall, one by one. It is only a matter of time, before Indians from all walks of life will speak up. It does not have to be the tireless voices of the Roys, the Navlakhas, Sundars, Bhusans, Himanshu Kumars only. And it will not be the voices of Justice PB Sawant and Suresh, Professor Yash Pal, Drs. Giri, Bhargava and Subramanium who officiated in the Indian Peoples Tribunal either. Soon other journals and magazines will join Tehelka, Outlook, Mainstream, Open magazines and occasionally The Hindu and even 24 Ghanta (the Kolkata TV channel), as well. Because, there is a tradition in India of quietly re-visiting the past and not simply concocting a present. There is a tradition of thoughtfulness and a renaissance mentality that gently warns against the rabid promotion of the “us and them” dichotomy. There is a tradition in India of being alert to upstarts who want to steal the show.

Actors, actresses, scientists, sports personalities will also speak up. News channels, despite the corporate sponsorship they enjoy, will eventually break their bondage and slip in the truth from the hills and rivers of Dandakaranya. There is a limit to how much an entire nation can be duped into this proto-fascist frenzy. Shades of George Bush, post-911! It lasted for a while and Ms. Susan Sonntag, Gore Vidal and a host of others were similarly brutally abused for questioning the rabid war-mongering and xenophobia that followed. So will it happen in India. Even in the Bombay movie tradition, there is a long list of Sahnis, Kapoors, Azmis, Abbas, the heirs in Bengal of Bijon Bhattacharya and Shombhu Mitra and the musical tradition of Salil Choudhury, Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and others all over the country will come out and have their voices be heard.

This is a fork in the road. And if you take the wrong end of the fork, there is no retreat. Hidden agendas will not work in this India. Whether you are a Maoist supporter or not, the facts are clear that the Maoists are NOT on the wrong side of history. You cannot juggle the reality by endlessly discussing the dichotomy of law and order versus development. This is a falsification of the debate. To thump your chest and bemoan the plight of “ our Jawans” as the CPI(Marxist) and the BJP recently did in Parliament, smacks of the same anti-intellectual tradition that followed 911 in the US.

The Maoists have, as per their own interpretations, clearly figured out what is going disastrously wrong and they have chosen to highlight this. Their fight has been a fight of resistance, albeit violent. And while the Maoists did not choose violence as their first step ( the counter-Maoists can continue to whine away about the Maoists constitutional edict to seize power by armed struggle etc, highlighting the aspect of power seizure as if it is an overnight coup d’état and not a long drawn out struggle for structural change) they have no choice but to defend their gains. For a long time, the fathers and mothers of liberalization sold the story to the media and who in turn parroted it out, day in and out that India needed to “liberalize.” Behind that well chosen misnomer, the Indian state sold a bill of goods to India’s proto-gullible middle class that questioning this “liberalization” would amount to un-patriotic activity. And the bloggers, twitterers, facebookers went all out to spread the same gospel. Well, that balance is now being tipped. Scores of blogs and sites have now hit out hard against this one sided misrepresentation.

If India was the same nation, it was some fifteen years ago, it would not attract much attention, either internally or externally. The times have changed. Today, what happens in Dantewada is written about in Washington DC, in San Francisco, in Moscow, in Amsterdam, London, Singapore, Paris and Johannesburg within hours. Call it what you will, there are representatives of the new media, stationed everywhere, picking up on each other’s pronouncements and belting out stories instantaneously. And some of these stories do not bode well for the folks who quietly promoted the camp of the suave and cocky Mr. P. Chidambaram. Because word has gotten around that within the ruling corridors that there is considerable double taking or to put it somewhat euphemistically some soul searching going on. Mr. Chidambaram had some vague notions that one day he would be an applicant for the position of the PM of this country. Dynasty or not, the Gandhi family knows that Chidambaram is a chip of the old block. For those of you who remember, this is the progeny of the Old Congress Syndicate. The ruling class of India are not a monolithic block and they continue to have their own skirmishes and cock-fights like Morarji Desai and Sanjiva Reddy on one side and the VV Giris, Indira-clan on the other side. Let us not forget that out of the Indian electorate of 714 million, 153,482,356 voted for the Congress party (21% of the electorate) and Manmohan Singh had to run in Assam and Chidambaram required a recount to get their seats. Within the UPA, there are plenty of forces who are not going to put up with the high-handedness of the Chidambaram coterie.

Somewhere amongst the denizens in India’s ruling corridors there are families, groupings, influences that have a long lineage going back to India’s struggle to free itself from Britain. In that lineage, non-alignment did well. Playing one superpower against the other. Despite the hidebound theories of the ruling classes’ propensities, the fact is that after all is said and done, the ruling class is not united. On the one hand there are the outright compradors and on the other side are the compromisers who desperately wish for a new superpower. There has always been an Indian state of mind, which eventually shakes itself out of its torpor and calls a spade a spade.

The people of India and I mean those who do not read blogs and do not know who George Dick Obama could be, vote with their fists, when they are kicked around too much. Mrs. Indira Gandhi found that out. The BJP realized that in no time. Karat and Yechury smarted under the same blows and Buddhadev Bhattacharya is going to find it out pretty soon. Even though voter turn out in India is still hardly anything to be proud of, when Indians do vote they vote with their minds. (Countercurrents.org)

Tribes and Skies

2010-04-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

by Zygmunt Bauman

The 'tribe' focused on by Calvino, a tribe of coconut gatherers, is - as the title of the story suggests - addicted to 'watching the sky'. The sky it watches obsessively and intensely happens to be a sight that is genuinely fascinating and truly rewarding to watch: it is full of 'new celestial bodies', like jet planes, flying saucers, rockets, and guided missiles . . . While the tribe watches, the tribal witch doctors feel obliged to explain, authoritatively, to their fellow tribesmen the meaning of what they are seeing. They tell the tribesmen that what is currently happening in the sky is a sure sign that the day is fast approaching when the slavery and poverty which has tormented the tribe for centuries will come to an end. Soon 'the barren savannah will bring forth millet and maize', so the tribe will no longer be doomed to feeding itself and surviving, day in, day out, by picking coconuts. And so - here comes the crunch - 'it is hardly worth us racking our brains over new ways of emerging from our present situation; we should trust in the Great Prophecy, rally around its only rightful interpreters, without asking to know more . . .'

Meanwhile, on earth, in that valley where the tribe had built their huts of straw and mud, from which they wandered out daily in search of coconuts and to which they returned, day in, day out, things were also changing. Previously, merchants occasionally arrived in the valley to buy coconuts from the gatherers; the merchants cheated on price, but the clever tribesmen managed to outsmart and fool them time and again, avenging their cheating for good measure. Now, however, the merchants had stopped coming. Instead, an outpost had been opened in the valley by a brand new establishment called Nicer Nut Corporation, whose agents purchased, wholesale, the totality of the coconut crop. The corporation, unlike the old-style travelling traders, allowed no haggling and no opportunities for trickery: prices were fixed in advance, take it or leave it. But, of course, if you 'leave it', you might as well forget your chances of survival until the next batch of coconuts is brought into the valley from picking escapades. On one point, however, the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation wholeheartedly agree with the tribal witch doctors (and vice versa). They all talk about missiles in the sky and about the news they augur. And the agents, just like the witch doctors, insist that beyond all reasonable doubt 'it is in the power of these shooting stars that our entire destiny lies'.

The teller of the story shares in the destinies and habits of his tribe. Like the rest of the tribe, he spends his evenings at the entrance of his straw and mud hut, closely watching the sky. Like the other tribesmen, he attentively listens to the witch doctors and takes to heart and memorizes what they, and the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation, keep saying. But he also thinks for himself (or, more precisely, his thoughts think themselves in his mind, without having asked his permission: an idea occurs to him which, he confesses, 'I can't get out of my head'). He thinks that 'a tribe that relies entirely on the will of shooting stars, whatever fortune they may bring, will always sell off its coconuts cheap'.

In another short story, Beheading the Heads, Italo Calvino points out that television (here he goes straight to the point, skipping the allegory of a sky filled with shooting stars, 'television' itself being a potent metaphor for so many aspects of our liquid modern life) 'changed a lot of things' - though not necessarily the things which our own, new and improved, technologically sophisticated witch doctors (now renamed 'spin doctors') privately like to pride themselves on having craftily and stealthily changed, while praising television for those changes.

Among things that TV did indeed change, Calvino suggests, is the way we view our leaders (here, 'our leaders' stands for much a larger collection of people who were previously distant and whom we used to hear without seeing, let alone watching: idols, stars, celebrities, all those people we now watch daily, and closely, expecting entertainment, fun and all the illumination and guidance worth getting, and to whom television accords the same treatment as it does to 'our leaders'). Once they were remote figures somewhere high up on the platform, or shown in portraits 'assuming expressions of conventional pride'. Now however, thanks to TV 'everybody can pore over the slightest movements of the features, the irritated twitch of the eyelids under spotlights, the nervous moistening of the lips between one word and another'. In a nutshell, once they arrived so close to us, indeed inside our sitting rooms and bedrooms, our leaders came to appear terribly banal, like the rest of us. And mortal, like the rest of us - that is, arriving only to go away again. Appearing in order to disappear. Clinging to power only to lose it. The sole advantage they seem to have over us, ordinary mortals, is that they are destined for a public, not a private death - 'the death we are sure to be there for, all together' ...

Tongue in cheek, though not entirely, Calvino goes as far as suggesting that it is our new awareness of this which explains why, so long as a politician lives, she or he 'will enjoy our interested, anticipatory concern'.

And finally come words so poignant that they deserve to be quoted verbatim and in full:

For us democracy can only begin once we are sure that on the appointed day the television cameras will frame the death throes of our ruling classes to the last man, and then, as an epilogue to the same programme (though many will switch off their sets at this point), the investiture of the new faces who are to rule (and to live) for a similar period.

All that, Calvino concludes, is 'watched by millions of viewers with the serene absorption of one observing the movement of the heavenly bodies in their recurrent circles, a spectacle all the more reassuring the more alien we find it'.

It is, it seems, a custom of more than one tribe, and not necessarily tribes who are remote in space or time, to keep their eyes fixed 'on stars shooting in the sky'. And the reasons why eyes are fixed on stars do not change much from one tribe to another. The consequences of eyes being fixed there do not change much: it is only the equipment serving that activity/passivity that changes. As well as the names of the tribes and of the stars they watch, and the stories told by tribal witch doctors about the meaning of all those shooting stars on which those eyes happen to be fixed. Though not the message of those stories, nor the intentions and purposes of their tellers.

Truthout, Sunday, 11th April, 2010

Beyond Multiculturalism

2010-01-18T23:10:00.000-08:00

Robert Jensen talks about Love in Action and Love in Dreams, Identities of Race, Gender and Class, Injuries coming out of Hierarchical Systems in today's world...Politics to grab Power vs Politics to Distribute Power.....And on many more topics...
Click here : Thinking a New world

Wishing you a meaningful Christmas and a happy, and violence-free YEAR 2010

2009-12-25T18:38:00.000-08:00

This is an email greeting i received from George Goldy yesterday with a very inspiring poem. i post it hear for friends who visit this blog.

Dear friends:

An irrelevant birth in the manger,

Of an ordinary, unimportant, child,

The spaceless birth,

The pains and agonies of a virgin mother,

To bear the identity of slumhood,

To live amidst betrayed, battered and undignified.

But today,

Traditions changed, trends changed

Years changed, volume changed

Language changed, literature changed,

Yet there is something unchanged,

Rather unwilling to change,

The labour of this new birth

Still striving to break the womb

And see this world

The voice of freedom,

The voice of humanhood,

The voice of liberation,

The voice of brotherhood

Had been battered ever than before

Suffered more than in the history

The days ahead are more brutal and violent

Anyone dare to oppose it will be anti-national,

Or a terrorist,

So,

Don’t dare, YOU

Dalits, Adivasis, Women, Working Class

Blacks, Ethnics, Indigenous, Subalterns

Minorities, Majority, etc. etc.

Yet! There’s hope that one day

The bells of freedom and liberty will ring…

The flag of peace and love will fly up high in the sky...

Over the earth, in the world,

In every country, every province

In every town, every village.

May this Christmas and the New Year 2010 bring back the hopes of freedom, liberty and peace for all. Let the year 2010 be a step forward in gaining strength and courage. Let's greet each other with the hope that this year would be a better one is the struggle for justice, freedom and fuller humanity

Wishing you a meaningful Christmas and a happy, and violence-free YEAR 2010

Warm regards

Goldy

Democracy Now!

2009-12-11T19:48:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now!

Speaking before a packed audience at Hampshire College, Tariq Ali argues that an immediate exit strategy from Afghanistan and Pakistan is vital both for the region and for the United States।

Resist and Speak out Loudly

2009-12-03T20:54:00.000-08:00

Biggest Land Grab After Columbus

By Devinder Sharma

I think the eulogisation of Tata's has gone too far. Behind all the glamour, sobriety and humanitariasm that we read and hear about Tata's, there is a dark hidden side which is kept under wraps. It is time we look at the destructive role Tata's have played over the years in uprooting thousands of poor families, and the resulting destruction of livelihoods and the environment.

To overcome their guilt, and that too aimed at pacifying the liberal voices in the urban centres, I am sure Ratan Tata would be thinking of setting up schools and funding some NGO activities in the tribal lands as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

What a sophisticated way to cover your dark underbelly !

I was quite taken aback today to see a frontpage headline in The Hindustan Times: The biggest land grab after Columbus. As the blurb says: Government report criticises corporate exploitation of tribal lands; tribals turn to new friends: Maoist. And if you remember only a few days back, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had publicly accepted, and made a promise: "The systemic exploitation of our tribal communities can no longer be tolerated."

Do you think Manmohan Singh will do anything to stop this? You bet, he will simply push for more such projects that will eventually destroy the social fabric of these tribal lands. If you think I am wrong, let us take the land-grab in Bedanji, a remote rural expanse in Bastar in Chhatisgarh, as a test case. The Tata's plan to set up a Rs 19,500 crore steel plant for which ten villages have to be emtied.

Interestingly, a report of the PM-appointed Ministry of Rural Development committee on Land Reforms has succintly said: "This open declared war will go down as the biggest land grab ever, if it plays out as per the script." The Hindustan Times report quotes the just-released government report warning against the corporate takeover in the Bastar hinterland: "The biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus."

You can read the full news report here:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-biggest-land-grab-
after-Columbus/H1-Article3-476125.aspx

I was reading another detailed field report from Pravin Patel, a human rights activist. It tells you how the State government is helping facilitate the process of the massive takeover of tribal lands. It tells you how the official machinery has actually been hand in glove with the industrial houses to ruthlessly exploit the tribals.

This is what he writes: In Chattisgarh the tribal district Batar, District administration has played in the hands of house of Tatas by way of stage managed public hearing bluntly violating the norms and set procedures as laid down in the Notification to grant Environmental Clearances.

By making mockey of the conditions of the Notification where Public Hearing is a mandatory requirement where consultation with the likely affected villagers are held. But to fulfill this mandatory requirements, public hearing was held at the campus of the district collector, which is at a distance of about 30 Kms from the project area. This was done with mischivious motives as it is known to all that the villagers are strongly opposing the setting up of any steel plant in their area.

The entire drama was enacted to show off that the mandatory public hearing is held. This has proved to be nothing less than a puppet show of the district administration where except the most of the tribals who are residents of the villages to be affected, all others were present whom the project proponent hired or managed with the help of District Administration to dance to the tunes of the project proponent house of Tatas.

You may like to read his full report. Please click on:
http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=
1#inbox/124f0af3377e6531

And finally, what does all this translate into. Well, you guessed it right. The tribals have no one else to seek solace and help from, except Maoists. What to talk of help, no one is willing to even listen to them except the Maoist. No wonder, Naxalism is growing.

As Gandhian Himanshu Kumar said the other day in an interview with the Times of India, (Nov 13, 2009) : Salwa Judum saw a 22-fold increase in Maoist numbers. Green Hunt will result in genocide of Adivasis. Those who survive will become Naxalites.
(Read the interview: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/
Green-Hunt-will-result-in-genocide-of-Adivasis/articleshow/5223813.cms)

How true? But do you think anyone cares, least of all Manmohan Singh? Ha, he is more hinged to the GDP than the welfare of the human beings that he represents. With Tata's investing Rs 19,500-crore, which will add to the GDP, and that will be his government's report card.

Nobel for Promises and Promises?

2009-10-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

by Howard Zinn

I was dismayed when I heard Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on wars in two countries and launching military action in a third country (Pakistan), would be given a peace prize. But then I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel Peace Prizes. The Nobel Committee is famous for its superficial estimates and for its susceptibility to rhetoric and empty gestures, while ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations - that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he also bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War - surely, among stupid and deadly wars, at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains around that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel Prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticized the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the Committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, was given a peace prize!

People should not be given a peace prize on the basis of promises they have made (as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises) but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war. Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel Peace Committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

--------

Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright and social activist, and has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for "A People's History of the United States."

Gandhi Today

2009-10-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

Oct 03, 2009

By Ted Glick

"Somewhere there's a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time here and around the world."
- Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

140 years today Mohandus Gandhi was born in Gujarat province in India. I didn't learn this from the New York Times, CNN, or any other mainstream media source. I didn't learn about it from progressive media outlets, although it is very possible that one or more of them publicized it and I missed it.

I learned about this as a result of being invited to speak yesterday at William Patterson University in northern New Jersey by a professor who organized a program about Gandhi's relevance for today. Thanks to Balmurli Natrajan, Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I've spent the last few days reflecting on this question.

When I was asked this question directly at yesterday's forum, what came to mind is this: Gandhi is important, is of continuing relevance, because he wasn't just a great, if imperfect, leader of India's successful struggle for independence from colonial Britain. He is important because he understood that it was necessary for him personally, and for his people, to be about the process of personal and cultural change if they were to have a chance of truly lasting, truly revolutionary change, in the best sense of the term.

Gandhi did his best to live a life which reflected the values of justice and love which he understood were central to the teachings of all great spiritual leaders. He went on fasts that were directed not just against the British but for his own people, calling upon them to refuse to mimic English violence and repression in their struggle for independence.

The words of Gandhi that I have used most often over the years are these: "Fasting is the sincerest form of prayer." I've used them as I've learned their truth, as I've learned about prayer, during long fasts that I've undertaken in connection with the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, against the Iraq war and for strong government action to address the climate crisis.

There's another fast very much in the Gandhian spiritual and political tradition that will be taking place about a month from now, a Climate Justice Fast (http://www.climatejusticefast.org). This is a fast initiated by young people in Australia, Europe and elsewhere specifically directed at the leaders of the world's governments as they move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try to come up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things are not looking good at all that they will do what is needed.

Anna Keenan, youth climate activist and one of the initiators of this fast, wrote yesterday about Gandhi. She began with a quote of his, that "the world has enough for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed." She went on to "share another great Gandhi quote: 'Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness.' In just over a month, on the last day of the Barcelona[climate] talks [November 6], I and other activists around the world will be beginning the Climate Justice Fast and continuing until Copenhagen [over 40 days, on water only].

"While the concept of the fast may shock some, it will be a non-violent, morally forceful and peaceful action, and is perhaps one of the few types of action that we have available to us that is capable of deeply communicating the gravity of the situation that we now find ourselves in, both in terms of the profound disaster of unchecked climate change and the profound opportunity provided by the Copenhagen summit."

I know that there are many climate and progressive activists who have problems with the idea of fasting. It's too bad this is the case, because I have learned that fasting isn't just one of a number of tactics that we need to keep in our quiver to use as we struggle for a world based on love and compassion. Fasting is a form of action that is very valuable in building the internal discipline and the deeply-felt understanding of what's really important in this world that we individually need to stay true to our best ideals.

When you fast for more than a few days, especially on a water-only fast, you are forced to think about the reasons for your fasting, why you are putting yourself through this. You spend time thinking about all of the people all over the world who "fast" involuntarily because of an unjust world order which is dominated by a relative handful of billionaires and multi-billionaires. When on a fast related to the issue of climate, you think about the almost-certain catastrophic droughts, famines and other disasters affecting not millions but billions later in this century if we don't rapidly make a shift away from the burning of fossil fuels and earth-destroying practices.

It is difficult not to feel helpless in the face of the timidity and resistance of far too many of the world's government leaders to doing what clearly must be done. It's maddening knowing that a serious commitment to the enactment of a clean energy revolution can be the decisive shift that opens up all kinds of possibilities for a very different future as the nations of the world work together to clean up the environmental mess capitalism has created.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed because of his leadership in the anti-Nazi German resistance movement, "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." Yes. Yes. Now and always.

Ted Glick is the Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and a long-time progressive activist.

The Politics of Lying and Culture of Deceit

2009-09-23T00:50:00.000-07:00

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.

Hannah Arendt

By Henry A. Giroux

In the current American political landscape, truth is not merely misrepresented or falsified; it is overtly mocked. As is well known, the Bush administration repeatedly lied to the American public, furthering a legacy of government mistrust while carrying the practice of distortion to new and almost unimaginable heights. Even now, almost a year after Bush left office, it is difficult to forget the lies and government-sponsored deceits in which it was claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was making deals with al-Qaeda and, perhaps the most infamous of all, the United States did not engage in torture. Unlike many former administrations, the Bush administration was engaged in pure political theater,[2] giving new meaning to Hannah Arendt's claim that "Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."[3] For instance, when the government wasn't lying to promote dangerous policies, it willfully produced and circulated fake news reports in order to provide the illusion that the lies and the policies that flowed from them were supported by selective members of the media and the larger public. The Bush deceits and lies were almost never challenged by right-wing media "patriots," who were too busy denouncing as un-American anyone who questioned Bush's official stream of deception and deceit. Ironically, some of these pundits were actually on the government payroll for spreading the intellectual equivalent of junk food. And some of them were actually being paid by the Bush government to make such claims.

In such circumstances, language loses any viable sense of referentiality, while lying, misrepresentation and the deliberate denial of truth become acceptable practices firmly entrenched in the wild West of talk radio, cable television and the dominant media. Fact finding, arguments bolstered by evidence and informed analysis have always been fragile entities, but they risk annihilation in a culture in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between an opinion and an argument. Knowledge is increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations and public relations firms and is systemically cleansed of any complexity. Lying and deceitfulness are all too often viewed as just another acceptable tactic in what has become most visibly the pathology of politics and a theater of cruelty dominated by a growing chorus of media hatemongers inflaming an authoritarian populist rage laced with a not too subtle bigotry.[4] Truth increasingly becomes the enemy of democracy because it does not support the spectacle and the reduction of citizens either to mere dupes of power or commodities. Ignorance is no longer a liability in a culture in which lying, deceit and misinformation blur the boundaries between informed judgments and the histrionics of a shouting individual or mob. Talk radio and television talk show screamers, in particular, seem to delight in repeating claims that have been discredited in the public arena, demonstrating a barely disguised contempt for both the truth and any viable vestige of journalism. These lies and deceits go beyond the classic political gambit, beyond the Watergate-style cover up, beyond the comic "I did not have sex with that woman." The lies and deceptions that are spewed out everyday from the right-wing teaching machines - from newspapers and radio shows to broadcast media and the Internet - capitalize on both the mobilizing power of the spectacle, the increasing impatience with reason and an obsession with what Susan J. Douglas describes as the use of the "provocative sound bites over investigative reporting, misinformation over fact."[5] Lying and deception have become so commonplace in the dominant press that such practices appear to have no moral significance and provoke few misgivings, even when they have important political consequences. In the age of public relations managers and talk show experts, we are witnessing the demise of public life. At a time when education is reduced to training workers and is stripped of any civic ideals and critical practices, it becomes unfashionable for the public to think critically. Rather than intelligence uniting us, a collective ignorance of politics, culture, the arts, history and important social issues, as Mark Slouka points out, "gives us a sense of community, it confers citizenship."[6] Our political passivity is underscored by a paucity of intellectual engagement, just as the need for discrete judgment and informed analysis fall prey to a culture of watching, a culture of illusion and circus tricks. Shame over the lying and ignorance that now shape our cultural politics has become a source of national pride - witness the pathetic response to Joe Wilson's outburst against President Obama. Or, for that matter, the celebrated and populist response to Sarah Palin's lies about death panels, which are seized upon not because they distort the truth and reveal the dishonesty and vileness of political opportunism - while also undermining a viable health care bill - but because they tap into a sea of growing anger and hyped-up ignorance and ratchet up poll ratings. Lying and deceit have become the stuff of spectacle and are on full display in a society where gossip and celebrity culture rule. In this instance, the consequences of lying are reduced to a matter of prurience rather than public concern, becoming a source of private injury on the part of a Hollywood star or producing the individual humiliation of public figure such as John Edwards.

The widespread acceptance of lying and deceit is not merely suggestive of a commodified and ubiquitous corporate-driven electronic culture that displays an utter contempt for morality and social needs: It is also registers the existence of a troubling form of infantilization and depoliticization. Lying as common sense and deceit as politics-as-usual joins the embrace of provocation in a coupling that empties politics and agency of any substance and feeds into a corporate state and militarized culture in which matters of judgment, thoughtfulness, morality and compassion seem to disappear from public view. What is the social cost of such flight from reality, if not the death of democratic politics, critical thought and civic agency? When a society loses sight of the distinction between fact and fiction, truth-telling and lying, what happens is that truth, critical thought and fact finding as conditions of democracy are rendered trivial and reduced to a collection of mere platitudes, which in turn reinforces moral indifference and political impotence. Under such circumstances, language actually becomes the mechanism for promoting political powerlessness. Lying and deceit are no longer limited to merely substituting falsehoods for the truth; they now performatively constitute their own truth, promoting celebrity culture, right-wing paranoia and modes of government and corporate power freed from any sense of accountability.

While all governments resort to misrepresentations and lies, we appear to have entered a brave new world in which lies, distortions and exaggerations have become so commonplace that when something is said by a politician, it is often meant to suggest its opposite, and without either irony or apology. As lies and deceit become a matter of policy, language loses its grip on reality, and the resulting indeterminacy of meaning is often used by politicians and others to embrace positions that change from one moment to the next. Witness Dick Cheney, who once referred to torture as "enhanced interrogation" so as to sugarcoat its brutality, and then appeared on national television in 2009 only to defend torture by arguing that if such practices work, they are perfectly justified, even if they violate the law. This is the same Cheney who, appearing on the May 31, 2005, "Larry King Live" show, attempted to repudiate charges of government torture by claiming, without irony, that the detainees "have been well treated, treated humanely and decently." This type of discourse recalls George Orwell's dystopian world of "1984" in which the Ministry of Truth produces lies and the Ministry of Love tortures people. Remember when the Bush administration used the "Healthy Forest Initiative" to give loggers access to protected wilderness areas or the "Clear Skies Initiative" to enable greater industrial air pollution? President Obama also indulges in this kind of semantic dishonesty when he substitutes "prolonged detention" for the much maligned "preventive detention" policies he inherited from the Bush-Cheney regime. While Obama is not Bush, the use of this type of duplicitous language calls to mind the Orwellian nightmare in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength."

When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they not only serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate society, but also demonstrate the degree to which language and education have become corrupted, tied to corporate and political power and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies. Especially since the horrible events of 9/11, Americans have been encouraged to identify with a militaristic way of life, to suspend their ability to read the word and world critically, to treat corporate and government power in almost religious terms and to view a culture of questioning as something alien and poisonous to American society. Shared fears rather than shared responsibilities now mobilize angry mobs and gun-toting imbeciles, who are praised as "real" Americans. Fear bolstered by lies and manufactured deceptions makes us immune to even the most obvious moral indecencies, such as the use of taser guns on kids in schools. Nobody notices or cares - and one cause and casualty of all of this moral indifference is that language has been emptied of its critical content just as the public spaces that make it possible are disappearing into the arms of corporations, advertisers and other powerful institutions that show nothing but contempt for either the public sphere or the kind of critical literacy that gives it meaning.

Obama's presence on the national political scene gave literacy, language and critical thought a newfound sense of dignity, interlaced as they were with a vision of hope, justice and possibility - and reasonable arguments about the varied crises America faced and civilized. Such practices as Obama compromised, if not surrendered, some of his principles to those individuals and groups that live in the vocabulary of duplicity, the idealism that shaped his language began to look like just another falsehood when measured against his continuation of a number of Bush-like policies. In this case, the politics of distortions and misrepresentations that Obama's lack of integrity has produced may prove to be even more dangerous than what we got under Bush because it wraps itself in a moralism that seems uplifting and hopeful while it supports policies that reward the rich, reduce schools to testing centers and continue to waste lives and money on wars that should have ended when Obama assumed his presidency. Obama claims he is for peace, and yet the United States is the largest arms dealer in the world. He claims he wants to reduce the deficit, but spends billions on the defense industry and wars abroad. He says he wants everyone to have access to decent health care, but makes backroom deals with powerful pharmaceutical companies. Orwell's ghost haunts this new president and the country at large. Reducing the critical power of language has been crucial to this effort. Under such circumstances, democracy as either a moral referent or a political ideal appears to have lost any vestige of credibility. The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are inextricably related to a theater of cruelty and modes of corrupt power in which politics is reduced to a ritualized incantation, just as matters of governance are removed from real struggles over meaning and power.

Beyond disinformation and disguise, the politics of lying and the culture of deceit trade in and abet the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into a state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear and its attendant use of moral panic not only create a rhetorical umbrella to promote right-wing ideological agendas (increased military spending, tax relief for the financial and corporate elite, privatization, market-driven reforms and religious intolerance), but also contribute to a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic. The collapse of any vestige of critical literacy, reason and sustained debate gives way to falsehoods and forms of ignorance that find expression in the often racist discourse of what Bob Herbert calls "the moronic maestros of right wing radio and TV,"[7] endlessly haranguing the public to resist any vestige of reason. How else to explain the actions of parents who refuse to let their children listen to a speech on education by - Should I say it? - an African-American President? How else to fathom the dominant media repeating uncritically the views of right-wing groups that portray Obama as Hitler or Lenin, or consistently making references that compare him to a gorilla or indulge in other crude racist references - in recent days, these groups have been given ample media attention, as if their opinions are not simply ventriloquizing the worst species of ignorance and racism.

The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are wrapped in the logic of absolute certainty, an ominous harbinger of a kind of illiteracy in which one no longer has to be accountable for justifying opinions, claims or alleged arguments. Stripped of accountability, language finds its final resting place in a culture of deceit in which lying either is accepted as a political strategy or is viewed as simply another normalized aspect of everyday life. The lack of criticism surrounding both government practices and corporations that now exercise unparalleled forms of power is more than shameful; it is an utter capitulation to an Orwellian rhetoric that only thinly veils an egregious form of authoritarianism and racism. In the face of such events, we must develop a critical discourse to address the gap between rhetoric and deeds of those who hold economic, political and social power. As Hannah Arendt has argued, debate is central to a democratic politics, along with the public space in which individuals can argue, exercise critical judgment and clarify their relationship to democratic values and public commitments. Critical consciousness and autonomy are, after all, not merely the stuff of political awareness, but what makes democratic accountability possible in the first place. They are also the foundation and precondition for individuals, parents, community groups and social movements to mobilize against such political and moral corruptions. Democracy is fragile, and its fate is always uncertain, but during the last decade we have witnessed those in commanding political and corporate positions exhibit an utter disregard for the truth, morality and critical debate. The Enron template of lying and deception has turned an ethos of dialogue and persuasion into its opposite: dogmatism and propaganda. In doing so, the American public has been bombarded by a discourse of fear, hate and racism, coupled with a politics of lying that undermines any viable vestige of a democratic ethos. We now find ourselves living in a society in which right-wing extremists not only wage a war against the truth, but also seek to render human beings less than fully human by taking away their desire for justice, spiritual meaning, freedom and individuality.

Politics must become more attentive to those everyday conditions that have allowed the American public to remain complicitous with such barbaric policies and practices. Exposing the underlying conditions and symptoms of a culture of lying and deceit is both a political and a pedagogical task that demands that people speak out and break through the haze of official discourse, media-induced amnesia and the fear-producing lies of corrupt politicians and the swelling ranks of hatemongers. The politics of lying and deceit at the current historical moment offers up the specter of not just government abuse, mob hysteria and potential violence, but also an incipient authoritarianism, one that avidly seeks to eliminate intelligent deliberation, informed public discussion, engaged criticism and the very possibility of freedom and a vital democratic politics. The spirit of critique is meaningless without literacy and an informed public. For such a public to flourish, it must be supported with public debate and informed agents capable of becoming both a witness to injustice and a force for transforming those political, economic and institutional conditions that impose silence and perpetuate human suffering. The distortions, misrepresentations and lies that have become an integral part of American culture present a serious threat to an aspiring democracy because they further what John Dewey called the "eclipse of the public," just as they empty politics of its democratic values, meanings and possibilities. The hate, extremism and pathology that have come to define our national political and popular landscapes - heard repeatedly in the prattle of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to name only two of the most popular examples - are legitimated by an appeal to absolute certainty, which becomes the backdrop against which a politics of lying and a culture of deceit, fear, cruelty and repression flourish. We are witnessing in the politics of lying and the culture of deceit a disconnection between language and social responsibility, politics and critical education, market interests and democratic values, and privately felt pain and joys and larger public considerations. And this undermining of the value of human dignity, truth, dialogue and critical thought is the offspring of a debate over much more than simply meaning and language, or even the widespread legitimacy of individual and institutional ignorance and corruption. At its core, it is a debate about power and those corporate and political interests that create the conditions in which lying becomes acceptable and deceit commonplace - those forces that have the power to frame in increasingly narrow ways the conventions, norms, language and relations through which we relate to ourselves and others. How we define ourselves as a nation cannot be separated from the language we value, inhabit and use to shape our understanding of others and the world in which we want to live. As the language of critique, civic responsibility, political courage and democracy disappears along with sustained investments in schools, media, and other elements of a formative culture that keeps an aspiring democracy alive, we lose the spaces and capacities to imagine a future in which language, literacy and hope are on the side of justice, rather than on the side of hate, willful ignorance and widespread injustice.

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," in "Crisis of the Republic" (New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1969), p. 6

2. Frank Rich, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (New York: Penguin, 2007).

3. Ibid., Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," p. 4.

4. See Bob Herbert's courageous article, "The Scourge Persists," New York Times (September 19, 2009), p. A17.

5. Susan J. Douglas, "Killing Granny with the Laziness Bias," In These Times (September 17, 2009). Online at: www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/4897.

6. Mark Slouka, "A Quibble," Harper's Magazine (February 2009), p. 9.

7. Ibid., Herbert, "The Scourge Persists," p. 17.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009. Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?," has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Uday Prakash Comments:

Wed, 09/23/2009 - 06:11 — Uday Prakash (not verified)

Straight, honest, insightful, critical....and certainly not confined only to American state of reality. It's a global situation. Democracies have now turned in to huge power tombs of lies, violence and amorous monstrous anti-human machines... It's a most holly and provocative piece. It perturbs and motivates us all to think about all...

Freedom of Expression

2009-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

Politics of ban

By Sudhanshu Ranjan

Now, in India, there is a tendency among some individuals or even communities to demand a ban on the drop of a hat.

Anthony Collins’s book ‘Discourse of Free-thinking’ published in 1713 popularised the term freethinking. In it, he wrote, that perfection of the sciences could be achieved only through freethinking. Deeply disturbed at the executions of witches, he wrote, “It is a glory to free-thinkers to wrest out of the priests’ hands the power of taking away so many innocent lives and reputations.”

Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others made it popular in France while in America, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among others, were its torchbearers. A society that does not provide space for dissent is a nothing but a barbaric society.
In 1702, Daniel Defoe wrote a pamphlet, ‘The Shortest Way with Dissenter’, in which he ridiculed the Anglican intolerance. He was arrested, jailed, fined and pilloried. But this is past. People fought hard for getting the right to freedom of expression and constitutions of most of the countries now guarantee it.

However, in India, of late, this right has become a victim of vote-bank politics. The Gujarat government’s ban on Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah, which was subsequently set aside by the high court, is the latest example of sacrificing the constitutionally-guaranteed right to score some brownie political points.

Thank God

Luckily, other BJP-ruled states did not follow suit. That the book was banned by a state government ruled by the BJP which also expelled Jaswant from the party even before reading the book and without giving him an opportunity to explain his position only proves that the party does not allow any freedom of thought.

Thus, a party man must write a book, not under the imprimatur of truth but in a way that appeases the leadership. Similarly, even textbooks must not be written objectively if some facts are not acceptable to some section.

Just a year ago, it was the BJP which opposed the ban on Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ and demanded to treat Taslima Nasreen like a political refugee to protect her freedom of speech and criticised the ban on her book ‘Dwikhandito’. Surprisingly then, the ban was imposed by the West Bengal government for which secularism is the creedal faith. However, the Calcutta high court set aside the ban. The state government also banned an issue of ‘Pathsanket’, a journal, which carried an article eulogising Taslima’s views as rational and scientific and raised some questions about the Prophet.

So, again it was a vote-bank politics — the Left front wanted to appease a particular community by banning the book, and the BJP opposed it to please another community. Protecting the freedom of expression was none of their concern.

Now, there is a tendency among some individuals or even communities to demand ban on the drop of a hat. Recently, Chhattisgarh government banned Habib Tanvir’s play ‘Charandas Chor’ because some self-styled representatives of the Satnami community complained that it denigrates Sant Ghasidas of their community. Habib wrote the play in 1974, which is based on a Rajasthani tale retold by Vijaydan Detha. That very year, Shyam Benegal made a film on it. Actors in both productions were almost same. This play was first of all enacted among members of the Satnami community who liked it very much. Habib wanted to christen it as ‘Amardas Chor’ because the protagonist is an honest thief who becomes immortal after getting the death sentence. But he was told that Amardas is the name of one of the gurus of the Satnamis. Another name suggested again turned out to be the name of another guru. Then, it was named ‘Chor chor’, which was later rechristened as ‘Charandas Chor’. Now, after 35 years, some people have taken offence, and the state government readily acceded to their demand.

Unofficial bans

Apart from official bans, there are unofficial bans imposed by vigilantes. Deepa Mehta was not allowed to film ‘Water’ in Varansi, and no action was taken against miscreants. ‘Parzania’ could not be screened in Gujarat. So was the fate of Mahesh Bhatt’s ‘Jakhm’ and Aamir Khan’s ‘Fanaa’. Babu Bajrangi thundered, “How can ‘Parzania’ ever be shown without our approval?” Bajrangi is the prime accused in the Naroda Patiya case in which over 100 people were massacred.

This trend of imposing unofficial ban is not new. A film on Shivaji could not be exhibited in the Kashmir valley in 1948. Hollywood film ‘Tango Charlie’ faced similar people’s ban in Assam by the ULFA as it showed the BSF engaged in anti-insurgency operations. Many a time the government does not show magnanimity either and bans films on tenuous grounds. French director Louise Malle’s film ‘My India’ was banned since it showed beggars, cows, dirt, etc on streets. The commentary was not offensive but the visuals were real which could not be changed.

The government has the power to impose restrictions but this power should be exercised in the rarest of rare cases. The US Supreme Court’s observation in Dennis vs US is apposite that to say that a thing is constitutional is not to say that it is desirable.
It is for the people to protect the hard-earned freedom. They must realise the dangerous game being played by politicians is inimical to the country’s interest.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty : Democracy as Spectacle

2009-09-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

by : Henry A. Giroux

Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system? Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die.

The growing dominance of a right-wing media forged in a pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks."

A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes. Glenn Beck, the alleged voice of the common man, appearing on the "Fox & Friends" morning show, calls President Obama a "racist" and then accuses him of "having a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor, while his counterpart in right-wing hate, talk radio host Michael Savage, states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children." He also claims that Obama is "surrounded by terrorists" and is "raping America." This is a variation of a crude theme established by Ann Coulter, who refers to Bill Clinton as a "very good rapist." Even worse, Obama is a "neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making," who plans to "force children into a paramilitary domestic army." And this is just a small sampling of the kind of hate talk that permeates right-wing media. This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose to believe and invest in this type of hate talk. On the contrary, while it may be idiocy, it reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational forces at work in miseducating the American public while at the same time extending the culture of cruelty. One central task of any viable form of politics is to analyze the culture of cruelty and its overt and covert dimensions of violence, often parading as entertainment.

Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice. But if a legal culture emerged that made violence and human suffering socially acceptable, popular culture rendered such violence pleasurable by commodifying, aestheticizing and spectacularizing it. Rather than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life had become both visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant and popular culture. Americans had grown accustomed to luxuriating in a warm bath of cinematic blood, as young people and adults alike were seduced with commercial and military video games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "America's Army," the television series "24" and its ongoing Bacchanalian fête of torture, the crude violence on display in World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship, and an endless series of vigilante films such as "The Brave One" (2007) and "Death Sentence" (2007), in which the rule of law is suspended by the viscerally satisfying images of men and women seeking revenge as laudable killing machines - a nod to the permanent state of emergency and war in the United States. Symptomatically, there is the mindless glorification and aestheticization of brutal violence in the most celebrated Hollywood films, including many of Quentin Tarantino's films, especially the recent "Death Proof" (2007), "Kill Bill" 1 & 2 (2003, 2004), and "Inglorious Bastards" (2009). With the release of Tarantino's 2009 bloody war film, in fact, the press reported that Dianne Kruger, the co-star of "Inglorious Bastards," claimed that she "loved being tortured by Brad Pitt [though] she was frustrated she didn't get an opportunity to get frisky with her co-star, but admits being beaten by Pitt was a satisfying experience." This is more than the aestheticization of violence, it is the normalization and glorification of torture itself.

If Hollywood has made gratuitous violence the main staple of its endless parade of blockbuster films, television has tapped into the culture of cruelty in a way that was unimaginable before the attack on the US on September 11. Prime-time television before the attacks had "fewer than four acts of torture" per year, but "now there are more than a hundred." Moreover, the people who torture are no longer the villains, but the heroes of prime-time television. The most celebrated is, of course, Jack Bauer, the tragic-ethical hero of the wildly popular Fox TV thriller "24." Not only is torture the main thread of the plot, often presented "with gusto and no moral compunction," but Bauer is portrayed as a patriot, rather than a depraved monster, who tortures in order to protect American lives and national security. Torture, in this scenario, takes society's ultimate betrayal of human dignity and legitimates the pain and fear it produces as normal, all the while making a "moral sadist" a television celebrity. The show has over 15 million viewers, and its glamorization of torture has proven so successful that it appears to have not only numbed the public's reaction to the horrors of torture, but it is so overwhelmingly influential among the US military that the Pentagon sent Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan to California to meet with the producers of the show. "He told them that promoting illegal behavior in the series ... was having a damaging effect on young troops." The pornographic glorification of gratuitous, sadistic violence is also on full display in the popular HBO television series "Dexter," which portrays a serial killer as a sympathetic, even lovable, character. Visual spectacles steeped in degradation and violence permeate the culture and can be found in various reality TV shows, professional wrestling and the infamous Jerry Springer Show. These programs all trade in fantasy, glamorized violence and escapism. And they share similar values. As Chris Hedges points out in his analysis of professional wrestling, they all mirror the worse dimensions of an unchecked and unregulated market society in which "winning is all that matters. Morality is irrelevant.... It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood."

The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet, "shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay transients a few dollars to fight each other." The culture of cruelty mimics cinematic violence as the agents of abuse both indulge in actual forms of violence and then further celebrate the barbarity by posting it on the web, mimicking the desire for fame and recognition, while voyeuristically consuming their own violent cultural productions. The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008." Rather than problematize violence, popular culture increasingly normalizes it, often in ways that border on criminal intent. For instance, a recent issue of Maxim, a popular men's magazine, included "a blurb titled 'Hunt the Homeless' [focusing on] a coming 'hobo convention' in Iowa and says 'Kill one for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'" In this context, violence is not simply being transformed into an utterly distasteful form of adolescent entertainment or spectacularized to attract readers and boost profits, it becomes a powerful pedagogical force in the culture of cruelty by both aligning itself and becoming complicit with the very real surge of violence against the homeless, often committed by young men and teenage boys looking for a thrill. Spurred on by the ever reassuring presence of violence and dehumanization in the wider culture, these young "thrill offenders" now search out the homeless and "punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society." All of these elements of popular culture speak stylishly and sadistically to new ways in which to maximize the pleasure of violence, giving it its hip (if fascist) edginess.

Needless to say, neither violent video games and television series nor Hollywood films and the Internet (or for that matter popular culture) cause in any direct sense real world violence and suffering, but they do not leave the real world behind either. That is too simplistic. What they do achieve is the execution of a well-funded and highly seductive public pedagogical enterprise that sexualizes and stylizes representations of violence, investing them with an intense pleasure quotient. I don't believe it is an exaggeration to claim that the violence of screen culture entertains and cleanses young people of the burden of ethical considerations when they, for instance, play video games that enabled them to "casually kill the simulated human beings whose world they control." Hollywood films such as the "Saw" series offer up a form of torture porn in which the spectacle of the violence enhances not merely its attraction, but offers young viewers a space where questions of ethics and responsibility are gleefully suspended, enabling them to evade their complicity in a culture of cruelty. No warnings appear on the labels of these violent videos and films, suggesting that the line between catharsis and desensitization may become blurred, making it more difficult for them to raise questions about what it means "to live in a society that produces, markets, and supports such products." But these hyper-violent cultural products also form part of a corrupt pedagogical assemblage that makes it all the more difficult to recognize the hard realities of power and material violence at work through militarism, a winner-take-all economy marked by punishing inequalities and a national security state that exhibits an utter disregard for human suffering. Even the suffering of children, we must note, as when government officials reduce the lives of babies and young children lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to collateral damage. Tragically, the crime here is much more than symbolic.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle."As Chris Hedges argues,

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
Bailouts are not going to address the ways in which individual desires, values and identities are endlessly produced in the service of a culture of cruelty and inequality. Power is not merely material, it is also symbolic and is distributed through a society in ways we have never seen before. No longer is education about schooling. It now functions through the educational force of the larger culture in the media, Internet, electronic media and through a wide range of technologies and sites endlessly working to undo democratic values, compassion and any viable notion of justice and its accompanying social relations. What this suggests is a redefinition of both literacy and education. We need, as a society, to educate students and others to be literate in multiple ways, to reclaim the high ground of civic courage, and to be able to name, engage and transform those forms of public pedagogy that produce hate and cruelty as part of the discourse of common sense. Otherwise, democracy will lose the supportive institutions, social relations and culture that make it not only possible but even thinkable.

Enough is Enough: How Many Days Can We Shorten This War?

2009-08-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

Aug 22, 2009

By Robert Naiman

(Aug. 20) -- Recently I watched the 2007 Lebanese film "Under the Bombs." The movie tells the story of the U.S.-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, wrapping the historical events inside a fictional narrative. Watching the movie reminded me of Just Foreign Policy's efforts with Jewish Voice for Peace and others to stop that war.

At the time, it seemed clear that the war could not go on indefinitely; the international community would not allow it. But how long would it be allowed to go on? If we could shorten it by one day, innocent civilians would live and not die. The 34-day conflict resulted in 1,191 deaths, the UN Human Rights Council reported. Using this figure, on average, each day of the war killed 35 more people; each day we shortened it saved 35 lives.

Today Afghanistan is holding the first round of its presidential election. Regardless of the outcome, one thing is clear from the campaign: the majority of Afghans are sick and tired of war. "There is broad agreement the war must end," reports Carlotta Gall in the New York Times. There is broad support in Afghanistan for negotiations with insurgents to end the war. The debate inside Afghanistan is on what process negotiations should follow, and whether the Afghan government is really following through on its stated commitment to negotiations.

Americans, too, have apparently had enough. Fifty-four percent - including three-quarters of Democrats - say they oppose the war in Afghanistan, CNN reported this month. A Washington Post-ABC News poll now says a majority of Americans see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting and just a quarter say more U.S. troops should be sent to the country. Majorities of liberals and Democrats solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction in troops. Two-thirds of liberals and six in 10 Democrats are against a troop increase. A majority of women say troop levels should be decreased.

But our leaders in Washington, apparently, are not yet sick and tired of war in Afghanistan. For almost a year, Western officials have been conceding that the war will not end without a political solution that involves negotiations with insurgents. But, these officials say, the West isn't ready yet to make a deal. "Reconciliation is important, but not now," one Western diplomat told the New York Times. "It's not going to happen until the insurgency is weaker and the government is stronger."

So, there's going to be a deal with insurgents; that's a foregone conclusion. The question that remains is how many more people will die before that happens - and whether, from the point of view of the interests of the majority of Afghans and the majority of Americans, the deal we can get 5 or 10 years from now is likely to be so much better than the deal we could get in the next year as to justify the deaths that will be the guaranteed result of postponing meaningful negotiations.

An amendment in June requiring the Pentagon to tell Congress what its strategy was for ending the war failed in the House, 138-278. But in an important milepost for future efforts, it was supported by a majority of House Democrats.

In the Senate, we're much further back: a bill calling for an exit strategy from Afghanistan has not even been introduced. But a path to eventually getting out of Afghanistan has to eventually also go through the Senate.

In our ally Britain, which has far fewer troops there, the question of how long their troops will be in Afghanistan is openly discussed. The head of the British Army said Britain will have to keep thousands on troops on the front line in Afghanistan for up to five more years, theTelegraph reported this week. But this question - how long will our troops be there? - is not even being asked in the U.S. Senate.

The Senate is now in recess; but the recess is a time for Senators to hear from their constituents. Now is the time to urge your Senators to demand an exit strategy from Afghanistan.

An Interesting Cmparison : India vs Pakistan

2009-08-13T18:28:00.000-07:00

Today I received this mail forwarded by some friends, I post it here. It's a hilarious and side-splitting comparison between the 'Big Bulls' of two neighboring countries India and Pakistan Unsure about its authenticity I put it here, anyway.

Capital suggestion

By Dr Farrukh Saleem

Jai Hind!!!
Written by a Pakistani journalist about India

12/9/2007

Here's what is happening in India :

The two Ambani brothers can buy 100 percent of every company listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) and would still be left with $30 billion to spare. The four richest Indians can buy up all goods and services produced over a year by 169 million Pakistanis and still be left with $60 billion to spare. The four richest Indians are now richer than the forty richest Chinese.

In November, Bombay Stock Exchange's benchmark Sensex flirted with 20,000 points. As a consequence, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries became a $100 billion company (the entire KSE is capitalized at $65 billion). Mukesh owns 48 percent of Reliance.

In November, comes Neeta's birthday. Neeta turned forty-four three weeks ago. Look what she got from her husband as her birthday present:

A sixty-million dollar jet with a custom fitted master bedroom, bathroom with mood lighting, a sky bar, entertainment cabins, satellite television, wireless communication and a separate cabin with game consoles. Neeta is Mukesh Ambani's wife, and Mukesh is not India 's richest but the second richest.

Mukesh is now building his new home, Residence Antillia (after a mythical, phantom island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean ). At a cost of $1 billion this would be the most expensive home on the face of the planet. At 173 meters tall Mukesh's new family residence, for a family of six, will be the equivalent of a 60-storeyed building. The first six floors are reserved for parking. The seventh floor is for car servicing and maintenance. The eighth floor houses a mini-theatre. Then there's a health club, a gym and a swimming pool. Two floors are reserved for Ambani family's guests. Four floors above the guest floors are family floors all with a superb view of the Arabian Sea . On top of everything are three helipads. A staff of 600 is expected to care for the family and their family home.

In 2004, India became the 3rd most attractive foreign direct investment destination. Pakistan wasn't even in the top 25 countries.

In 2004, the United Nations, the representative body of 192 sovereign member states, had requested the Election Commission of India to assist the UN in the holding elections in Al Jumhuriyah al Iraqiyah and Dowlat-e Eslami-ye Afghanestan. Why the Election Commission of India and not the Election Commission of Pakistan? After all, Islamabad is closer to Kabul than is Delhi .

Imagine, 12 percent of all American scientists are of Indian origin; 38 percent of doctors in America are Indian; 36 percent of NASA scientists are Indians; 34 percent of Microsoft employees are Indians; and 28 percent of IBM employees are Indians.

For the record: Sabeer Bhatia created and founded Hotmail... Sun Microsystems was founded by Vinod Khosla. The Intel Pentium processor, that runs 90 percent of all computers, was fathered by Vinod Dham. Rajiv Gupta co-invented Hewlett Packard's E-speak project. Four out often Silicon Valley start-ups are run by Indians. Bollywood produces 800 movies per year and six Indian ladies have won Miss Universe/Miss World titles over the past 10 years.

For the record: Azim Premji, the richest Muslim entrepreneur on the face of the planet, was born in Bombay and now lives in Bangalore.India now has more than three dozen billionaires; Pakistan has none (not a single dollar billionaire) .

The other amazing aspect is the rapid pace at which India is creating wealth. In 2002, Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh and Anil Ambani's father, left his two sons a fortune worth $2.8 billion. In 2007, their combined wealth stood at $94 billion. On 29 October 2007, as a result of the stock market rally and the appreciation of the Indian rupee, Mukesh became the richest person in the world, with net worth climbing to US$63.2 billion (Bill Gates, the richest American, stands at around $56 billion). Indians and Pakistanis have the same Y-chromosome haplogroup. We have the same genetic sequence and the same genetic marker (namely: M124).

We have the same DNA molecule, the same DNA sequence. Our culture, our traditions and our cuisine are all the same. We watch the same movies and sing the same songs. What is it that Indians have and we don't?

INDIANS ELECT THEIR LEADERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And also to mention: They think of Construction of own nation, unlike other nations who are just concerned with destruction of others...

Simple answer why the Indian fare better than the Pakis'.. They don't focus on religion and neither do they spend time and money in devising ways to kill their own and everyone else over religion.

The current Gender Discourse in India and in Hindu Intellectuals

2009-07-03T03:49:00.000-07:00

After yesterday's verdict of Delhi High Court on the issue of Homosexuality I found this article interesting. However, it does not support my views at any level.

by Devdutt Pattanaik

In his Navagraha Kirti, the great 19th century Carnatic music composer, Muthuswami Dikshitar describes Budh (the planet mercury) as Napumsakam or
one who is not quite male or female. He alludes to a story in the Puranas where Brihaspati (the planet Jupiter) discovers that his wife Tara (the goddess of stars) is pregnant with the child of her lover, Chandra (the Moon-god). He curses the love child to be born neuter. Budh later marries Ila, a man who becomes a woman when he accidentally trespasses an enchanted grove. From that union springs the Chandra-vamsa, or the lunar dynasty of kings. So says the Mahabharata.
As in the story of Ila, Indian lore is full of tales where men turn into women and women turn into men. Narada falls into a pond, becomes a woman, discovers the meaning of worldly delusion or maya. Shiva bathes in the Yamuna, becomes a gopi, a milkmaid, so that he can dance the raas-leela with Krishna — an idea that has inspired the temple of Gopeshwarji in Vrindavan. At a short distance from Ahmedabad, is the temple of Bahucharji, the rooster-riding goddess, once where it is said there was a pond that turned a woman into a man, a mare into a horse and a bitch into a dog. The pond has dried up, but women still visit this shrine seeking a male child. They seek the blessings of bhagats (some call them hijras) who though men believe they are women and choose to live their life wearing a sari.
Near Pondicherry, in the village of Koovagam, every year the transgendered alis dance and sing in memory of an event that took place during mythic times. Aravan, the son of Arjuna and his serpent wife, Ulupi, had to be sacrificed to ensure victory of the Pandavas at Kurukshetra. But he refused to die without a taste of marriage. As no woman was willing to marry a man doomed to die, Krishna took a female form, Mohini, became Aravan’s wife, spent a night with him and then wailed for him as widow when he was beheaded.
In the Valmiki Ramayana, there are descriptions of Rakshasa women who kiss women on Ravana’s bed on whose lips lingers the taste of their master. Krittivasa Ramayana is the story of two widows who drink a magic potion and, in the absence of their husband, make love to each other and end up bearing a child without bones (traditionally believed to be the contribution of semen).
How does one interpret these stories? Are they gay stories? They certainly shatter the conventional confines of gender and sexuality. Ancient Indian authors and poets without doubt imagined a state where the lines separating masculinity and femininity often blurred and even collapsed. Though awkward, these were not stray references. Such tales were consistent and recurring, narrated matter-of-factly, without guilt or shame. Such outpouring has its roots in Indian metaphysics.
As the wheel of rebirth turns, Indians have always believed, the soul keeps casting off old flesh and wrapping itself anew. Depending on one’s karma, one can be reborn as a tree, as a rock, as a bird, a beast, a man, a woman, a man with a woman’s heart, a woman with a man’s heart, even as a god or demon...endless possibilities exist in the infinite cosmos. The wise see masculinity and femininity as ephemeral robes that wrap the sexless genderless soul. The point is not to get attached to the flesh, but to celebrate its capabilities, discover its limitations, and finally transcend it.
The question before us is: does the human mind have the empathy to include gender and sexual ambiguity in civil human society? It does. In every Yuga new rules come into being that redefine world order. Mahabharata mentions a Yuga when there was no marriage — women were free to go with any man they chose. This changed when Shvetaketu instituted the marriage laws. We have lived through a Yuga where we left unchallenged laws of old imperial masters that dehumanised and invalidated sexual minorities. This has to change —hopefully now.

in Times of India, 3rd July, 2009

(The writer is the author of The Book of Ram, Seven Secrets of Hindu Calendar Art and other books on sacred lore.)

Blue all the shades of Blue.

2009-06-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Vision from the Blue Plane-Window

by Ernesto Cardenal

In the round little window, everything is blue,
land bluish, blue-green, blue
(and sky)
everything is blue
blue lakes and lagoons
blue volcanoes
while farther off the land looks bluer
blue islands in a blue lake.
This is the face of the land liberated.
And where all the people fought, I think:
for love!
To live without the hatred
of exploitation.
To love one another in a beautiful land
so beautiful, not only in itself
but because of the people in it,
above all because of the people in it.
That's why God gave us this beautiful land
for the society in it.
And in all those blue places they fought, suffered
for a society of love
here in this land.

One patch of blue looks more intense...
And I thought I was seeing the sites of all the battles there,
and of all the deaths,
behind that small, round windowpane
blue
all the shades of blue.

translated by Jonathan Cohen

DAWN

Now the roosters are singing.
Natalia, your rooster's already sung, sister,
Justo, yours has already sung, brother.
Get up off your cots, your bed mats.
I seem to hear the congos awake on the ohter coast.
We can already blow on the kindling - throw out the pisspot.
Bring an oil lamp so we can see the faces.
A dog in a hut yelped
and a dog from another hut answered.
Juana, it's time to light the stove, sister.
The dark is even darker because day is coming.
Get up Chico, get up Pancho.
There's a horse to mount,
we have to paddle a canoe.
Our dreams had us separated, in folding
cots and bed mats (each of us dreaming our own dream)
but our awakening reunites us.
The night already draws away followed by its witches and ghouls.
We will see the water very blue; right now we don't see it. - And
this land with its fruit trees, which we also don't see.
Wake up Pancho Nicaragua, grab your machete
there's a lot of weeds to cut
grab your machete and your guitar.
There was a owl at midnight and a hoot owl at one.
The night left without moon or any morning star.
Tigers roared on this island and those on the coast called back.
Now the night bird's gone, the one that says: Sc-rewed, Sc-rewed.
Later the skylark will sing in the palm tree.
She'll sing: Compañero
Compañera.
Ahead of the light goes the shade flying like a vampire.
Wake up you, and you, and you.
(Now the roosters are singing.)
Good morning, God be with you!

translation by Mark Zimmerman
from Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria

Language is Liquidated

2009-06-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

Words and War

Tuesday 09 June 2009

by: Norman Solomon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

A July 2008 bombing outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul. (Photo: Getty Images)

It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.

Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can't be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration's current supplemental bill is military.

Often it seems that lofty words about war hopes are boilerplate efforts to make us feel better about an endless warfare state. Oratory and punditry laud the Pentagon's fallen as noble victims of war, while enveloping its other victims in a haze of ambiguity or virtual nonexistence.

When last Sunday's edition of The Washington Post printed the routine headline, "Iraq War Deaths," the newspaper meant American deaths - to Washington's ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American.

Ask for whom the bell tolls. That's the implicit message - from top journalists and politicians alike.

A few weeks ago, some prominent US news stories did emerge about Pentagon air strikes that killed perhaps a hundred Afghan civilians. But much of the emphasis was that such deaths could undermine the US war effort. The most powerful media lenses do not correct the myopia when Uncle Sam's vision is impaired by solipsism and narcissism.

Words focus our attention. The official words and the media words - routinely, more or less the same words - are ostensibly about war, but they convey little about actual war at the same time that they boost it. Words are one thing, and war is another.

Yet words have potential to impede the wheels of war machinery. "And henceforth," Albert Camus wrote, "the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions."

A very different type of gamble is routinely underway at the centers of political power, where words are propaganda munitions. In Washington, the default preference is to gamble with the lives of other people, far away.

More than 40 years ago, Country Joe McDonald wrote a song, "An Untitled Protest," about war fighters: who "pound their feet into the sand of shores they've never seen / Delegates from the western land to join the death machine." Now, tens of thousands more of such delegates are on the way to Afghanistan.

In pseudo-savvy Washington, "appearance is reality." Killing and maiming, fueled by appropriations and silence, are rendered as abstractions.

The deaths of people unaligned with the Pentagon are the most abstract of all. No wonder The Washington Post is still printing headlines like "Iraq War Deaths." Why should Iraqis qualify for inclusion in Iraq war deaths?

There's plenty more media invisibility and erasure ahead for Afghan people as the Pentagon ramps up its war effort in their country.

War thrives on abstractions that pass for reality.

There are facts about war in news media and in presidential speeches. For that matter, there are plenty of facts in the local phone book. How much do they tell you about the most important human realities?

Millions of words and factual data pour out of the Pentagon every day. Human truth is another matter.

My father, Morris Solomon, recently had his ninetieth birthday. He would be the first to tell you that his brain has lost a lot of capacity. He doesn't recall nearly as many facts as he used to. But a couple of days ago, he told me: "I know what war is. It's stupid. It's ruining humanity."

That's not appearance. It's reality.

In South Asian countries,

Wed, 06/10/2009 - 02:40 — Uday Prakash (comments)

In South Asian countries, 'appearances' are nightmares and dreams are apocalyptic. Time is rendered blurred by the violence of all sorts. Remember Norman, 'appearances' and 'dreams' together form 'reality'. Sometimes I think our lives as an inconclusive sentence growing and developing to make a complete ultimate sentence with any meaning..and this all is happening under certain grammatical rules. Syntax has its own rationality and logic. But think....when violence disrupts this process and perpetuates its own irrational, illogical 'reasoning'...when it interferes in side an evolving sentence...language itself is liquidated... That's the reason, we cry:'No more war!...no more violence..! Lets go to prayers...' and our cries don't carry any meaning because the language has been perished ... They are the 'powers' for whom the bell tolls..Certainly not for us, who have lost their abilities to form a complete sentence.. Norman, we are now deprived of any grammar. If we say 'PEACE' ...is there anyone who can comprehend it and translate it in their language.. Language of war, profits, trades and hegemony over others..?

2009-05-31T02:22:00.000-07:00

My Autopsy

Michael Dickman

There is a way
if we want
into everything

I'll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the small and
glowing loaves of bread

I'll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese poems

You eat the forks
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we're gone, hanging on despite worms
or fire

I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth

(Excerpt)

Poetry as Insurgent Art

2009-05-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

I am signaling you through the flames

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

English in postcolonial India is a language of liberation and modernity

2009-05-03T15:30:00.001-07:00

(This article appeared in an abridged version in Economic Times of India under Face off column, a few days before)

‘Hindi hain ham vatan hai Hindostaan hamaaraa’, when Mohd Iqbal wrote in his most popular, accepted nearly as the third national anthem ‘Saare jahaan se acchhaa …’ before independence and much before the partition in 1947, Hindi had entirely a different implication and its connotation. Hindi at that time, in colonial India, suggested more about a civilization well spread from Indus valley to doaba. It certainly not evoked any specific language, race or religion in the minds at the time. Hindavi was a zubaan of ordinary people who formed second largest linguistic community on earth.

How the same Hindi was transformed in to a ‘raaj-bhaashaa’ and ‘raashtra-bhaashaa’ and made to get associated with a distinct religious community dominated by a couple of Hindu castes, is not that cryptic process. Anyone aware about the politics of last 60 plus years understands it even if chooses to remain quiet.

In 2007, it was the first time ever; I was invited to become part of the government delegation sent to take part in ‘Vishva Hindi Sammelan’ at New York. Hundreds of Hindi writers were provided with business class air tickets and were put up in 5-7 star hotels like Hotel Radisson, Hotel Pennsylvania and Inter Continental etc. Courtesy to Ministry of HRD. Millions of money was spent to project Hindi as ‘Vishva Bhaashaa’ (World Language). Five days long function was held in UN building. Even the Secretary General of the UN was there to attend inaugural ceremony and was applauded when he disclosed that his son in law speaks Hindi. He also mumbled a few sentences in Hindi. Needless to say, a demand was raised by the organizers, led by the AICC General Secretary, Anand Shrma, that UN should accept Hindi as its working language like English, French and other languages.

The same evening, My US friend and translator, who teach Hindi in Chicago University, had some official work with one Mr. Pandey, the office bearer of Nagari Pracharini Sabha, one of the oldest and prime Hindi institute located in Benares. We came to know that Mr. Pandey has been put in Hotel Pennsylvania. When he reached there and asked for Mr. Pandey at the reception counter of the hotel, the counter girl started laughing. She said, ‘Please tell me the first name because there are more than a dozen Pandeys staying over here.’

It was not a joke. It was a factual statement about ‘Vishva Bhaashaa Hindi.’ I realized soon that more than 85% of the participants and more than 98% of the apex body of the organizers of VHS belonged to one Hindu caste and its sub castes.

According to one survey in TV, electronic and print media, one single caste has more than 78% monopoly over Hindi. In literature and academics situation is more precarious. If you find this statement dubious and vague, I request you to go and check about the people occupying all the places related to Hindi in capital. You’d stand before your findings terrified.

I was a young student of school when Dr. Lohiya raised the slogan of ‘Hindi hataao’. I also took part in wall writing and blackening English hoardings and sign panels with passion. But now, when Mulayam singh has raised this slogan again, I desist in saying it a farce of Lohiya’s tragedy. I stand against it. In my opinion, there might have been reasons before independence for great politicians like Mahatma Gandhi, C. Rajgopalachari, Chittaranjan Das and others coming from non Hindi states supporting Hindi as a ‘Raashtra Bhaashaa’. They might have felt about the necessity of a common unifying language in a multi-linguistic and multi cultural subcontinent to consolidate their struggle against British. English at that time would have logically been perceived as the language of colonial rulers.

But after these many post colonial years, situation has entirely changed. Hindi is now the language of ‘sarkaar, bazaar and sanchaar’ (government, market and media) and it has been monopolized by the dominant caste and religious group. Official Hindi has become a vehicle of obscurantism, communalism, blind nationalism and to top all casteism. You can watch TV channels or can leaf through any newspaper, you will see pooja, tyohars, superstitions, obscene pictures and all imaginable inferior stuff to form your opinion.

English, in post colonial India, has become a language of modernity and empowerment. Poor and low caste people and minorities as well know that Hindi will make them ‘naukar’ and English will escort them to the seat of the Master. Even kaamwali baai and dhobi have learnt this mantra. Obviously this is the reason they are enrolling their kids in English medium schools in spite they have to go through a harsh, stingy ascetic life.

If you ask me to give a slogan now, it would be like this: ’angrezi laao, desh bachao.’

Uday prakash

Mass Suicides in Indian Villages

2009-04-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine
"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."
Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.
In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.
His family must repay a debt of 400 and the crop this year is poor.
"The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds," said Lakhnu's friend Santosh. "There were no rains at all."
"That's why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans."
Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."
Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.
"Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.
All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies," he said.

SAARC Writers Conference Agra

2009-03-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

Author is yet to die…

Uday Prakash
(Keynote Address)

We are living in a time when the death of author has already been pronounced by many scholars long before. Author was dead along with the ‘End of History’, it has been said so repeatedly since then that it appears as a truth.
And, when we look at it, it essentially comes out as a thoroughly factual statement. We, it seems, now are here, in 21st century, living posthumously. It’s a miserable life in posterity of some breed, class or font, ceased to exist anymore.
This year in January, I was making a small film on legendary Rajasthani author Vijaidan Detha, who had met with an accident and toiling to regain his lost memory, he said ‘ The age of writer is gone. In this town, where I live, out of 6000 people, it’s rare to find a person with book and with pen. They have mobiles in plenty, thousands of them.’ Obviously, I titled the film: ‘Author in the Age of Mobiles’.
Interestingly, the same celebrated thinker, Francis Fukuyama, who had pronounced the death of the history and the last man, in his new book ‘Our Posthumous Future’, makes an alteration about his earlier proclamation. He says:
‘Hegel had been right in saying that history had ended in 1806, since there had been no essential political progress beyond the principles of the French revolution, which he had seen consolidated by Napoleon’s victory in the battle of Jena that year. The collapse of socialism in 1989 signaled only the pronouncement of a broader convergence toward liberal democracy around the globe.’
Well, now just think about these two phrases, ‘Liberal Democracy’ and ‘Political Progress’. We, the authors, who are here today in Agra, coming from SAARC countries, must seek the genuine answers, we must make an effort to redefine and deliberate over these two phrases in our own contexts. Do we really have, or ever had, true liberal, modern democracies in our respective countries? Or have we sincerely witnessed ‘Political progress’ since we were told that we are now independent nations and its citizens? Is it true that we now taste the fruits of that utopia dreamed by Rousseau about ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ and so on? Had descendents of Gandhi, Marx and others have tried ever to create societies which have been transformed medieval , feudal, colonial shapes to a modern, tolerant, liberal and democratic one?
Obviously no! Not anywhere.
Time is dark and gets worsened when we see what’s happening all around. In 1980s we were told: ‘Nothing to worry. The Third Technological Revolution has arrived. Information Technology, along with electronics and bio-genetic labs, is going to create a fabulous, prosperous, peaceful ‘Global Village’ very soon. The new science has now replaced the old politics with its outdated technologies. A new technological civilization has arrived with its new-tech generation. These new drivers will take us to bigger horizons. We silly, unintelligent, childish authors started dreaming the dream of Sahir Ludhiyanvi : ‘Who subah kabhi to ayegi …!”
And what was the aftermath?
9/11, clash of civilizations, growing terrorism and its retaliatory violence, collateral damages, carpet bombings, dismantling of earlier nation-states, new torture centers, POTA and TADA, Special Arm Forces Acts, disregard of UN charter of Human Rights Declarations…..
Author, one of the most vulnerable and powerless creature, witnessed a ghastly, horrific nightmare everywhere. On one hand we saw multiple Airliners, Huge skyscrapers, shopping malls, metro rails and markets full with modern gadgets….! We saw beauty ramps, our girls becoming miss universe, miss world, our masala films getting Oscars…and hundreds of channels showing dance India dance, laughter challenges, reality shows…And on the other hand we saw Mumbai Terror attack, Cannaught place bomb explosions….genocides..Encounters…criminals occupying apex political positions, corrupts sitting on top bureaucratic seats of powers…
This part of Asia, where the new Sun was to rise in the middle of last century, is overwhelmed with darkness, drenching in the blood of its own people….
And we also witnessed conflicts of all sorts, most violent and always on rise. These conflicts are fragmenting all grand-narratives in to narrow, tiny, sectarian pieces. Our minds and souls are restructured, our identities as a modern author has been confiscated and we are given now most retrogressive, obscure, and disgraceful identities of our religion, caste, race, color etc…Time here is now rolling back.
Unfortunately, we the citizens of South Asian countries do not have a homogenous society like most of the western countries. We are plural societies with a great variance of multiple races, religions, languages, castes, colors, cultures and so on. And we also see growing hostilities between all SAARC countries. In fact, they appear in state of a war now. TV channels, news papers are attempting relentlessly to make us all warmongers, enemies of each other. Forces are now on their business to convert us in to subhuman, soulless consumerists, greedy debauches, neo-colonial bastards and citizens of empire.
Castism in my country has been equal to communalism and racism. According to one survey, conducted by CSDS a single caste and its sub-castes monopolize the language I write and live in i.e. Hindi.
I end up this somber note citing about one anecdote. Last year I scripted a film, which was based on my own novella Mohan Das. It was a story a lower caste dalit, who has lost his identity. Mightier do take away everything here in my beloved country as they do in Panama or Pakistan. This film had its premiere in Osian Film Festival, New Delhi, in July 2008. I was not invited, as writers have hardly any space in Bollywood film world. I was passing through a bad stretch of time and was completely down and out.
I was in my village, in Madhya Pradesh searching for modes of survival. It was 19th July, 2008. I had sunk in to depressions. Suddenly my cell phone rang. I picked it up. Ajeet Cour ji was on the other side. Her voice was trembling:
‘Uday ji, I had cried only three times in my entire life. But today, watching Mohan Das, I wept seven times….”
I know she is an author. I’m an author too. Our identities have been taken away. We are Mohan Das and we have strong bonds with each other.
Let us be together…lets cling to each other….lets raise our voices…
Lets make a pronouncement here at Agra, a city of love that History might have ended, we are not concerned with that, but words are still living…
Words are ‘power inscribed’….so the author will remain the final ‘authority; to give a verdict against all other powers…
Jai Ho !!
13th March, 2009

Remembering Harold Pinter

2008-12-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

Is Our Conscience Dead ?
Ann Wright

Friday 26 December 2008
On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptance speech. I was in London in December 2005, speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech - not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.
I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Nobel Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight on the tragic effects of the past decades of US foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.
Pinter's Laureate speech question, "Is Our Conscience Dead?" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech, "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or, as in Cheney's case - purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable.
Following is the part of Pinter's lecture that speaks to the invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo - and our collective and individual conscience:
"Art, Truth and Politics" Noble Lecture by Harold Pinter December 7, 2005
"... The United States no longer ... sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.
It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?
Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture.
What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?
More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and show no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
I hope you will decide that yes, we do have a conscience and that you will join the millions of Americans who say we must hold accountable those who have committed criminal acts while in government - the policy makers as well as the implementers.
Write and call the new President and the new Congress and demand official investigations into war crimes and other criminal acts committed by members of the Bush administration and join us on Inauguration day to remind the new President of his responsibilities.

From Mumbai to Obama: End Bush's 'War on Terror'

2008-11-29T15:21:00.000-08:00

By Steve Weissman

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai call out to President-elect Barack Obama and his advisors to rethink the signature blunder of George W. Bush's eight years in office - the so-called War on Terror. As US intelligence reports have made clear, the centerpiece of the supposed campaign against terror, the military occupation of Iraq, has increased the likelihood of more attacks like those in Mumbai, Madrid, London and Manhattan. The new escalation in Afghanistan will similarly increase terrorist attacks there, in neighboring India and Pakistan, in disputed Kashmir, and throughout the world.
Bush and Cheney chose the word "war" with malice aforethought. From the start, they intended a military response, first against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And, as Barton Gellman shows so brilliantly in his book "Angler," Dick Cheney and his team consciously wanted to create a wartime presidency with enormous unchecked power and scant regard for basic American liberties.
By contrast, Obama's advisors openly acknowledge that military force alone will never bring victory over terrorism. They would, in addition, provide more economic aid, use counter-insurgency tactics to pacify local populations, and work with surrounding regional powers, including Iran.
But Obama and his people still talk far too much about using military force and delude themselves into believing that the physical defeat of Al-Qaeda will significantly weaken the current terrorist threat.
Though it's still too early to know who staged the attacks in Mumbai, they were most likely militant jihadis, possibly with links to Kashmiri rebels and renegade elements of Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI. Al-Qaeda may or may not have played a role in the planning.
But even if Al-Qaeda did, how would killing Osama bin Laden - if he's still alive - or hanging all of his top aides, or hammering the Taliban in any way defuse the toxic brew of often justified grievances and outrageous religious fanaticism that we now face? The enemy is not a single man, and not a single group. It is a movement of shared ideas and beliefs, all too often encouraged by Washington's pursuit of policies that are both unjust and counter-productive.
The terrorist bloodshed started long before bin Laden and will continue long after his dialysis machine packs up. No magic bullet will end it, but military boots on other people's ground will almost always make matters worse. That's what they did in Iraq. That's what they are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What bin Laden added to the mix was the well-articulated idea that terrorist attacks could promote a clash of civilizations, or holy war. With his War on Terror, George W. Bush, the Crusader-in-Chief, responded exactly as bin Laden wanted, turning moderate Muslims around the world into terrorist supporters, funders, and enablers. Why would Obama want to continue the madness?
To gain perspective, Obama might ask his advisers to brief him on the very different wave of terrorism that spread from Russia, through Europe, and into the United States between 1881 and 1914. The terrorists were mostly anarchists, and they killed, among others, Czar Alexander II, King Umberto I of Italy, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, and the president of the United States, William McKinley.
The assassinations shook the established powers throughout the Western world. One terrorist, a Bosnian nationalist, even triggered War I when he assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in historic Sarajevo.
The new media of the time, the daily newspaper, naturally exaggerated the threat, spreading the terrifying specter of the crazed anarchist bomb-thrower. Just as naturally, the papers gave considerably less coverage to another image of the age - that of the government-paid agent provocateur.
In time, the anarchists themselves saw that their violence, their propaganda of the deed, was not sparking the revolutionary movement they wanted, and they turned instead toward organizing workers into unions. But, even at the time of the greatest murder and mayhem, I can think of no government that ever went anywhere near as far as the Bush administration in making the fight against terrorism a question of military force.
Today's terrorists have far more deadly weapons at their disposal, as Dick Cheney always told us. But today's police and intelligence services have more than enough technology to meet the threat. What they need is far greater international cooperation, which a reliance on the military makes more difficult.
Similarly, Islamic societies around the world have more than enough creativity to see the dead end into which terrorism leads. What they need is time and space to adapt to a changing world.
Barack Obama is in a unique position to build cooperation and encourage Muslims everywhere to find their own way forward. Happily, he has made a good start by announcing that he will close Guantánamo and end the horrors of torture. He has also raised the hope, however faint, that he will work toward a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians and between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Even more to the point, his pledge to build a green economy will reduce any argument for continuing American support of despotic governments in countries with large reserves of oil and natural gas.
All this is promising. But it remains only a promise, and all of it will come to naught if Obama gives the orders to continue killing people and breaking things wherever and whenever the United States wants.

MOHANDAS : ABDUCTED, LYNCHED AND TORTURED

2008-11-26T20:06:00.000-08:00

I’m back to Delhi, the capital of India, a country I loved so much since the arrival of my breath in wind of my small village. It was quite more than three months long wanderings in another planet enduring anyhow in the same nation-state.. My small village, Sitapur is just struggling to survive under the clutches of builders, contractors, corrupt officials and politicians who have one genetic consistency amongst them which owns greed and violence as their DNA distinctiveness.
They must be tested for it, medically and neurologically.
My novella Mohandas was born here, in the same soil, under the same sky, at the bank of the same river Soan, where I was born too around 56 years in the past.
Mohandas was never a fiction, a handiwork of imagination, an objet d'art created through arduous skills in a language named Hindi. It was not a daydreaming or scaring nightmare. Mohandas was and is never a fantasy….
It ‘s too real. Corporal truth about the life of us all working, moral and powerless subjects of this mighty corporate-political state. It’s a narrative which narrates its time and its helplessness. A gloomy, pessimistic saga of our life which succeeds to continue anyhow.
Well, Mohandas became very popular in no time throughout India. It’s translated in to almost all Indian languages, including English, which also is an Indian language without any snag. It has been played and being played as theatrical performances in big and small cities well spread over the country.
However, like ‘The Girl with the Golden Parasol’ (Peelee Chhatari waali Ladkee) this novella too created chaos and mess in my life. Now my being, I deeply feel, is an subversive act of clinging to life in a political, dehumanized, business minded state.
Irony or tragic comicality was here. If you remember, the novella Mohandas was dedicated to a lawyer who had taken up his case to the judicial magistrate, to my shock, the lawyer is now the Secretary of the Lions Club. A city club of businessmen and contractors. At the same time he is also the district secretary of the Communist Party of India.
So, things have changed very soon. History has ended and pragmatism has replaced ideologies. I visited the lawyers chamber, it’s equipped with split AC and interiors are lavish with expensive furnitures.
Well where Mohandas will go? And me, his author? Unemployed, uprooted…..! Money and power has snatched away our identities. I exactly remember the time when I wrote Mohandas three years before. I’d gone back to my village in search of survival as I was rejected by the selection committees for a University and an Academy. The member got his own son in law appointed in the same university and had full support of power centers of capital’s Hindi elites. Now, when I read a newspaper I found that the man who was selected for the post I was contender, is found guilty of sexual abuse and exploitation of a research student and an inquiry is on.
I know, nothing will happen. He’ll come out smiling in the same way as Vishwanath smiles as a victor, impersonating as Mohandas, seizing his identity. They are the Brahmins. Our life has been subjugated and slaved by them. Hindi is their colony.
Yes, Mohandas is made in to a feature film, produced by another Brahmin, who has nothing beside power and money and ambitions. Although he’s running his ‘production company’ faking it with his wife’s name in actuality he’s a government official. One can guess about his resources of wealth in today’s India very well.
I thank to media and media critics who came out questioning my absence during the Osian Film Festival and I also thank Osian people for displaying my name in all their banners and folios.
But the news is that film Mohandas repeated the same tragedy, perhaps as a farce this time with his author and writer.
I sincerely oppose it and criticize it.
I wrote a poem just before I left to my native land (Remember the brilliant poem by Amme Cesare : Return to My Native Land). The poem I wrote is about Delhi and its title is ‘Dayaar’. It’s published in a small magazine ‘samved’ edited by Kishan Kaljayi. I’ve been receiving many phone calls since then.
Yes, my friends …I’m down and out…
And the truth is, I’ve not opted for it !
I’ll write more very soon about all this.

Mohan Das : Hindi film's nasty face

2008-06-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

Mohan Das, a novella authored by me, which has been translated in to almost all Indian languages by eminent translators, including English and which is still being staged by various theatre groups all over the country, seems has fallen in to the wrong hands for its film version. I just had a chance to see its brochure, printed by the producer for the publicity and promotion of the film, it steals credit titles which have been duly signed by me and the producer in a stamped legal agreement. Fact is, I've written the screenplay and Dialogues, which producer has acknowledged. I had faced some delay in getting agreed upon fee, but finally it was paid.
In addition, today I just spotted an interview of the Director in India Times and to my surprise, the director is conspicuously silent about the story, screenplay and dialogue.
I paste the entire text below so that you can see it yourself. I'm also approaching Osians to safeguard my rights as an author because this organization is headed by Aruna Vasudev, who herself is a writer, journalist and filmmaker.
I'll be moving to the court, if the credits are not properly shown in the film, to seek justice.
(For your information, few Hindi-power-centers are involved in this nasty game beside Bollywood, which has already earned notority in plagiarism, piracy and cheating the artists and writers)
Well, now read the interview:

Director Mazhar Kamran's film Mohandas, starring Sonali Kulkarni, Nakul Vaid , Sharbani Mukherji , Sushant Singh, Aditya Srivastava and Govind Namdeo, has been selected for screening in the 10th Osian's Cinefan, Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema (OCFF10) that will take place in New Delhi from 10th of July to 20th July 2008. Presented as an investigative satirical thriller, Mohandas unravels an unusual small-town scam of stolen identity. It has been filmed in remote parts of UP and MP, against the backdrop of the coal mines.

Comments Mazhar Kamran, "I am happy that I will be showing my film for the first time at a film festival with an Asian focus. Given the nature of the subject of my film and its roots, it is only proper that one begins at home. We are prone to looking elsewhere for recognition, when the best thing to happen is to be recognized in your own milieu." He goes on to add, "There is no dearth of stories that are unique to our time and place. We are not looking here hard enough and go on borrowing from other cultures. In the past, we have had our unique voice. Film-makers like Guru Dutt, Mehboob, Bimal Roy and K. Asif have shown the way our mainstream cinema could go."

Since its establishment in 1999, OCFF has become one of the most important film showcases in Asia. Founded in 1999 by Aruna Vasudev, as a film festival that screened 27 films, OCFF has grown rapidly, diversified and become competitive. It is now recognised as a leading film festival.

In the forthcoming 10th edition, OCFF will screen films from more than 40 countries. Osian's-Cinefan continues to bring the finest films from Indian, Asian and Arab countries and to breaking down artistic hierarchies of the popular and the highbrow -to re-invent a thoughtful and creative film culture for our times.

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