Beyond Fukishima

 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

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

by

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

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

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

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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.”

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. “All my children were crying.” It is one of many demolitions; over 100,000 families have been evicted to make way for “security zones” around the Games and facilities that will mostly benefit India’s small but powerful managerial and technocratic class who, besotted with all things corporate, prefer not to be reminded that 77 per cent of their compatriots are dirt poor. 

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

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