Iraq's Electoral Cul-de-sac
By Dilip Hiro, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 29, 2005.
Starting with Saddam's arrest in 2003, each of Washington's rosy scenarios – in which a diminution of violence is predicted and a path to success declared – has turned to dust.
Iraq's National Assembly poll on Jan. 30 is already set to become but the latest in a series of "turning points" touted by the Bush administration, which in reality turn out to be cul-de-sacs. Starting with Saddam Hussein's arrest in December 2003, each of Washington's rosy scenarios – in which a diminution of violence is predicted and a path to success declared – has turned to dust. These include the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 28, 2004, the "Iraqification" of the country's security apparatus (an ongoing theme), and the recapture of Fallujah, described as the prime font of the Sunni insurgency, last November.
Instead of dampening resistance to the Anglo-American occupation, the arrest of Saddam, who was at the time still projected by Washington as the primary source of the growing insurgency, exacerbated it. With the prospect of Saddam's return to power finally dead and gone, Shiites began to focus on the latter part of a popular slogan of the time: "No, no to Saddam; No, no to America." The result – the Shiite uprisings of April 2004.
The highly publicized rushed note Condoleezza Rice slipped to President Bush at the NATO summit in Istanbul on June 28, 2004 – "Mr President, Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from [Paul] Bremer at 10:26 a.m. Iraq time" – turned into a sick joke quickly enough when Iyad Allawi, the Interim Prime Minister of "sovereign Iraq," repeatedly called in American forces to curb the guerrillas. The Pentagon's routine use of fighter-bombers and attack helicopters to strike against the insurgents in urban areas soon enough defeated its own campaign to win Iraqis' "hearts and minds."
Dismal failure also greeted – and continues to greet – Washington's claims about the successful Iraqification of local security forces. Six months of relentless efforts and constant announcements of further intensification, further speeding up of the process have so far produced only 5,000 trained and dependable Iraqi soldiers for a prospective 120,000-strong army. In the meantime, a third of the 135,000 policemen on the payrolls never even report for duty. Of those who do, only half are properly trained or armed. Time and again, instead of fighting the guerrillas, most police officers either defected or fled.
Following George Bush's re-election in early November, we were told that the Pentagon's recapture of Fallujah, the epicenter of the insurgency, would finally begin the process of ridding Iraq of the scourge of "terrorists and killers." Instead, the guerrillas scattered to different places and turned Mosul, six times more populous than Fallujah, into their new center of operations.
As we've entered 2005, the run-up to the elections has thrown into relief the long-running tensions between the traditional governing Sunni minority and the governed Shiite majority, a relationship that dates back to the absorption of Mesopotamia into the Sunni Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1638.
Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the 1914-18 World War, the British, detaching the oil-rich Kurdish region (then called Mosul Province) from Ottoman Turkey and attaching it to Mesopotamia to create modern Iraq, added an ethnic factor to the previous sectarian divide. Kurds, belonging to the Indo-European tribal family, are different from Semitic Arabs and they now form about one-sixth of the Iraqi population. Though overwhelmingly Sunni, they do not appear in the Sunni-Shiite equation because their ethnic difference from Arabs overrides their religious fellowship with Sunni Arabs.
The capture of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni and leader of the Sunni-dominated Baath Party, finally ended the 365-year-old Sunni hegemony. History shows, however, that no class, sectarian, or ethnic group gives up power without a fight; and having lost power, the former ruling group invariably tries to regain it by hook or crook. In that context, the behavior of the Sunni minority in Iraq should have been predicted.
That the ruling minority was overthrown by the United States, a foreign superpower, totally alien to Iraqis in religion, language, and culture, is what separates the Iraq situation from others. To make matters more complex, this alien invader has its own agenda – essentially, the transformation of Iraq into a client state to further its own military, strategic, diplomatic, and economic interests in the region. That is what grates on the staunch nationalism of Mesopotamians, rooted in 6,000 years of history.
This is true of Shiite as well as Sunni Mesopotamians. "We do not accept the continuation of the American troops in Iraq," said Ayatollah Abdul Aziz al Hakim, leader of the (Shiite) Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). "We regard these forces to have committed many mistakes in the handling of various issues, the first and foremost being security, which in turn has contributed to the massacres, crimes, and calamities that have taken place in Iraq against the Iraqis."
His views are echoed across the sectarian divide. Most Sunnis, whether religious or secular, are no less eager than Hakim to see the American troops depart. Polls show that two-thirds of Iraqis want the foreign soldiers to leave immediately.
The members of the two sects differ, however, about the means to be used to achieve this aim. Hakim and other Shiite leaders by and large want to participate in the Jan. 30 poll, win a majority of seats in the National Assembly, and then negotiate with the Americans for a phased withdrawal. Most Sunnis – from secular nationalists to Islamist militants – view elections conducted in a country under occupation by foreign, infidel troops as illegitimate. The call for a poll boycott has come not only from the insurgent groups but also from the Association of Muslim Scholars, which claims the affiliation of 3,000 mosques. The Iraqi Islamic Party, which had been part of the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council and the subsequent Interim Government, decided to boycott the poll when its demand for a postponement of the vote was rejected.
To deter violence on the polling day, the Election Commission has so far withheld the names of 5,600 polling centers, and the participating parties have not disclosed full lists of their candidates. While voters may be unaware of the locations of their polling centers, guerrilla groups are not. By infiltrating the Election Commission, their agents have already evidently leaked such confidential information to them. One insurgent leader in Baghdad claimed that his resistance cells had stockpiled extra amounts of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and missiles, which they had prepositioned in places where they will be able to hit the polling centers known to them.
"The Americans and Allawi insisted on having these elections to prove they are in control of Iraq," said an unnamed guerrilla leader. "We intend to prove them wrong. The resistance will intensify after the elections and will never cease until the American occupiers leave Iraq."
So the forthcoming poll will likely provide another example of the cure proving to be worse than the disease.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
People Vs. Empire
People Vs. Empire
By Arundhati Roy, In These Times. Posted December 14, 2004.
The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.
This article is adapted from "Public Power in the Age of Empire" (Seven Stories, 2004) which is based on a speech Arundhati Roy gave to the American Sociological Association in August 2004.
In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from “the people.” However, as you make your way up India’s complex social ladder, the distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate itself from the state.
In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of this distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This could be a sign of robust democracy, but unfortunately it’s a little more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn’t the Communists, it’s al Qaeda. If it isn’t Cuba, it’s Nicaragua. As a result, the most powerful nation in the world is peopled by a terrified citizenry jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.
This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S government’s Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.
To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the government from the people. Such confusion fuels anti-Americanism in the world — anti-Americanism that is seized upon and amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets. You know the routine: “Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms,” et cetera. This enhances the U.S. people’s sense of isolation, making the embrace between sarkar and public even more intimate.
Over the last few years, the “war on terrorism” has mutated into the more generic “war on terror.” Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a tired old horse that politicians have ridden into power for centuries. But could it be that ordinary people, fed up with that poor old horse, are looking for something different? Before Washington’s illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was support for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, more than 10 million people marched against the war on different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war.
We must question then: Is “democracy” still democratic? Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the actions of its sarkar?
If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terror and the logic that underlies terrorism are exactly the same. Both make ordinary citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al Qaeda made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government has made the people of Afghanistan pay in the thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people of Iraq pay in the hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein. Whose God decides which is a “just war” and which isn’t? George Bush senior once said: “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.” When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn’t need to care what the facts are, then we can be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.
Real Choices
So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist? In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. People in scores of countries around the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?
In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists of the BJP out of office. But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neoliberalism, privatization, censorship, big dams — on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism — the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the 50-year legacy of the Congress Party that prepared the ground culturally and politically for the far right.
And what of the U.S. elections? Did U.S. voters have a real choice? The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial corporate structure will be allowed through the portals of power. Given this, it’s no surprise that in this election you had two Yale University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-solider, both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who would lead the war on terror more effectively. It’s not a real choice. It’s an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they’re both owned by Procter & Gamble. The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naive. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex web of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital into and out of Third World countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions, like the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of “reform.” As a consequence of such reform, thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed; millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.
Once the free market controls the economies of the Third World they become enmeshed in an elaborate, carefully calibrated system of economic inequality. Western countries flood the markets of poorer nations with their subsidized agricultural goods and other products with which local producers cannot possibly compete. Countries that have been plundered by colonizing regimes are steeped in debt to these same powers, and have to repay them at the rate of about $382 billion a year. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer — not accidentally, but by design.
To put a vulgar point on all of this, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires in 2004 (587 “individuals and family units”), according to Forbes magazine, is $1.9 trillion — more than the gross domestic product of the world’s 135 poorest countries combined. The good news is that there are 111 more billionaires this year than there were in 2003.
Modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants’ quarters, this setup ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalization on its own.
Public Power
Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public that can link hands across national borders. A public that disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public that has set itself against the governments and institutions that support and service Empire.
Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There’s no country on God’s earth that isn’t caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars — losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is further entrench and exacerbate already existing inequalities.
Until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see themselves as victims of Empire. But now, local struggles have begun to see their role with increasing clarity. However grand it might sound, the fact is, they are confronting Empire in their own, very different ways. Differently in Iraq, in South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and differently, for that matter, on the streets of Europe and the United States.
Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neoliberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity. they have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly incorporeal enemy is now corporeal.
This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of stratigies. But they all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.
Meanwhile, the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper and the battle to control the world’s resources intensifies. Economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.
Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. The illegal invasion. The brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The rewriting of laws to allow the shameless appropriation of the country’s wealth and resources by corporations allied to the occupation. And now the charade of a sovereign “Iraqi government.”
The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle. Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct a secular, feminist, democratic, non-violent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. government and its allies to withdraw from Iraq.
Resistance across Borders
The first militant confrontation in the United States between the global justice movement and the neoliberal junta took place at the WTO conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass movements in developing countries that had long been fighting lonely, isolated battles, Seattle was the first delightful sign that people in imperialist countries shared their anger and their vision of another kind of world. As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national borders and pose a real threat, governments have developed their own strategies for dealing with them, ranging from co-optation to repression.
Three contemporary dangers confront resistance movements: the difficult meeting point between mass movements and the mass media, the hazards of the NGO-ization of resistance, and the confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states.
The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a complicated one. Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to hang about in the same place for too long. Just as a business needs cash turnover, the media need crisis turnover. Whole countries become old news, and cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper than before the light was briefly shone on them.
While governments hone the art of waiting out crises, resistance movements are increasingly ensnared in a vortex of crisis production that seeks to find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly formats. For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective at publicizing impoverishment than malnourished people in the millions.
The disturbing thing nowadays is that resistance as spectacle has cut loose from its origins in genuine civil disobedience and is becoming more symbolic than real. Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are fun and vital, but alone they are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.
If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we must liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the mundane. We must use our experience, our imagination and our art to interrogate those instruments of state that ensure “normality” remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We must expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things — food, water, shelter and dignity — such a distant dream for ordinary people. The real preemptive strike is to understand that wars are the end result of a flawed and unjust peace.
For mass resistance movements, no amount of media coverage can make up for strength on the ground. There is no alternative, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking political mobilization.
NGO-ization
A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. Some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of course do valuable work, but it’s important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.
Most large, well-funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the United Nations and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place.
Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche, they turn people into dependent victims and they blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators of the discourse — the secular missionaries of the modern world.
Eventually — on a smaller scale, but more insidiously — the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda, turning confrontation into negotiation and depoliticizing resistance.
The Cost of Violence
This brings us to a third danger: the deadly nature of the actual confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states. Between public power and the agents of Empire.
Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving from symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crackdown is merciless. We’ve seen what happened to the demonstrators in Seattle, in Miami, in Gothenburg, in Genoa.
In the United States, you have the USA Patriot Act, which has become a blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments around the world. Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution.
One does not endorse the violence of militant groups. Neither morally nor strategically. But to condemn it without first denouncing the much greater violence perpetrated by the state would be to deny the people of these regions not just their basic human rights, but even the right to a fair hearing. People who have lived in situations of conflict know that militancy and armed struggle provokes a massive escalation of violence from the state. But living as they do, in situations of unbearable injustice, can they remain silent forever?
No discussion taking place in the world today is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar.
In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to violence. No government’s condemnation of terrorism is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by nonviolent dissent. Instead, today, nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed, bought off or simply ignored.
Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media (and let’s not forget the film industry) lavish their time, attention, funds, technology and research on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified. The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.
The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq — mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods — are victims, just as much as the Iraqis, of the same horrendous process that asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.
The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly. “There’s no alternative,” they say, and let slip the dogs of war.
Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia, and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, comes the chilling reply: “There’s no alternative but terrorism.” Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.
Terrorism is vicious, ugly and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice. It’s time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons, or full-spectrum dominance, or “daisy cutters” or spurious governing councils and loya girgas can buy peace at the cost of justice.
The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others. Exactly what form that battle takes, whether it’s beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends on us.
Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi, India. She is the author of "Public Power in the Age of Empire", "The God of Small Things," and "Power Politics."
By Arundhati Roy, In These Times. Posted December 14, 2004.
The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.
This article is adapted from "Public Power in the Age of Empire" (Seven Stories, 2004) which is based on a speech Arundhati Roy gave to the American Sociological Association in August 2004.
In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from “the people.” However, as you make your way up India’s complex social ladder, the distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate itself from the state.
In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of this distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This could be a sign of robust democracy, but unfortunately it’s a little more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn’t the Communists, it’s al Qaeda. If it isn’t Cuba, it’s Nicaragua. As a result, the most powerful nation in the world is peopled by a terrified citizenry jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.
This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S government’s Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.
To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the government from the people. Such confusion fuels anti-Americanism in the world — anti-Americanism that is seized upon and amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets. You know the routine: “Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms,” et cetera. This enhances the U.S. people’s sense of isolation, making the embrace between sarkar and public even more intimate.
Over the last few years, the “war on terrorism” has mutated into the more generic “war on terror.” Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a tired old horse that politicians have ridden into power for centuries. But could it be that ordinary people, fed up with that poor old horse, are looking for something different? Before Washington’s illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was support for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, more than 10 million people marched against the war on different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war.
We must question then: Is “democracy” still democratic? Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the actions of its sarkar?
If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terror and the logic that underlies terrorism are exactly the same. Both make ordinary citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al Qaeda made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government has made the people of Afghanistan pay in the thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people of Iraq pay in the hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein. Whose God decides which is a “just war” and which isn’t? George Bush senior once said: “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.” When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn’t need to care what the facts are, then we can be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.
Real Choices
So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist? In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. People in scores of countries around the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?
In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists of the BJP out of office. But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neoliberalism, privatization, censorship, big dams — on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism — the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the 50-year legacy of the Congress Party that prepared the ground culturally and politically for the far right.
And what of the U.S. elections? Did U.S. voters have a real choice? The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial corporate structure will be allowed through the portals of power. Given this, it’s no surprise that in this election you had two Yale University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-solider, both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who would lead the war on terror more effectively. It’s not a real choice. It’s an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they’re both owned by Procter & Gamble. The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naive. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex web of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital into and out of Third World countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions, like the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of “reform.” As a consequence of such reform, thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed; millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.
Once the free market controls the economies of the Third World they become enmeshed in an elaborate, carefully calibrated system of economic inequality. Western countries flood the markets of poorer nations with their subsidized agricultural goods and other products with which local producers cannot possibly compete. Countries that have been plundered by colonizing regimes are steeped in debt to these same powers, and have to repay them at the rate of about $382 billion a year. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer — not accidentally, but by design.
To put a vulgar point on all of this, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires in 2004 (587 “individuals and family units”), according to Forbes magazine, is $1.9 trillion — more than the gross domestic product of the world’s 135 poorest countries combined. The good news is that there are 111 more billionaires this year than there were in 2003.
Modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants’ quarters, this setup ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalization on its own.
Public Power
Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public that can link hands across national borders. A public that disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public that has set itself against the governments and institutions that support and service Empire.
Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There’s no country on God’s earth that isn’t caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars — losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is further entrench and exacerbate already existing inequalities.
Until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see themselves as victims of Empire. But now, local struggles have begun to see their role with increasing clarity. However grand it might sound, the fact is, they are confronting Empire in their own, very different ways. Differently in Iraq, in South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and differently, for that matter, on the streets of Europe and the United States.
Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neoliberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity. they have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly incorporeal enemy is now corporeal.
This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of stratigies. But they all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.
Meanwhile, the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper and the battle to control the world’s resources intensifies. Economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.
Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. The illegal invasion. The brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The rewriting of laws to allow the shameless appropriation of the country’s wealth and resources by corporations allied to the occupation. And now the charade of a sovereign “Iraqi government.”
The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle. Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct a secular, feminist, democratic, non-violent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. government and its allies to withdraw from Iraq.
Resistance across Borders
The first militant confrontation in the United States between the global justice movement and the neoliberal junta took place at the WTO conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass movements in developing countries that had long been fighting lonely, isolated battles, Seattle was the first delightful sign that people in imperialist countries shared their anger and their vision of another kind of world. As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national borders and pose a real threat, governments have developed their own strategies for dealing with them, ranging from co-optation to repression.
Three contemporary dangers confront resistance movements: the difficult meeting point between mass movements and the mass media, the hazards of the NGO-ization of resistance, and the confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states.
The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a complicated one. Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to hang about in the same place for too long. Just as a business needs cash turnover, the media need crisis turnover. Whole countries become old news, and cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper than before the light was briefly shone on them.
While governments hone the art of waiting out crises, resistance movements are increasingly ensnared in a vortex of crisis production that seeks to find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly formats. For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective at publicizing impoverishment than malnourished people in the millions.
The disturbing thing nowadays is that resistance as spectacle has cut loose from its origins in genuine civil disobedience and is becoming more symbolic than real. Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are fun and vital, but alone they are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.
If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we must liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the mundane. We must use our experience, our imagination and our art to interrogate those instruments of state that ensure “normality” remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We must expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things — food, water, shelter and dignity — such a distant dream for ordinary people. The real preemptive strike is to understand that wars are the end result of a flawed and unjust peace.
For mass resistance movements, no amount of media coverage can make up for strength on the ground. There is no alternative, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking political mobilization.
NGO-ization
A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. Some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of course do valuable work, but it’s important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.
Most large, well-funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the United Nations and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place.
Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche, they turn people into dependent victims and they blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators of the discourse — the secular missionaries of the modern world.
Eventually — on a smaller scale, but more insidiously — the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda, turning confrontation into negotiation and depoliticizing resistance.
The Cost of Violence
This brings us to a third danger: the deadly nature of the actual confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states. Between public power and the agents of Empire.
Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving from symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crackdown is merciless. We’ve seen what happened to the demonstrators in Seattle, in Miami, in Gothenburg, in Genoa.
In the United States, you have the USA Patriot Act, which has become a blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments around the world. Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution.
One does not endorse the violence of militant groups. Neither morally nor strategically. But to condemn it without first denouncing the much greater violence perpetrated by the state would be to deny the people of these regions not just their basic human rights, but even the right to a fair hearing. People who have lived in situations of conflict know that militancy and armed struggle provokes a massive escalation of violence from the state. But living as they do, in situations of unbearable injustice, can they remain silent forever?
No discussion taking place in the world today is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar.
In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to violence. No government’s condemnation of terrorism is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by nonviolent dissent. Instead, today, nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed, bought off or simply ignored.
Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media (and let’s not forget the film industry) lavish their time, attention, funds, technology and research on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified. The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.
The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq — mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods — are victims, just as much as the Iraqis, of the same horrendous process that asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.
The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly. “There’s no alternative,” they say, and let slip the dogs of war.
Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia, and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, comes the chilling reply: “There’s no alternative but terrorism.” Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.
Terrorism is vicious, ugly and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice. It’s time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons, or full-spectrum dominance, or “daisy cutters” or spurious governing councils and loya girgas can buy peace at the cost of justice.
The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others. Exactly what form that battle takes, whether it’s beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends on us.
Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi, India. She is the author of "Public Power in the Age of Empire", "The God of Small Things," and "Power Politics."
Hindu nationalist Mahajan in and Uma out in Bihar campaign
Letter from Delhi: Mahajan in and Uma out in Bihar campaign
By Virendra Kapoor, Special to Gulf News
The "saffron sanyasin", Uma Bharti, known as much for her temperamental behaviour as for fire-brand oratory, was billed as the star speaker for the BJP in the on-going campaign for electing new legislatures in Bihar and Jharkhand.
Particularly in the caste-ridden polity of Bihar, the BJP leadership felt, Bharti would hold a special appeal for voters since she herself was a Lodh, a dominant intermediate caste.
But mysteriously enough just when the campaign got underway, Bharti developed chest pain and excused herself from doing the tour of duty in Bihar.
And since then wicked tongues in the party haven't stopped wagging.
For, between the official announcement of her being the chief campaigner for the BJP in Bihar and her sudden illness all that had happened was the surprise decision by the party chief, L. K. Advani, to dispatch the controversial Maharashtra BJP leader, Pramod Mahajan, to Bihar to bolster the party's campaign.
Honeymoon over
The parting of ways between the Congress party and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti is on the cards. Sooner than most people imagine. The TRS is getting impatient with the lack of progress in the formation of a separate Talangana state.
Admittedly, the poll manifesto of the Congress did promise to help create a separate Telangana state, but after coming to power the party has had second thoughts.
The recent leakage and wide publicity given to a secret Intelligence Bureau report which detailed the linkages of several TRS leaders with the Naxalite groups active in Andhra Pradesh was done at the behest of a senior Congress leader from the state.
The IB report named a couple of TRS legislators who, it said, are closely associated with the armed groups spreading mayhem in the state.
End of a career
Here is tomorrow's news today. A prominent industrialist is all set to quit the Rajya Sabha. The reason: his membership has sent a wrong message to the powers that be about his political leanings.
Indeed, he has been so keen not to cause offence to the new rulers that he hasn't been seen in public with his politician friend in a long time.
Saigal a huge draw
The legend of Kundan Lal Saigal has grown with the passage of time.
The other day the capital's favourite gathering point for bureaucrats, diplomats and visiting dons, India International Centre, scheduled a talk on Pakistan by the visiting US scholar Stephen P. Cohen of the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Also listed for the same time was a programme of musical homage to Saigal to mark his birth centenary.
Sorry to say, Cohen lost to Saigal by a huge margin. While the handful of strategic affairs analysts and retired editors heard Cohen hold forth on the current mess in Pakistan in one of the small committee rooms, fans of Saigal, who died 57 years ago, filled the auditorium to the brims with people jostling for standing room.
Pricey secrecy
Every time the top job in the country's internal and external intelligence agencies falls vacant, and there is a tussle to fill it among the handful of aspirants, charges and counter-charges against various claimants are made in anonymous letters and leaflets sent to politicians and sections of the media.
Last week, before the government finally ended the uncertainty in RAW by naming a senior Kerala cadre IPS officer as its new head, an anonymous one-page letter was in circulation making all manner of accusations against a couple of senior officers who were in the race for the top job.
There being no worthwhile audit of enormous amounts of money spent by RAW on its secret operations, the charges pertain to the misuse of funds for personal gain.
The writer is a well-known columnist
By Virendra Kapoor, Special to Gulf News
The "saffron sanyasin", Uma Bharti, known as much for her temperamental behaviour as for fire-brand oratory, was billed as the star speaker for the BJP in the on-going campaign for electing new legislatures in Bihar and Jharkhand.
Particularly in the caste-ridden polity of Bihar, the BJP leadership felt, Bharti would hold a special appeal for voters since she herself was a Lodh, a dominant intermediate caste.
But mysteriously enough just when the campaign got underway, Bharti developed chest pain and excused herself from doing the tour of duty in Bihar.
And since then wicked tongues in the party haven't stopped wagging.
For, between the official announcement of her being the chief campaigner for the BJP in Bihar and her sudden illness all that had happened was the surprise decision by the party chief, L. K. Advani, to dispatch the controversial Maharashtra BJP leader, Pramod Mahajan, to Bihar to bolster the party's campaign.
Honeymoon over
The parting of ways between the Congress party and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti is on the cards. Sooner than most people imagine. The TRS is getting impatient with the lack of progress in the formation of a separate Talangana state.
Admittedly, the poll manifesto of the Congress did promise to help create a separate Telangana state, but after coming to power the party has had second thoughts.
The recent leakage and wide publicity given to a secret Intelligence Bureau report which detailed the linkages of several TRS leaders with the Naxalite groups active in Andhra Pradesh was done at the behest of a senior Congress leader from the state.
The IB report named a couple of TRS legislators who, it said, are closely associated with the armed groups spreading mayhem in the state.
End of a career
Here is tomorrow's news today. A prominent industrialist is all set to quit the Rajya Sabha. The reason: his membership has sent a wrong message to the powers that be about his political leanings.
Indeed, he has been so keen not to cause offence to the new rulers that he hasn't been seen in public with his politician friend in a long time.
Saigal a huge draw
The legend of Kundan Lal Saigal has grown with the passage of time.
The other day the capital's favourite gathering point for bureaucrats, diplomats and visiting dons, India International Centre, scheduled a talk on Pakistan by the visiting US scholar Stephen P. Cohen of the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Also listed for the same time was a programme of musical homage to Saigal to mark his birth centenary.
Sorry to say, Cohen lost to Saigal by a huge margin. While the handful of strategic affairs analysts and retired editors heard Cohen hold forth on the current mess in Pakistan in one of the small committee rooms, fans of Saigal, who died 57 years ago, filled the auditorium to the brims with people jostling for standing room.
Pricey secrecy
Every time the top job in the country's internal and external intelligence agencies falls vacant, and there is a tussle to fill it among the handful of aspirants, charges and counter-charges against various claimants are made in anonymous letters and leaflets sent to politicians and sections of the media.
Last week, before the government finally ended the uncertainty in RAW by naming a senior Kerala cadre IPS officer as its new head, an anonymous one-page letter was in circulation making all manner of accusations against a couple of senior officers who were in the race for the top job.
There being no worthwhile audit of enormous amounts of money spent by RAW on its secret operations, the charges pertain to the misuse of funds for personal gain.
The writer is a well-known columnist
No selective arm-twisting
If nuclear transparency is demanded from Iran, the same should be applied to Israel
The recent statements by senior American and Israeli officials about Iran's nuclear capabilities seem to have been well orchestrated. They were issued in tandem and the pronouncements are so similar as to suggest the same pen formulated them.
Last Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said that in less than a year, Iran would be on its way to making a nuclear weapon.
Mofaz was repeating what Mossad chief Meir Dagan had said in an appearance before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee last Tuesday: "By the end of 2005, Iran will have reached the point of no return in its technology for manufacturing nuclear bombs. Three to four years later it will be able to build a nuclear bomb."
Mofaz went on to say that an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran could not be ruled out.
The Israeli comments went hand in hand with those echoed in Washington. Last week, and on the day that George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term, US Vice-President Dick Cheney said that Iran was "right at the top of the list" of what he described as "global trouble spots".
Cheney, too, said that Israel would most probably attack Iran.
It seems that Mofaz and Cheney are working for the same administration. Undoubtedly, the region should be free of all nuclear weapons. Iran should definitely comply with international regulations governing nuclear programmes.
And so should Israel, which has neither signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty nor allowed its activities to be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. If transparency is demanded from Iran, the same should be applied to Israel.
The real question is why tensions are being heightened now when there are serious developments taking place on two important fronts Iraq and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
The recent statements by senior American and Israeli officials about Iran's nuclear capabilities seem to have been well orchestrated. They were issued in tandem and the pronouncements are so similar as to suggest the same pen formulated them.
Last Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said that in less than a year, Iran would be on its way to making a nuclear weapon.
Mofaz was repeating what Mossad chief Meir Dagan had said in an appearance before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee last Tuesday: "By the end of 2005, Iran will have reached the point of no return in its technology for manufacturing nuclear bombs. Three to four years later it will be able to build a nuclear bomb."
Mofaz went on to say that an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran could not be ruled out.
The Israeli comments went hand in hand with those echoed in Washington. Last week, and on the day that George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term, US Vice-President Dick Cheney said that Iran was "right at the top of the list" of what he described as "global trouble spots".
Cheney, too, said that Israel would most probably attack Iran.
It seems that Mofaz and Cheney are working for the same administration. Undoubtedly, the region should be free of all nuclear weapons. Iran should definitely comply with international regulations governing nuclear programmes.
And so should Israel, which has neither signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty nor allowed its activities to be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. If transparency is demanded from Iran, the same should be applied to Israel.
The real question is why tensions are being heightened now when there are serious developments taking place on two important fronts Iraq and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
HEY RAM !
Hey Ram!Khushwant Singh
We celebrate Bapu Gandhi’s birthday (2nd October) and we pay homage to his memory on anniversaries of his martyrdom on January 30. Of the two the one of greater significance is the latter because it sums up our failures: we let him down in the most critical years in our fight for freedom.
He had to pay the price for our deserting him. He stuck to principles he had preached all through his life. The best way of paying him tribute on Shahidi Divas is to hang our heads in shame, crave his forgiveness and vow to fight forces of hatred whenever and wherever they raise their ugly heads.
Before I pontificate to others, allow me to present my credentials. I am a Gandhian of sorts. I do not subscribe to all that Bapu Gandhi stood for. He preached vegetarianism, celibacy and total abstention from alcohol: I am not a vegetarian; I enjoy alcoholic drinks and frown upon celibacy as being contrary to human nature. Nevertheless I am proud to describe myself as a Gandhi chela. For me there is no contradiction between rejecting some of his tenets as of trivial importance and accepting others as guiding principles of life.
I have evolved for myself my own way of analysing events and judging people which I recommend for the consideration of my readers. When an event takes place I ask myself: "How would Bapu Gandhi react to this?" Likewise when I hear or read speeches delivered by our readers I ask: "Would Bapu Gandhi have approved of what this man or woman is saying?"
Once you use Gandhi as your guide to get a balanced view of events and judging people, you have no problem in deciding what is right and what is not. I used him to judge Bhindranwale when he made hateful utterances against the Hindus; I used him when Advani carried out his rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya. I used him to make my assessment of the likes of Uma Bharti, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sadhvi Rithambara, Singhal Togadia, Narendra Modi, Sushma Swaraj and some others. And I disapprove of them because I feel it in my guts that Bapu Gandhi would approve of my disapproval.
We celebrate Bapu Gandhi’s birthday (2nd October) and we pay homage to his memory on anniversaries of his martyrdom on January 30. Of the two the one of greater significance is the latter because it sums up our failures: we let him down in the most critical years in our fight for freedom.
He had to pay the price for our deserting him. He stuck to principles he had preached all through his life. The best way of paying him tribute on Shahidi Divas is to hang our heads in shame, crave his forgiveness and vow to fight forces of hatred whenever and wherever they raise their ugly heads.
Before I pontificate to others, allow me to present my credentials. I am a Gandhian of sorts. I do not subscribe to all that Bapu Gandhi stood for. He preached vegetarianism, celibacy and total abstention from alcohol: I am not a vegetarian; I enjoy alcoholic drinks and frown upon celibacy as being contrary to human nature. Nevertheless I am proud to describe myself as a Gandhi chela. For me there is no contradiction between rejecting some of his tenets as of trivial importance and accepting others as guiding principles of life.
I have evolved for myself my own way of analysing events and judging people which I recommend for the consideration of my readers. When an event takes place I ask myself: "How would Bapu Gandhi react to this?" Likewise when I hear or read speeches delivered by our readers I ask: "Would Bapu Gandhi have approved of what this man or woman is saying?"
Once you use Gandhi as your guide to get a balanced view of events and judging people, you have no problem in deciding what is right and what is not. I used him to judge Bhindranwale when he made hateful utterances against the Hindus; I used him when Advani carried out his rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya. I used him to make my assessment of the likes of Uma Bharti, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sadhvi Rithambara, Singhal Togadia, Narendra Modi, Sushma Swaraj and some others. And I disapprove of them because I feel it in my guts that Bapu Gandhi would approve of my disapproval.
Three day INP(BJP) conclave begins
GUWAHATI, Jan 28: The three-day conclave of the State unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party began here today to gear up the preparations of the party for the ensuing Assembly elections of 2006 and strengthen its organizational set-up. On the first today, the office-bearers of the party went into a huddle and discussed the issues to be raised during the election campaign for the forthcoming polls in the State. Assam BJP Central observer SS Ahluwalia, BJP national general secretary (organization) Sanjay Joshi, BJP North-east organizational in-charge V Satish, State BJP president Indramani Bora, BJP MPs of the State Rajen Gohain and Narayan Barkataki, BJP State Legislature Party leader Bimalangshu Roy, BJP MLAs and other office-bearers of the party attended the meeting today.
Party sources said that the office-bearers’ meeting would be followed by the meetings of the State executive and the State council of the party, slated for tomorrow and the day after respectively. This is the first major meet of the State unit of the party after LK Advani took over as the BJP national president, the sources said, adding that the conclave is likely to chalk out a major strategy to improve the electoral prospects of the party in the State.
Other issues taken up for discussion in today’s meeting were the burning problems of the State, the alleged failure of the Congress Government in the State to maintain law and order, the organizational set-up down to the grassroot level, the repeal of the IM(DT) Act, possibility of poll tie-ups with like-minded parties and spread of awareness about the reported ISI activities in the State, party sources said. A detailed strategy will be formulated after the State executive and council meet on January 29 and 30 to build on these issues, the sources added. It may be mentioned here that the chintan baithak of the BJP is scheduled in February.
Will this meeting of hindu nationalist bring some new formula of how to kill inocent indian muslim citizen or will think of how to sell all its resourse to their mantors .
Party sources said that the office-bearers’ meeting would be followed by the meetings of the State executive and the State council of the party, slated for tomorrow and the day after respectively. This is the first major meet of the State unit of the party after LK Advani took over as the BJP national president, the sources said, adding that the conclave is likely to chalk out a major strategy to improve the electoral prospects of the party in the State.
Other issues taken up for discussion in today’s meeting were the burning problems of the State, the alleged failure of the Congress Government in the State to maintain law and order, the organizational set-up down to the grassroot level, the repeal of the IM(DT) Act, possibility of poll tie-ups with like-minded parties and spread of awareness about the reported ISI activities in the State, party sources said. A detailed strategy will be formulated after the State executive and council meet on January 29 and 30 to build on these issues, the sources added. It may be mentioned here that the chintan baithak of the BJP is scheduled in February.
Will this meeting of hindu nationalist bring some new formula of how to kill inocent indian muslim citizen or will think of how to sell all its resourse to their mantors .
Excavations show NE had ties with china - A big blow to the face of hindu fanatic brahmins
Excavations show NE had ties with China , what will the hindu fanatic brahmin have to say
Guwahati, Jan 28 (PTI): A professor of Gauhati University has claimed to have found evidence of palaeolithic culture which has thrown light on the prehistory of the State linking it to South-east Asia and China.
Prof Dilip Medhi who worked for years in the State says Mizoram can boast of its prehistoric status with the discovery of evidence of the palaeolithic culture.
Medhi says in his findings that there was plenty of authenticating evidence of human migration from South-east Asia and China to the North-east and to other mainland.
He also says that the NE had relations with China and South-east Asia and that neolithic shouldered celts were found in North Cachar Hills of Assam and in 1964, again in Kamrup district and also at Parse Parlo in Arunachal Pradesh.
Medhi said that according to the findings, Mizoram can boast of three major cultural ties with South-east Asia which are the palaeolithic, neolithic and megalithic.
He revealed that three massive choppers including few of the tools came to his hand whose appearance provides a connection of Mizoram to the palaeolithic "Anyathian" culture in the Yeraadi valley of Myanmar.
The American South-east Asiatic Expedition of 1937-38 had first explored paleolithic sites in upper Burma (now Myanmar) which was called the Anyathian culture.
One remarkable feature about the culture is that there was no handaxes which are commonly found among Western palaeolithics with three most characteristic implements, the chopper, chopping tool and hand axe.
Medhi said that one of the three choppers discovered at Champhai typically resembles a chopper discovered at Tengnoupal district of Manipur.
The Manipur chopper, he said, currently housed in the Manipur State Museum, has a relation with the similar chopper found in Banganga in Himachal Pradesh.
An excavation would be conducted at the place of occurrence of the choppers in March 2005 including resolving many issues in the prehistory of South-east Asia and South Asia, Medhi said.
The present-day metallic hoes and axes used in the jhum (shifting) cultivation and in splitting firewood respectively do resemble a neolithic celt, Medhi claimed.
"The discovery in Mizoram does establish a close relation to the Anyathian palaeolithic in Myanmar and therefore it proves beyond doubt that the Anyathian culture of the Yerawadi valley of Myanmar extended to Mizoram with a possibility of further extension to Tripura and may be Bangladesh", Medhi said.
"The monoliths representing megalithic culture of Mizoram has a definite proof of migration of this tradition from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar which passes through North-east India and entered into mainland India via Bangladesh", he said.
Guwahati, Jan 28 (PTI): A professor of Gauhati University has claimed to have found evidence of palaeolithic culture which has thrown light on the prehistory of the State linking it to South-east Asia and China.
Prof Dilip Medhi who worked for years in the State says Mizoram can boast of its prehistoric status with the discovery of evidence of the palaeolithic culture.
Medhi says in his findings that there was plenty of authenticating evidence of human migration from South-east Asia and China to the North-east and to other mainland.
He also says that the NE had relations with China and South-east Asia and that neolithic shouldered celts were found in North Cachar Hills of Assam and in 1964, again in Kamrup district and also at Parse Parlo in Arunachal Pradesh.
Medhi said that according to the findings, Mizoram can boast of three major cultural ties with South-east Asia which are the palaeolithic, neolithic and megalithic.
He revealed that three massive choppers including few of the tools came to his hand whose appearance provides a connection of Mizoram to the palaeolithic "Anyathian" culture in the Yeraadi valley of Myanmar.
The American South-east Asiatic Expedition of 1937-38 had first explored paleolithic sites in upper Burma (now Myanmar) which was called the Anyathian culture.
One remarkable feature about the culture is that there was no handaxes which are commonly found among Western palaeolithics with three most characteristic implements, the chopper, chopping tool and hand axe.
Medhi said that one of the three choppers discovered at Champhai typically resembles a chopper discovered at Tengnoupal district of Manipur.
The Manipur chopper, he said, currently housed in the Manipur State Museum, has a relation with the similar chopper found in Banganga in Himachal Pradesh.
An excavation would be conducted at the place of occurrence of the choppers in March 2005 including resolving many issues in the prehistory of South-east Asia and South Asia, Medhi said.
The present-day metallic hoes and axes used in the jhum (shifting) cultivation and in splitting firewood respectively do resemble a neolithic celt, Medhi claimed.
"The discovery in Mizoram does establish a close relation to the Anyathian palaeolithic in Myanmar and therefore it proves beyond doubt that the Anyathian culture of the Yerawadi valley of Myanmar extended to Mizoram with a possibility of further extension to Tripura and may be Bangladesh", Medhi said.
"The monoliths representing megalithic culture of Mizoram has a definite proof of migration of this tradition from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar which passes through North-east India and entered into mainland India via Bangladesh", he said.
Kamrup DC A K Absar Hazarika , S P Nath transferred and a bangali have been appointed
GUWAHATI, Jan 27– The State Government this evening transferred the Deputy Commissioner, Kamrup (Metropolitan) AK Absar Hazarika and city Superintendent of Police HC Nath following the two blasts at the Judges Field, which marred the Republic Day celebrations yesterday. The Government decision came after a meeting of the Council of Ministers.Official sources said that the State Government today decided to upgrade the post of Superintendent of Police, Guwahati city to Senior Superintendent of Police and Vijay Ramisetti, IPS, has been posted as the first SSP of the city. Ramisetti is now serving as the Superintendent of Police, Kokrajhar. The city will have two Superintendents of Police under the SSP. Jitmal Doley has been posted as the SP, Special Operations unit of the city, while, Luis Aind will be the SP, Traffic of Guwahati. The city SP, HC Nath, has been transferred as the SP of Special Branch.The Government also transferred the Deputy Commissioner, Kamrup (Metropolitan) AK Absar Hazarika as the joint secretary of the Home Department and Kamrup Deputy Commissioner Samir Sinha will take his place. Gautam Ganguli has been posted as the Kamrup Deputy Commissioner.Earlier this afternoon,Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi admitted that there might be security lapses which enabled the ultras to trigger off two blasts at the Judges Field during the Republic Day celebrations yesterday and hinted at reorganisation of the police force.Addressing a press conference at the Janata Bhawan here today, the Chief Minister said that Additional Director General of Police, CID, Sankar Baruah has been directed to inquire into the incident and he would submit his report tomorrow. He asserted that the Government would take action against all those found guilty for the lapses if any immediately after receiving the report. When asked whether it was an assassination attempt on him, the Chief Minister said, “Nothing can be ruled out.”Gogoi admitted that the State Police force does not have the equipment required to detect bombs planted deep on the ground and hoped that the Government of India would provide such equipment in the near future. He also said that withdrawal of security forces for elections in other States also posed a problem for the Government. However, he refused to admit that the Government failed to maintain law-and-order and said, “No intelligence or security measure is foolproof. Even an advanced country like America failed to prevent ultras’ strikes.” He said that the militants are changing their methods frequently and the security forces would have to change tactics accordingly to prevent the militants from carrying out any subversive activity.The Chief Minister tried to justify his claim of improvement of the law-and-order situation, and said that the number of civilians killed during the tenure of the present Government is much less than the number of persons killed during the tenure of the AGP Government. He also claimed that the improvement of the economy of the State is a pointer towards the improvement of the law-and-order situation. Replying to a question, he admitted that there were suggestions for not allowing the Judges Field to be used for fairs, he said that sometimes the administration has to accept demands and pressure from various corners. He said that the Government has decided to take over the field from the district administration.Reacting to the demand from the AGP for his resignation, the Chief Minister said: “Why should I resign? I still enjoy the support of the people of Assam.” He alleged that the AGP joined hands with the ULFA by asking the people to boycott the Republic Day celebrations but the people of Assam rejected their call. He said that on one hand, the AGP asked the people to boycott the Republic Day celebrations and on the other hand the party president Brindaban Goswami attended the celebrations at the Judges Field. He further alleged that Goswami tried to create panic among the people after the blasts instead of pacifying the
Thursday, January 27, 2005
WHY AM I IN POWER
‘Why Am I in Power?’
M.J. Akbar, mjakbar@asianage.com
Last year Dr. Manmohan Singh was fortunate. This year will determine whether he will be successful. All successful men require a degree of good fortune. But all fortunate men are not necessarily successful. Fortune opens at least one door through which you can depart from the predictable trajectory of life and enter the realm of the memorable. Success comes when you can sustain the memorable.
Dr.. Manmohan Singh has used his first two hundred days in office to sustain his personal reputation. This is good news. He has not changed from the person we discovered when P.V. Narasimha Rao made him finance minister. His central virtue remains integrity. The country has responded warmly and his stock has been rising at a very Manmohan pace: Steadily. He must of course be aware of inherent dangers. The biggest is that of high expectations, for integrity is much more than financial honesty. It extends to intellectual and moral integrity. The disappointment therefore will be far higher if he is ever seen to succumb to the traditional political demands of obsequiousness or compromise beyond a common sense-level.
The common sense-level can be identified by an application of common sense. No one expects him to risk his government by measuring Lalu Yadav or Shibu Soren by the yardsticks of the Prophet Moses (“Thou shalt not steal” etc.). And yet, it will hurt his image, and do so soon, if he gives the impression of being impotent. He may not be the moral arbiter of past sins, but there must be no sin under his watch.
The question that Dr. Singh will have to answer this year, and the sooner the better, is simple, basic and vital. Why is he in power? He may have come to power by accident but he cannot remain in power by accident. Power can be sustained only by a defined purpose. What is that purpose?
It cannot be yesterday’s purpose. He cannot become prime minister in order to become better finance minister. The story of economic reforms is not over. Much remains to be done, and doubtless will be done in either micro or macro leaps, depending on opportunity, ability and the vagaries of coalition politics. But the fact is that economic reform is yesterday’s story, begun by Rao and given a bipartisan dimension by Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Dr. Manmohan Singh cannot be in power as a holding operation while the Congress rearranges its leadership options. That, apart from being the waste of opportunity, would reduce him to being in office rather than being in power. The difference is obvious. Gulzarilal Nanda, Charan Singh, I.K. Gujral and Deve Gowda were in office. Each was removed, in a matter of days or months, before he could come to power. Others found their own route maps to legitimacy. Rajiv Gandhi inherited the office through a national tragedy. He acquired credibility through a general election. A quirk of politics and the inflexibility of Morarji Desai made Indira Gandhi prime minister. Her road to credibility was perhaps the most difficult of all. Vajpayee was merely in office until a paradoxical defeat on the floor of the Lok Sabha opened the door of victory in the general elections of 1999. You can also begin by being in power and end up being in office, as Morarji Desai did between 1977 and 1979. This is the potential nightmare that Dr. Singh must beware of.
If Dr. Singh wants to lead India, rather than merely govern the country for whatever period God has placed in his destiny, then he must address the theme question: “Why am I Prime Minister?” He needs to formulate an answer with depth and sufficient length to stretch for five years. When he has formulated it, he needs to let us know what it is.
For in that answer will lie the hinge of his credibility. Power is a curious animal. It comes to life only when it has been injected with credibility. Power is not the ability to give orders, whether you are sergeant major or prime minister. Any fool can give orders, and lots of fools do. Power is the ability to get those orders obeyed. That is why power is best sustained by wisdom and dissipates so easily with arrogance. Dr. Manmohan Singh can never be accused of arrogance. His modesty is one of his fundamental assets. But he might want to check out the humility levels of some of those who speak in his name.
Neither is power static. If it does not sweep forward like a tide, it ebbs. The pace in either direction is slow and often invisible when the protective screens of office surround you, making the obvious invisible. You can take it as a law: When there is no progress, there is definitely regress. The forward momentum of power is propelled by the search of a new horizon. Which is the horizon toward which Dr. Singh wants to take his country? What are the new realities that will be his legacy, his memorial, and his raison d’кtre for having been prime minister of India?
Dr. Manmohan Singh is a good man, but being good is not good enough. Nor is it necessary to be a missionary in order to have a mission. As I noted, the laws of Moses can be left to the domain of Moses. And yet every prime minister needs to define the Promised Land toward which he is leading his people.
In an interesting departure from image, Dr. Singh opened the New Year with a significant political ploy. He was in Bengal, the fortress of his principal ally, the Marxists. Using a remarkable blend, as delicate as the finest Darjeeling tea, in a tone not quite casual and not quite definitive, the prime minister invited Mamta Banerjee, the left’s greatest adversary, not only back into the Congress but also back into the Union Cabinet. The second part of the perfectly nuanced offer was even more significant than the first, and gave the lie to those who believe that our economics-driven prime minister does not understand politics or political maneuver. It was a signal from a lighthouse that did a 360-degree turn, throwing beams in every direction.
Mamta Banerjee does not have MPs, so Dr. Singh was not adding to his Parliamentary score. His sharpest signal was aimed twelve months into the future, at the Bengal elections of early 2006. It was an assertion that the Congress was not ready to live in the margins of Bengal in order to appease the Marxists. The party in Bengal, in other words, would not be hostage to the coalition in Delhi. This is a legitimate horizon. The danger of coalition politics as it has emerged with the formation of the present government is that it threatens to reduce the Congress to a tattered and sporadic force in Indian politics, picking up seats where it can, rather than a cogent national party.
There are serious implications for India’s polity if the Congress remains a marginal player, unable to consolidate or grow, for if the next general elections are held, as due, in 2009, the party could be further weakened by the lash of anti-incumbency.
That would mean that of the two national political formations, the Congress and the BJP, neither is expanding and both are conceding space to regional forces. Today the two coalitions have a center around which they can circulate. If that center weakens beyond a point, the nature of coalition politics will change.
As prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh must use power to chart a road map for his party. But that is only part of his mission. His substantive contribution has to be to create an agenda for every Indian. It cannot be a multipolar agenda that stinks of unachievability and is therefore dismissed as familiar political hypocrisy.
What could be his core mission? I could of course name a few of the great unfinished tasks of the Indian nation state: The abolition of poverty and illiteracy, or the creation of peace with Pakistan, and there would be nothing new in them for we still have not had a prime minister who promised to increase poverty or to incite war with Pakistan (do not rule the second out, though, for hysteria has many lovers). Such noble intentions as the creation of national wealth have been ill-served by lip service.
If one expected the same from Dr. Manmohan Singh, I would not have wasted time asking the core question. It is not where we want to go that is the question, but how we will reach there, and how soon. The time has come for an answer. The answer can only come from the prime minister of India. As far as we are concerned: Well, we also serve who only stand and wait.
Madrasas in India
Madrasas in India Modernizing Curriculum
Syed Abdul Aziz Shamshoddin, Arab News
JEDDAH, 19 January 2005 — An educational revolution is taking place in India. Increasingly, madrasas that confined themselves to religious education have moved to acquire licenses for technical and medical institutes. The idea is to enable a madrasa student to get to grip with modern education and help him land a job in India’s highly competitive job market.
One such institution is the Jamia Islamia Ishaatul Uloom. Based in Akkalkuwa in rural Maharashtra, it was established by Maulana Ghulam Muhammad Vastanvi and his team of devoted teachers in 1980. In all there are nearly 6000 students in the institutions managed by the Jamia — nearly 4,000 students in Islamic study center and 2,000 in various other institutions. They are staying in a hostel provided by the Jamia.
Jamia Islamia Ishaatul Uloom, Akalkova is an important and significant part of the series of centers of Islamic as well as modern technology education started by Maulana Vastanvi. This institution has been functioning for the last 23 years. It draws students from all over India. The area of its operations covers 16 Indian states.
This institution was started in the form of a small madrasa. Now it has eight different faculties including Islamic Study Center, a medical college, pharmacy college, industrial training center, polytechnic college, D.Ed/P.T.C College and hospital.
So far 1065 students have graduated in different educational fields. Jamia also receives active cooperation of village residents and has established more than 862 Makatabs in 46 districts in different states of India.
The Jamia has a library containing about 45,000 books on various subjects and topics in different languages.
Jamia also undertakes social service activities. In poverty stricken areas, it has provided 765 tube wells and drilled 900 wells in 1665 villages and solved drinking water problems in 33 remote villages.
Madrasas and other educational faculties have no independent or continuous source of income; they are able to function only because of the cooperation and financial assistance from the general public.
The Jamia offers free lodging and boarding including various scholarships to orphans and poor students.
According to Maulana Gulam Mohammad Vastanvi, who commands considerable following in Gujarat and Maharashtra, recent events in the country are not the end of the road for Indian Muslims.
“A large body of secular Hindus in the English media, the judiciary and the government have taken up the case of Indian Muslims,” Maulana who is here to perform Haj, said. “It is now the duty of Muslims to strengthen the hand of these peace-loving Hindus,” he added.
Syed Abdul Aziz Shamshoddin, Arab News
JEDDAH, 19 January 2005 — An educational revolution is taking place in India. Increasingly, madrasas that confined themselves to religious education have moved to acquire licenses for technical and medical institutes. The idea is to enable a madrasa student to get to grip with modern education and help him land a job in India’s highly competitive job market.
One such institution is the Jamia Islamia Ishaatul Uloom. Based in Akkalkuwa in rural Maharashtra, it was established by Maulana Ghulam Muhammad Vastanvi and his team of devoted teachers in 1980. In all there are nearly 6000 students in the institutions managed by the Jamia — nearly 4,000 students in Islamic study center and 2,000 in various other institutions. They are staying in a hostel provided by the Jamia.
Jamia Islamia Ishaatul Uloom, Akalkova is an important and significant part of the series of centers of Islamic as well as modern technology education started by Maulana Vastanvi. This institution has been functioning for the last 23 years. It draws students from all over India. The area of its operations covers 16 Indian states.
This institution was started in the form of a small madrasa. Now it has eight different faculties including Islamic Study Center, a medical college, pharmacy college, industrial training center, polytechnic college, D.Ed/P.T.C College and hospital.
So far 1065 students have graduated in different educational fields. Jamia also receives active cooperation of village residents and has established more than 862 Makatabs in 46 districts in different states of India.
The Jamia has a library containing about 45,000 books on various subjects and topics in different languages.
Jamia also undertakes social service activities. In poverty stricken areas, it has provided 765 tube wells and drilled 900 wells in 1665 villages and solved drinking water problems in 33 remote villages.
Madrasas and other educational faculties have no independent or continuous source of income; they are able to function only because of the cooperation and financial assistance from the general public.
The Jamia offers free lodging and boarding including various scholarships to orphans and poor students.
According to Maulana Gulam Mohammad Vastanvi, who commands considerable following in Gujarat and Maharashtra, recent events in the country are not the end of the road for Indian Muslims.
“A large body of secular Hindus in the English media, the judiciary and the government have taken up the case of Indian Muslims,” Maulana who is here to perform Haj, said. “It is now the duty of Muslims to strengthen the hand of these peace-loving Hindus,” he added.
Violence Mars India's Republic Day Celebrations
Violence Mars India’s Republic Day Celebrations
Nilofar Suhrawardy & Agencies
NEW DELHI, 27 January 2005 — India showcased yesterday its military might and cultural diversity at its annual Republic Day parade amid high security, but celebrations were marred by violence in the country’s revolt-hit northeast.
Troops killed at least 10 civilians near Guwahati, the main city in Assam, after being attacked by a mob as they searched for rebels they believed were planning to target Republic Day functions, police said.
Soldiers fired on a crowd of about 5,000 people after they attacked the troops with knives, sticks and stones in the village of Hajo on the outskirts of Guwahati, the region’s main city.
Troops had gone there to hunt for guerrillas believed to be hiding there. “They thought the militants were in the crowd, but finally when local police identified the bodies, they turned out to be villagers. There were no militants among the victims,” said Police Inspector General Khagen Sharma. Hundreds of policemen have since been sent to the village to prevent more violence, another police officer said.
Two blasts also shook a heavily guarded Republic Day function in Guwahati, injuring at least two policemen, police said.
Police blamed the blasts, that occurred as state Governor Ajai Singh was about to unfurl India’s national flag, on the outlawed United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) which has been fighting for decades for an Assamese homeland. A third blast occurred in the western Bongaigaon district near other Republic Day celebrations but there were no casualties.
The biggest official holiday of the year is traditionally a key target for scores of Indian rebel groups who reject the day as a symbol of the Indian government’s unwanted dominance.
In the capital, New Delhi, a tight security cordon was thrown around the eight-kilometer parade venue as thousands watched the events despite a biting winter chill and millions more watched live on television.
Tens of thousands of security personnel were deployed, with roadblocks at intersections and the city center closed to traffic.
President Abdul Kalam took the salute on the Rajpath or King’s Way, with Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck the chief guest. The monarch was said to be on a hit list of India’s northeastern rebels after his soldiers ousted them from border camps in his Himalayan outpost.
Security forces were on watch for a lone sniper suspected to be a member of the ULFA, whom police feared may have sneaked into New Delhi. Buildings along the parade route were taken over by security personnel.
India rolled out its military hardware, including the BrahMos cruise missile built by India and Russia, and the nuclear-capable surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, Prithvi and Agni.
Representatives of the 1.1 million-strong armed forces were on show and colorful floats and folk dances highlighted India’s cultural diversity. The parade, marking India’s becoming a republic in 1950, followed a yearlong tentative peace process with Pakistan. The nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars, two over disputed Kashmir.
“I sincerely hope our two countries would be able to resolve all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, peacefully,” said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in a message to Kalam.
Hundreds of people took to the streets in Pakistan’s zone of Kashmir yesterday to observe India’s Republic Day as a black day, officials and witnesses said.
Waving black flags and banners emblazoned with anti-India slogans, the protesters paraded through Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir. “Down with India,” cried the demonstrators as they marched to the United Nations office in the city, where they called on the world body to pressure India to stop alleged atrocities in its part of Kashmir.
Nilofar Suhrawardy & Agencies
NEW DELHI, 27 January 2005 — India showcased yesterday its military might and cultural diversity at its annual Republic Day parade amid high security, but celebrations were marred by violence in the country’s revolt-hit northeast.
Troops killed at least 10 civilians near Guwahati, the main city in Assam, after being attacked by a mob as they searched for rebels they believed were planning to target Republic Day functions, police said.
Soldiers fired on a crowd of about 5,000 people after they attacked the troops with knives, sticks and stones in the village of Hajo on the outskirts of Guwahati, the region’s main city.
Troops had gone there to hunt for guerrillas believed to be hiding there. “They thought the militants were in the crowd, but finally when local police identified the bodies, they turned out to be villagers. There were no militants among the victims,” said Police Inspector General Khagen Sharma. Hundreds of policemen have since been sent to the village to prevent more violence, another police officer said.
Two blasts also shook a heavily guarded Republic Day function in Guwahati, injuring at least two policemen, police said.
Police blamed the blasts, that occurred as state Governor Ajai Singh was about to unfurl India’s national flag, on the outlawed United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) which has been fighting for decades for an Assamese homeland. A third blast occurred in the western Bongaigaon district near other Republic Day celebrations but there were no casualties.
The biggest official holiday of the year is traditionally a key target for scores of Indian rebel groups who reject the day as a symbol of the Indian government’s unwanted dominance.
In the capital, New Delhi, a tight security cordon was thrown around the eight-kilometer parade venue as thousands watched the events despite a biting winter chill and millions more watched live on television.
Tens of thousands of security personnel were deployed, with roadblocks at intersections and the city center closed to traffic.
President Abdul Kalam took the salute on the Rajpath or King’s Way, with Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck the chief guest. The monarch was said to be on a hit list of India’s northeastern rebels after his soldiers ousted them from border camps in his Himalayan outpost.
Security forces were on watch for a lone sniper suspected to be a member of the ULFA, whom police feared may have sneaked into New Delhi. Buildings along the parade route were taken over by security personnel.
India rolled out its military hardware, including the BrahMos cruise missile built by India and Russia, and the nuclear-capable surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, Prithvi and Agni.
Representatives of the 1.1 million-strong armed forces were on show and colorful floats and folk dances highlighted India’s cultural diversity. The parade, marking India’s becoming a republic in 1950, followed a yearlong tentative peace process with Pakistan. The nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars, two over disputed Kashmir.
“I sincerely hope our two countries would be able to resolve all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, peacefully,” said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in a message to Kalam.
Hundreds of people took to the streets in Pakistan’s zone of Kashmir yesterday to observe India’s Republic Day as a black day, officials and witnesses said.
Waving black flags and banners emblazoned with anti-India slogans, the protesters paraded through Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir. “Down with India,” cried the demonstrators as they marched to the United Nations office in the city, where they called on the world body to pressure India to stop alleged atrocities in its part of Kashmir.
Sending Fighters To Iraq Not Terror : Italian Judge
Sending Fighters to Iraq not Terror: Italian Judge
The Italian judge said that resistance US occupation forces in Iraq by sending fighters does not amount to terror. (Reuters)
MILAN, January 26 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – An Italian judge has dropped charges of terrorism against five Arab citizens accused of sending fighters to Iraq to resist the US occupation forces, a ruling that drew fire from the pro-US Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi.
Judge Clementina Forleo said Monday, January 24, in documents seen by Reuters that there was no concrete evidence the four Tunisians and one Moroccan were involved in anything beyond what might be considered as “guerrilla” activities.
“Historically, the activity of the cells in question coincided with the United States’ attack on Iraq,” Reuters quoted a statement explaining Forleo's judgment.
“Numerous intercepted conversations refer to that event, and to the need to stem as much as possible its foreseeable negative impact by helping the ‘brothers’ in the conflict zone, either economically or by sending combatants to strengthen their armed groups.
“It has not been proven that these paramilitary structures provided for concrete programs with targets exceeding guerrilla activity,” the missive added.
The five Arab citizens were arrested last year under a law introduced after the September 11 attacks on charges of sending fighters to war-torn Iraq and planning attacks in Europe.
But the judge said there was no evidence of planning attacks in Europe and that sending fighters or funds to Iraq did not amount to terrorism.
Italy has a 3,000-strong contingent including ground troops, pilots along with three naval ships and 40 Red Cross volunteers in occupied Iraq.
Poor Evidence
The Italian judge said much of the submitted evidence against the five men were of very poor quality and relied on intelligence reports rather than hard evidence.
Forleo sentenced Bouyahia Maher and Ali Ben Sassi Toumi to three years and Mohammed Daki to 22 months in jail for trading forged documents, a sentence far less than the prison terms of up to 10 years prosecutors had requested.
Dirissi Noureddine and Kamel Hamraoui were referred by the Italian judge to another court because of a question of regional jurisdiction.
Forleo's ruling drew a strong reaction from the Italian government with Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini saying the judgment was a “shameless distortion of a reality that is under the eyes of the entire world.”
“To say in the ruling that 'in the conflict in question all armed actors have used instruments with an extremely high offensive potential' means you are placing the victims and the butchers on the same level,” Fini said in a statement.
Forleo's decision also prompted outrage from the Italian mass media and newspapers.
The La Stampa newspaper ran a blistering editorial with an English-language headline “Clementina Go Home,” blasting the judge for being unpatriotic.
The Dublin-based International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS) has ruled that resisting occupation troops in Iraq was a “duty” on able Muslims in and outside the country and that aiding the occupier was impermissible.
On the indiscriminate attacks that claim the lives of innocent civilians, the IAMS asked resistance fighters not to target women, children and the elderly even if they were of the occupiers’ nationalities.
A cohort of prominent Saudi scholars have further defended resistance against the occupation forces in Iraq as a legitimate right, prohibiting cooperation with the occupiers and collaboration against resistance groups.
The Italian judge said that resistance US occupation forces in Iraq by sending fighters does not amount to terror. (Reuters)
MILAN, January 26 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – An Italian judge has dropped charges of terrorism against five Arab citizens accused of sending fighters to Iraq to resist the US occupation forces, a ruling that drew fire from the pro-US Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi.
Judge Clementina Forleo said Monday, January 24, in documents seen by Reuters that there was no concrete evidence the four Tunisians and one Moroccan were involved in anything beyond what might be considered as “guerrilla” activities.
“Historically, the activity of the cells in question coincided with the United States’ attack on Iraq,” Reuters quoted a statement explaining Forleo's judgment.
“Numerous intercepted conversations refer to that event, and to the need to stem as much as possible its foreseeable negative impact by helping the ‘brothers’ in the conflict zone, either economically or by sending combatants to strengthen their armed groups.
“It has not been proven that these paramilitary structures provided for concrete programs with targets exceeding guerrilla activity,” the missive added.
The five Arab citizens were arrested last year under a law introduced after the September 11 attacks on charges of sending fighters to war-torn Iraq and planning attacks in Europe.
But the judge said there was no evidence of planning attacks in Europe and that sending fighters or funds to Iraq did not amount to terrorism.
Italy has a 3,000-strong contingent including ground troops, pilots along with three naval ships and 40 Red Cross volunteers in occupied Iraq.
Poor Evidence
The Italian judge said much of the submitted evidence against the five men were of very poor quality and relied on intelligence reports rather than hard evidence.
Forleo sentenced Bouyahia Maher and Ali Ben Sassi Toumi to three years and Mohammed Daki to 22 months in jail for trading forged documents, a sentence far less than the prison terms of up to 10 years prosecutors had requested.
Dirissi Noureddine and Kamel Hamraoui were referred by the Italian judge to another court because of a question of regional jurisdiction.
Forleo's ruling drew a strong reaction from the Italian government with Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini saying the judgment was a “shameless distortion of a reality that is under the eyes of the entire world.”
“To say in the ruling that 'in the conflict in question all armed actors have used instruments with an extremely high offensive potential' means you are placing the victims and the butchers on the same level,” Fini said in a statement.
Forleo's decision also prompted outrage from the Italian mass media and newspapers.
The La Stampa newspaper ran a blistering editorial with an English-language headline “Clementina Go Home,” blasting the judge for being unpatriotic.
The Dublin-based International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS) has ruled that resisting occupation troops in Iraq was a “duty” on able Muslims in and outside the country and that aiding the occupier was impermissible.
On the indiscriminate attacks that claim the lives of innocent civilians, the IAMS asked resistance fighters not to target women, children and the elderly even if they were of the occupiers’ nationalities.
A cohort of prominent Saudi scholars have further defended resistance against the occupation forces in Iraq as a legitimate right, prohibiting cooperation with the occupiers and collaboration against resistance groups.
Maulana abul kalam azad , first education awards or rewards
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, first Education Awards or Rewards
Kuldip Nayar
Minister after independence, was sounded for the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest
civil award, announced annually on January 26 to commemorate the declaration made in 1930 that India’s objective was to have complete independence from British rule. His role during the freedom struggle was crucial and his erudition was recognized throughout the Islamic world.
Azad declined the award. He reportedly told the then Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru that how could they pin the medal on themselves when they were the ones to decide who should get the award? Being a top man in the ruling Congress, his word carried weight.
The Maulana’s objection startled the government. The Cabinet is said to have met informally to discuss his rejection. But he did not relent despite Nehru’s pressure. The party leaders, Azad argued, could not hog the glory that their government had the authority to bestow on them. Still the government went ahead and gave awards to the Congressmen as well. Many years later Azad was given the Bharat Ratna posthumously.
The then Congress government did not respect the sentiments he had expressed. The point Azad made some 50 years ago, soon after the awards were started, is as relevant today as it was then. How could the government the ruling party leads be an arbiter of the country’s awards and confer them on those who are close to the rulers? It reminds me of a Punjabi saying: When a blind man distributes sweets, he gives them to his own people again and again.
The selection of awardees by different Congress governments during the last many years, when analysed, shows a definite tilt towards the people who suited their book. They were the ones who towed the party line. Critics or opponents never figured anywhere. For example, Ram Manohar Lohia, the socialist leader, or the Marxist EMS Namboodipad, were not even considered.
THE INP(BJP) - LED GOVERNMENT DID NO BETTER .IT SAFFRONIZED THE LIST OF RECIPIENTS AND GAVE AWARDS TO EVEN THE FANATIC RSS WORKERS.
I saw the subjective exercise from close quarters when I was the Information Officer in the Home Ministry for six years till 1964. The ministry would receive names from individuals or organizations that were close to the Congress party. Central and State ministers also sent their suggestions. A deputy secretary in the Home Ministry and I would prepare the list of names alphabetically and summarize their bio-data. It was a clerical job and the entire exercise was arbitrary. There were no rules to guide, nor any norms to follow. We even dropped names that we did not like. The list was sent to the Home Secretary who forwarded it to the Home Minister.
Politics was injected at this stage. The minister decided who would get which award, Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan or Padma Vibushan. The Prime Minister was always in the picture. Between the two, names were added to the list or deleted from it. The President who authorized the gazette notification seldom changed the list received from the government.
However, once the then President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, added one name when I was still in the ministry. He wrote in his own hand the name of a lady from the South. We, in the Home Ministry worked hard to find who she was. There was an educationist by that name at Chennai. But when the list went back to Dr Prasad, he corrected her profession to say that she was a nurse.
His ADC informed us that she had treated him when he fell sick while travelling by road. We were able to spot her out. That year two ladies by the same name received the award.
The screening committee is relatively a recent phenomenon. There was a public interest litigation to challenge the awards on the ground that they were banned legally. Article 18 of the Constitution says: "No title, not being a military or academic distinction, shall be conferred by the state." The Supreme Court, however, did not regard civil awards as titles. But it did suggest the constitution of a screening committee.
The objection that the selection tended to be biased would have gone if the Supreme Court had itself appointed members of the committee. The court left the job to the government. It, in turn, appointed persons who were cast in the mould of the ruling party. The fact that the Manmohan Singh government constituted a committee, different from the one the Vajpayee government had, to process the names of the awardees this time indicated that the Congress was particular about who did the screening. Of course, the Home Minister and the Prime Minister remained the final authority.
Whoever the person or whatever the method, the fact of subjectivity cannot be ruled out. Even if by some quirk or miracle the bias were to disappear, the question to ask would be: Are the awards necessary?
The Janata Party government that came to power in 1977 after retrieving democracy from authoritarianism did away with them straightaway. It thought that the titles of the British days had been brought back.
Indeed, the titles were conferred on toadies or those who were on the side of foreign rule. So long as the Janata Party stayed in power, there was no award.
After so many decades, I still cannot figure out how Rabindra Nath Tagore accepted the title of ‘Sir.’ True, he returned it after the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. But why did he accept it in the first instance? Freedom fighters did not like it. To that extent, the stature of Tagore came down by several pegs.
After the Janata Party rule, awards have come back with a vengeance and so have the fawning flatterers and sycophants. Once again the award has begun to appear on the letterheads and visiting cards of the recipients. The government’s repeated announcements not to use awards as titles have been of little avail. Self-importance is natural for a recipient because the government distributes awards like rewards. It should not expect people to think otherwise because the very selection lacks objectivity.
However, there have been many persons who have refused to accept awards. Gandhian Siddharaj Dhadda is a recent example. He declined the Padma Vibushan which the Vajpayee government sought to confer on him. Journalists too have refused to accept awards. The late Nikhil Chakraborty was one of them.
Ultimately, it depends on individuals: how do they look at awards. The successive governments at the Centre have played havoc with the selection because the ruling parties have given them to such people who have earned little recognition in the field they work except a few. In fact, the government has spoilt the reputation of even those who deserve laurels and to whom the nation is indebted.
Kuldip Nayar
Minister after independence, was sounded for the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest
civil award, announced annually on January 26 to commemorate the declaration made in 1930 that India’s objective was to have complete independence from British rule. His role during the freedom struggle was crucial and his erudition was recognized throughout the Islamic world.
Azad declined the award. He reportedly told the then Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru that how could they pin the medal on themselves when they were the ones to decide who should get the award? Being a top man in the ruling Congress, his word carried weight.
The Maulana’s objection startled the government. The Cabinet is said to have met informally to discuss his rejection. But he did not relent despite Nehru’s pressure. The party leaders, Azad argued, could not hog the glory that their government had the authority to bestow on them. Still the government went ahead and gave awards to the Congressmen as well. Many years later Azad was given the Bharat Ratna posthumously.
The then Congress government did not respect the sentiments he had expressed. The point Azad made some 50 years ago, soon after the awards were started, is as relevant today as it was then. How could the government the ruling party leads be an arbiter of the country’s awards and confer them on those who are close to the rulers? It reminds me of a Punjabi saying: When a blind man distributes sweets, he gives them to his own people again and again.
The selection of awardees by different Congress governments during the last many years, when analysed, shows a definite tilt towards the people who suited their book. They were the ones who towed the party line. Critics or opponents never figured anywhere. For example, Ram Manohar Lohia, the socialist leader, or the Marxist EMS Namboodipad, were not even considered.
THE INP(BJP) - LED GOVERNMENT DID NO BETTER .IT SAFFRONIZED THE LIST OF RECIPIENTS AND GAVE AWARDS TO EVEN THE FANATIC RSS WORKERS.
I saw the subjective exercise from close quarters when I was the Information Officer in the Home Ministry for six years till 1964. The ministry would receive names from individuals or organizations that were close to the Congress party. Central and State ministers also sent their suggestions. A deputy secretary in the Home Ministry and I would prepare the list of names alphabetically and summarize their bio-data. It was a clerical job and the entire exercise was arbitrary. There were no rules to guide, nor any norms to follow. We even dropped names that we did not like. The list was sent to the Home Secretary who forwarded it to the Home Minister.
Politics was injected at this stage. The minister decided who would get which award, Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan or Padma Vibushan. The Prime Minister was always in the picture. Between the two, names were added to the list or deleted from it. The President who authorized the gazette notification seldom changed the list received from the government.
However, once the then President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, added one name when I was still in the ministry. He wrote in his own hand the name of a lady from the South. We, in the Home Ministry worked hard to find who she was. There was an educationist by that name at Chennai. But when the list went back to Dr Prasad, he corrected her profession to say that she was a nurse.
His ADC informed us that she had treated him when he fell sick while travelling by road. We were able to spot her out. That year two ladies by the same name received the award.
The screening committee is relatively a recent phenomenon. There was a public interest litigation to challenge the awards on the ground that they were banned legally. Article 18 of the Constitution says: "No title, not being a military or academic distinction, shall be conferred by the state." The Supreme Court, however, did not regard civil awards as titles. But it did suggest the constitution of a screening committee.
The objection that the selection tended to be biased would have gone if the Supreme Court had itself appointed members of the committee. The court left the job to the government. It, in turn, appointed persons who were cast in the mould of the ruling party. The fact that the Manmohan Singh government constituted a committee, different from the one the Vajpayee government had, to process the names of the awardees this time indicated that the Congress was particular about who did the screening. Of course, the Home Minister and the Prime Minister remained the final authority.
Whoever the person or whatever the method, the fact of subjectivity cannot be ruled out. Even if by some quirk or miracle the bias were to disappear, the question to ask would be: Are the awards necessary?
The Janata Party government that came to power in 1977 after retrieving democracy from authoritarianism did away with them straightaway. It thought that the titles of the British days had been brought back.
Indeed, the titles were conferred on toadies or those who were on the side of foreign rule. So long as the Janata Party stayed in power, there was no award.
After so many decades, I still cannot figure out how Rabindra Nath Tagore accepted the title of ‘Sir.’ True, he returned it after the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. But why did he accept it in the first instance? Freedom fighters did not like it. To that extent, the stature of Tagore came down by several pegs.
After the Janata Party rule, awards have come back with a vengeance and so have the fawning flatterers and sycophants. Once again the award has begun to appear on the letterheads and visiting cards of the recipients. The government’s repeated announcements not to use awards as titles have been of little avail. Self-importance is natural for a recipient because the government distributes awards like rewards. It should not expect people to think otherwise because the very selection lacks objectivity.
However, there have been many persons who have refused to accept awards. Gandhian Siddharaj Dhadda is a recent example. He declined the Padma Vibushan which the Vajpayee government sought to confer on him. Journalists too have refused to accept awards. The late Nikhil Chakraborty was one of them.
Ultimately, it depends on individuals: how do they look at awards. The successive governments at the Centre have played havoc with the selection because the ruling parties have given them to such people who have earned little recognition in the field they work except a few. In fact, the government has spoilt the reputation of even those who deserve laurels and to whom the nation is indebted.
Indian Constitution , fundamental duties and we
Constitution, fundamental duties and we
Md. MH Barbhuiya
The Constitution of India is the supreme law of the land, comprising the basic rights and liberties. There is a dedication to the people who formed it. Starting from the Preamble, the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy are nothing but the components to achieve the goal of a social welfare State where the citizens’ rights, liberties and freedom will be secured and protected; where there will be no discrimination on the basis of any adverse classification and so on. The Constitution comprises civil, political, economic, social, cultural and religious rights. Considering its comprehensiveness, the Constitution of India is regarded as one of the best Constitutions in the world.
But in spite of the comprehensiveness of the Constitution in all aspects, India is still in the list of developing countries. The rate of development is very slow. Peace, tranquillity and harmony are on the decline. There is widespread unrest. People are feeling insecure. Women cannot move freely and girl children face discrimination. Schoolchildren have to escorted for fear of abduction. Workers cannot speak against their employers. The poor, but honest and righteous, cannot speak in front of the rich and privileged class. Government funds are sanctioned for the development of the country, but the work is completed on paper and not in practice. Why?
One of the reasons for the above problems is our lesser response to the duties imposed on us. Eminent jurist, Hohfield in his Fundamental Legal Conceptions says: "Rights and duties are correlated." In the absence of one, the other cannot function properly. Unless we give equal response to our duties both legal and moral, codified laws will not be sufficient to combat the irregularities in the society. If due regard is not paid to the duties imposed on us, we cannot expect peace and tranquillity in the society. We cannot expect development either, nor can we expect a secure life where dignity and worth of all human beings, irrespective of sex, caste, creed, race, religion, place of birth, ethnic origin, will be protected.
Duty means an act which one ought to do or ought not do, considering the facts and circumstances in a given situation. It is the guide of one’s activities. It prescribes a person’s behaviour, primarily for some purpose other than his own interests.
Rights and duties are inter-related. One cannot exist without the other. They are connected with each other like the organs of our body. If one organ of the body is missing, the total system suffers. Similarly, in the legal system also, if the rights and duties are separated from each other or if the required response is not given, then the legal system cannot develop.
The Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, was once asked to give his thoughts on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said, "The source of right is duty. If we all discharge our duties, rights will not be far to seek. If leaving duties unperformed, we run after rights, they will escape us like will-o’-the-wisp, the more we pursue them, the further they will fly."
Article 51-A has been inserted in the Constitution by the Constitution 42nd Amendment Act, 1976 in accordance with the recommendations of the Swaran Singh Committee which, though widely known, may be reproduced for reasons of convenience:
It shall be the duty of every citizen of India....
a) to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem,
b) to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom,
c) to uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India,
d) to defend the country and render national service whenever called upon to do so,
e) to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood, among all the people of India, transcending religious, linguistic, regional and sectional diversities to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women,
f) to protect and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture,
g) to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers, and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures,
h) to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform,
j) to safeguard public property and abjure violence
k) to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement.
Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is the first in its kind in the history of mankind also enumerates some duties not only upon the State but also upon the individuals.
Md. MH Barbhuiya
The Constitution of India is the supreme law of the land, comprising the basic rights and liberties. There is a dedication to the people who formed it. Starting from the Preamble, the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy are nothing but the components to achieve the goal of a social welfare State where the citizens’ rights, liberties and freedom will be secured and protected; where there will be no discrimination on the basis of any adverse classification and so on. The Constitution comprises civil, political, economic, social, cultural and religious rights. Considering its comprehensiveness, the Constitution of India is regarded as one of the best Constitutions in the world.
But in spite of the comprehensiveness of the Constitution in all aspects, India is still in the list of developing countries. The rate of development is very slow. Peace, tranquillity and harmony are on the decline. There is widespread unrest. People are feeling insecure. Women cannot move freely and girl children face discrimination. Schoolchildren have to escorted for fear of abduction. Workers cannot speak against their employers. The poor, but honest and righteous, cannot speak in front of the rich and privileged class. Government funds are sanctioned for the development of the country, but the work is completed on paper and not in practice. Why?
One of the reasons for the above problems is our lesser response to the duties imposed on us. Eminent jurist, Hohfield in his Fundamental Legal Conceptions says: "Rights and duties are correlated." In the absence of one, the other cannot function properly. Unless we give equal response to our duties both legal and moral, codified laws will not be sufficient to combat the irregularities in the society. If due regard is not paid to the duties imposed on us, we cannot expect peace and tranquillity in the society. We cannot expect development either, nor can we expect a secure life where dignity and worth of all human beings, irrespective of sex, caste, creed, race, religion, place of birth, ethnic origin, will be protected.
Duty means an act which one ought to do or ought not do, considering the facts and circumstances in a given situation. It is the guide of one’s activities. It prescribes a person’s behaviour, primarily for some purpose other than his own interests.
Rights and duties are inter-related. One cannot exist without the other. They are connected with each other like the organs of our body. If one organ of the body is missing, the total system suffers. Similarly, in the legal system also, if the rights and duties are separated from each other or if the required response is not given, then the legal system cannot develop.
The Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, was once asked to give his thoughts on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said, "The source of right is duty. If we all discharge our duties, rights will not be far to seek. If leaving duties unperformed, we run after rights, they will escape us like will-o’-the-wisp, the more we pursue them, the further they will fly."
Article 51-A has been inserted in the Constitution by the Constitution 42nd Amendment Act, 1976 in accordance with the recommendations of the Swaran Singh Committee which, though widely known, may be reproduced for reasons of convenience:
It shall be the duty of every citizen of India....
a) to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem,
b) to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom,
c) to uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India,
d) to defend the country and render national service whenever called upon to do so,
e) to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood, among all the people of India, transcending religious, linguistic, regional and sectional diversities to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women,
f) to protect and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture,
g) to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers, and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures,
h) to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform,
j) to safeguard public property and abjure violence
k) to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement.
Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is the first in its kind in the history of mankind also enumerates some duties not only upon the State but also upon the individuals.
NSCN-IM call to Assam hill tribals
NSCN-IM call to Assam hill tribals
Karbis, Dimasas refuse to be part of ‘Nagalim’
GUWAHATI, Jan 25: The Karbi Students’ Association (KSA), the pro-talks faction of the United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS) and the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) today refused to take the bait of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) which recently extended an invitation to the Karbi, Dimasa, Kuki, Hmar and other tribes to get together and decide "which side" they wanted to stay with. The student body and the two other tribal militant outfits which are currently holding peace talks with the Government said that the NSCN (I-M) move was inspired by its aim to form the greater ‘Nagalim’ by uniting all Naga-inhabited areas in the region.
It may be mentioned here that NSCN (I-M) general secretary Thuingaleng Muivah, addressing the fourth ‘Naga People’s Consultative Meet to Strengthen Indo-Naga Political Talks’ convened by the NSCN (I-M) at its designated headquarters, Hebron, in Nagaland, had said that his organization was ready to welcome the people of the above communities into its fold. "There will be no discrimination against them," Muivah said.
Talking to The Sentinel here today, KSA president Hanuram Ingti said that the question of the merger of the Karbi community with the proposed ‘Nagalim’ did not arise at all. "We ourselves are demanding a separate State under Article 244 (A) of the Constitution," he added. The Nagas have encroached land in Missibailang in Karbi Anglong district despite their assurance now that the welfare of the Karbi people will be taken care of, Ingti said, adding that it is a ploy on the part of the NSCN (I-M) to realize its dream of a greater ‘Nagalim.’
UPDS (pro-talks) joint secretary V Mukrang said that the Karbis of Assam, despite a lot of common traditions, practise a religion different from that of the Karbis of Nagaland. The Karbis of Naga stock add the title ‘Mikir’ to their names, Mukrang informed this reporter. "However, the Karbis in Nagaland are being treated as second-class citizens," the UPDS leader said. "The question of joining the proposed ‘Nagalim’ does not arise as we are engaged in a dialogue with the Centre for a separate homeland," he added. The NSCN (I-M) is trying to gain support for the creation of ‘Nagalim’ through this move, Mukrang said.
Meanwhile, DHD chairman Dilip Nunisa said that the Assam Government would decide whether the ‘Dimaraji’ areas should be included in the greater ‘Nagalim’ or remain in Assam itself. Alleging that there is discrimination against the Dimasa people living in Nagaland, Nunisa said that the Nagas had captured their land near Hebron, the NSCN (I-M) headquarters. Monuments and other relics belonging to the Dimasa community have been desecrated in Nagaland, he added. "We appreciate the NSCN (I-M) gesture but the Nagas should not harm the interests of the Dimasas in Nagaland," Nunisa said.
Nunisa further said that the ULFA, which is also demanding sovereignty, may not appreciate the NSCN (I-M) invitation.
Karbis, Dimasas refuse to be part of ‘Nagalim’
GUWAHATI, Jan 25: The Karbi Students’ Association (KSA), the pro-talks faction of the United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS) and the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) today refused to take the bait of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) which recently extended an invitation to the Karbi, Dimasa, Kuki, Hmar and other tribes to get together and decide "which side" they wanted to stay with. The student body and the two other tribal militant outfits which are currently holding peace talks with the Government said that the NSCN (I-M) move was inspired by its aim to form the greater ‘Nagalim’ by uniting all Naga-inhabited areas in the region.
It may be mentioned here that NSCN (I-M) general secretary Thuingaleng Muivah, addressing the fourth ‘Naga People’s Consultative Meet to Strengthen Indo-Naga Political Talks’ convened by the NSCN (I-M) at its designated headquarters, Hebron, in Nagaland, had said that his organization was ready to welcome the people of the above communities into its fold. "There will be no discrimination against them," Muivah said.
Talking to The Sentinel here today, KSA president Hanuram Ingti said that the question of the merger of the Karbi community with the proposed ‘Nagalim’ did not arise at all. "We ourselves are demanding a separate State under Article 244 (A) of the Constitution," he added. The Nagas have encroached land in Missibailang in Karbi Anglong district despite their assurance now that the welfare of the Karbi people will be taken care of, Ingti said, adding that it is a ploy on the part of the NSCN (I-M) to realize its dream of a greater ‘Nagalim.’
UPDS (pro-talks) joint secretary V Mukrang said that the Karbis of Assam, despite a lot of common traditions, practise a religion different from that of the Karbis of Nagaland. The Karbis of Naga stock add the title ‘Mikir’ to their names, Mukrang informed this reporter. "However, the Karbis in Nagaland are being treated as second-class citizens," the UPDS leader said. "The question of joining the proposed ‘Nagalim’ does not arise as we are engaged in a dialogue with the Centre for a separate homeland," he added. The NSCN (I-M) is trying to gain support for the creation of ‘Nagalim’ through this move, Mukrang said.
Meanwhile, DHD chairman Dilip Nunisa said that the Assam Government would decide whether the ‘Dimaraji’ areas should be included in the greater ‘Nagalim’ or remain in Assam itself. Alleging that there is discrimination against the Dimasa people living in Nagaland, Nunisa said that the Nagas had captured their land near Hebron, the NSCN (I-M) headquarters. Monuments and other relics belonging to the Dimasa community have been desecrated in Nagaland, he added. "We appreciate the NSCN (I-M) gesture but the Nagas should not harm the interests of the Dimasas in Nagaland," Nunisa said.
Nunisa further said that the ULFA, which is also demanding sovereignty, may not appreciate the NSCN (I-M) invitation.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Lawlessness on the rise in Nalbari
NALBARI, Jan 24: Tension and sensation prevail in Nalbari district following killings, highway robberies and threats taking place in different places in the district. There are allegations that the district administration has failed to check the increasing anti-social activities.
Reports available here said that four surrendered ULFA activists had been shot dead by ULFA cadres in Nalbari district in the recent days. One Bipul Talukdar of Angardhowa village under Dhamdhama police outpost and one Ashok Das of Sankuchi village died on the spot when they were shot at by ULFA militants recently.
Prahlad Rajbongshi of Angardhowa died at the Guwahati Medical College and Hospital recently after he was admitted there last week following a bullet injury. SULFA man Dilip Barman was also shot dead by suspected ULFA cadres at the heart of Barama a few months ago.
The police administration has allegedly failed to provide protection to the surrendered ULFA men who are being targeted by their former colleagues.
A grassroot worker of the AGP, one Deben Lahkar, hailing from Burburi village under Ghograpar police station, was shot dead at his own house recently by unidentified gunmen.
However, later the people alleged that Lahkar was killed by Army personnel. They also took out a procession to protest against the killing and shouted slogans against the Army.
There are further reports that some police personnel were extorting money from people on the highways.
One Ganesh Barman, a businessman of Barama town, was seriously injured when he was assaulted by some unidentified miscreants recently. The local people of Barama observed a 24-hour bandh to protest against the incident. They have also urged the administration to punish the people responsible for the incident.
Meanwhile, the people of Nalbari have demanded the State Government to control the anti-social activities which are on the rise in the district.
Reports available here said that four surrendered ULFA activists had been shot dead by ULFA cadres in Nalbari district in the recent days. One Bipul Talukdar of Angardhowa village under Dhamdhama police outpost and one Ashok Das of Sankuchi village died on the spot when they were shot at by ULFA militants recently.
Prahlad Rajbongshi of Angardhowa died at the Guwahati Medical College and Hospital recently after he was admitted there last week following a bullet injury. SULFA man Dilip Barman was also shot dead by suspected ULFA cadres at the heart of Barama a few months ago.
The police administration has allegedly failed to provide protection to the surrendered ULFA men who are being targeted by their former colleagues.
A grassroot worker of the AGP, one Deben Lahkar, hailing from Burburi village under Ghograpar police station, was shot dead at his own house recently by unidentified gunmen.
However, later the people alleged that Lahkar was killed by Army personnel. They also took out a procession to protest against the killing and shouted slogans against the Army.
There are further reports that some police personnel were extorting money from people on the highways.
One Ganesh Barman, a businessman of Barama town, was seriously injured when he was assaulted by some unidentified miscreants recently. The local people of Barama observed a 24-hour bandh to protest against the incident. They have also urged the administration to punish the people responsible for the incident.
Meanwhile, the people of Nalbari have demanded the State Government to control the anti-social activities which are on the rise in the district.
Two sent to jail for murder attempt
Two sent to jail for murder attempt
MERAPANI, Jan 24: One Ratneswar Das (23) along with his mother Minati Das (48) of Krishnashrami village under Merapani PS have been sent to jail on charges of attempting to murder Ms Jewti Das, the newly-wedded wife of Ratneswar Das recently.
It is reported that Jewti Das was frequently harassed by her husband and her mother-in-law Minati Das.
This is the customs of hindu , due to some causes which the hindu know them self , male fellow use to demand a huge amount of money and belonging from their female partner and if the female partner cannot give then she may get divorce or intimidation from their male partner family or she may be in haspital or she may die . Hindu from time onwards have said to their society that dowry or salling of their mentally retarded male not to do so , but during the last period of hindu fanatic government some how we can see all this thing in rising in alarming rate
It may be mentioned that Jewti is undergoing medical treatment as Ratneswar Das and his mother tried to set fire on Jewti on January 15.
MERAPANI, Jan 24: One Ratneswar Das (23) along with his mother Minati Das (48) of Krishnashrami village under Merapani PS have been sent to jail on charges of attempting to murder Ms Jewti Das, the newly-wedded wife of Ratneswar Das recently.
It is reported that Jewti Das was frequently harassed by her husband and her mother-in-law Minati Das.
This is the customs of hindu , due to some causes which the hindu know them self , male fellow use to demand a huge amount of money and belonging from their female partner and if the female partner cannot give then she may get divorce or intimidation from their male partner family or she may be in haspital or she may die . Hindu from time onwards have said to their society that dowry or salling of their mentally retarded male not to do so , but during the last period of hindu fanatic government some how we can see all this thing in rising in alarming rate
It may be mentioned that Jewti is undergoing medical treatment as Ratneswar Das and his mother tried to set fire on Jewti on January 15.
Is the demand of hindu bengali , hindu bihari , hindu nepali demand for quota logistic ?
Ardhendu demands quota for linguistic minorities before polls, castigates CM
TEZPUR, Jan 24: Congress leader and former Assam minister Dr Ardhendu Kumar Dey has come down heavily on the State Government by alleging that the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress Government has been ignoring the interest of the linguistic minorities of Assam over the years.
Addressing the joint meeting of the All Assam Linguistic Minority Forum (AALMF) and Sanjukta Yuba Chatra Parishad held at Rangapara Town Hall here recently, Dr Dey demanded the State Government to take necessary steps to reserve at least 25 State LACs for the linguistic minorities to safeguard the interest of these people in the forthcoming State Assembly polls.
He also urged the linguistic minorities of the State to work unitedly to strengthen their movement to press for their various long-pending demands.
Expressing serious concern over the various problems of the linguistic minorities of the State, the former minister also urged Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi to take steps to re-induct him in the State Cabinet.
Members of various linguistic minorities organizations and others also took part in the meeting, which was held under the presidentship of Paritosh Rai, president of AALMF.
It is to be noted that these lingustic minority , through whome Mr G . N . Bordoloi have come to power in the fourties , and have killed many genuined muslims from asom and many have fled to the then east pakistan and pakistan and to many parts of the world , and now they are demanding their own country in making . But it is interesting to note that the local hindu have been saying that they are in majority but through whom , through these lingustic minority - which is most fabiricated in itself . There is a saying history repeats .
Assam Govt doesn’t have employment policy
GUWAHATI, Jan 24: The Assam Government, which had adopted the Central Employment Exchange (Compulsory Notification of Vacancies) Act, 1959 as far way back as in 1960, does not have an employment policy of its own even today even as the number of unemployed in the State has reached the alarming figure of approximately 17 lakh.
The amended Employment Exchange (Compulsory Notification of Vacancies) Rules, 1960, being followed in Assam, states: "Vacancies, required to be notified to the Central Employment Exchange, shall be notified at least four weeks before the date on which the applicants will be interviewed or tested where interviews or tests are held, or the date on which vacancies are intended to be filled, if no interviews or tests are held, and an employer shall furnish the Employment Exchange concerned, the results of the selection within 15 days from the date of selection." All establishments, including those in the private sector where "ordinarily 25 or more persons are employed to work for remuneration" are within the purview of the Rules which are open to violation as the State is without an employment policy. Most of the private establishments skip the Employment Exchanges and go for direct recruitment as if to deprive the local candidates.
The Sentinel sought views from a number of personalities leading various organizations on the issue of 100 per cent reservation for local candidates in government as well as private establishments. The response is a mixed bag. They are, however, unanimous on one point: that since there are limited job avenues in government establishments in the State, the private establishments have to adhere to the set Rules, and absorb the local candidates by conducting their recruitment process through the employment exchanges only.
Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) general secretary Dilip Sankar Saikia said that the Parishad had been demanding 100 per cent reservation for local candidates in all group C and D posts not only in the Central and semi-Central departments but also in private establishments like the banking and insurance sectors. "Banking and insurance sectors apparently show that their vacancies here are abolished, but they later get officials transferred from outside the State against the abolished vacancies," he alleged. Citing an instance, he said that the authorities in the UCO Bank had inducted an employee transferred from outside the State, depriving the locals. "The Parishad soon swung into action and did not allow the employee from outside Assam to join," he claimed, adding that the Government was not firm in the implementation of the Employment Act.
He further said that the then AGP Government in the State had initiated a suitable employment policy in 1986, but could not implement it because of the change of government. Quoting a section of the Compulsory Notification of Vacancies Act, he said all vacancies should be filled by appointing local candidates only.
He further said that the Parishad was now demanding that the minimum staff strength in private establishments for compulsory recruitment through employment exchanges should be brought down to ten from the existing 25. According to him, normally companies recruit people from outside the State as sales professionals who often submit ‘fake certificates’ stating their schooling in Assam. Most of the medical representatives and sales executives working in the State are from West Bengal and Bihar, Saikia pointed out, adding that nowhere in the country could one find Assamese people working in large numbers. (To be continued)
If you have any comment then write to asimhazarika@gawab.com
The amended Employment Exchange (Compulsory Notification of Vacancies) Rules, 1960, being followed in Assam, states: "Vacancies, required to be notified to the Central Employment Exchange, shall be notified at least four weeks before the date on which the applicants will be interviewed or tested where interviews or tests are held, or the date on which vacancies are intended to be filled, if no interviews or tests are held, and an employer shall furnish the Employment Exchange concerned, the results of the selection within 15 days from the date of selection." All establishments, including those in the private sector where "ordinarily 25 or more persons are employed to work for remuneration" are within the purview of the Rules which are open to violation as the State is without an employment policy. Most of the private establishments skip the Employment Exchanges and go for direct recruitment as if to deprive the local candidates.
The Sentinel sought views from a number of personalities leading various organizations on the issue of 100 per cent reservation for local candidates in government as well as private establishments. The response is a mixed bag. They are, however, unanimous on one point: that since there are limited job avenues in government establishments in the State, the private establishments have to adhere to the set Rules, and absorb the local candidates by conducting their recruitment process through the employment exchanges only.
Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) general secretary Dilip Sankar Saikia said that the Parishad had been demanding 100 per cent reservation for local candidates in all group C and D posts not only in the Central and semi-Central departments but also in private establishments like the banking and insurance sectors. "Banking and insurance sectors apparently show that their vacancies here are abolished, but they later get officials transferred from outside the State against the abolished vacancies," he alleged. Citing an instance, he said that the authorities in the UCO Bank had inducted an employee transferred from outside the State, depriving the locals. "The Parishad soon swung into action and did not allow the employee from outside Assam to join," he claimed, adding that the Government was not firm in the implementation of the Employment Act.
He further said that the then AGP Government in the State had initiated a suitable employment policy in 1986, but could not implement it because of the change of government. Quoting a section of the Compulsory Notification of Vacancies Act, he said all vacancies should be filled by appointing local candidates only.
He further said that the Parishad was now demanding that the minimum staff strength in private establishments for compulsory recruitment through employment exchanges should be brought down to ten from the existing 25. According to him, normally companies recruit people from outside the State as sales professionals who often submit ‘fake certificates’ stating their schooling in Assam. Most of the medical representatives and sales executives working in the State are from West Bengal and Bihar, Saikia pointed out, adding that nowhere in the country could one find Assamese people working in large numbers. (To be continued)
If you have any comment then write to asimhazarika@gawab.com
Stampede at Hindu Procession Kills 150
Stampede at Hindu Procession Kills 150
16 minutes ago
By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM,
BOMBAY, India - Thousands of Hindus panicked during a religious procession in western India on Tuesday, triggering a stampede that killed at least 150 people, a local official said. Many more people were injured.
Accounts differed as to what caused the stampede, which happened near the village of Wai, some 150 miles south of Bombay, in Satara district.
Sharad Jadhav, Satara's second-highest official, said the stampede was caused by overcrowding, but police said it was triggered by a fire.
"A fire caused by a short circuit in a makeshift shop near the temple created panic among the pilgrims. Some tried to flee the area, starting the stampede," said K.K. Pathak, the inspector-general of police in the region. The situation grew worse when a narrow path leading to the temple became jammed with pilgrims.
Jadhav said he'd been told by officials at the scene that 150 people were killed.
More than 300,000 people are reported to have gathered for the Hindu festival, said A.D. Ingle, deputy superintendent of police in the area.
Hindus congregate every year at the hilltop temple of the Hindu goddess Mandra Devi on a full moon night, which falls on Tuesday this year. The devotees had started arriving in the area Monday.
Stampedes are not uncommon at major Hindu religious festivals, which can attract millions of worshippers. Authorities are often unable to cope with the huge crowds.
In August, at least 39 Hindus were killed when pilgrims stampeded on the banks of a holy river in Nasik, a town 110 miles northeast of Bombay.
Fifty-one pilgrims died in 1999 after a rope meant to channel worshippers snapped in a landslide at a Hindu shrine in southern India, while 50 people were killed in 1986 in a stampede in the northern town of Haridwar.
In the worst-ever accident, about 800 pilgrims died during a Hindu festival in 1954 in the northern city of Allahabad. In this place where the most nude hindu priest grather in kumbh mela .
Communal hindu fanatic meet
A meeting of the representatives of nine district committees of the Eksaran Bhagawati Samaj, Assam has decided to nominate the present deputy chief of the Samaj Debeswar Bora to the post of the chief – Acharya – of the Samaj. The meeting was held at the Golaghat Rong Bong Nandapur Palnaam Than of the Samaj recently under the presidentship of Samaj’s Palnaam Acharya Mahananda Hazarika, said a press release here today. The meeting also decided to hold a meeting of the representatives of all the district committees of the Samaj on March 5 and 6 at the Nandapur Palnaam Than to formally bestow Bora with the charge of the Acharya. It may be mentioned here that the Samaj was founded by Late Ilaram Das to propagate the tenets of Mahapurush Sankardev.
RIBA ( Interest ) is haram
If "interest" is haram
What is the alternative?
Our community is never tired of proclaiming that interest is haram without offering a practical alternative. With Muslim-managed financial companies and banks collapsing like a pack of cards, it is time to establish micro-credit institutions says M H Lakdawala
Mubashira, 28, a housewife visits the jeweller at Bandra to take a loan of Rs 25,000 against her ornaments agreeing to pay 10 per cent interest per month.
Sana, 48,wife of a failed businessman visits the jeweller at Agripada for a loan of Rs 3,00,000, not thinking twice, at the rate of 4 per cent interest per month.
Zaitunbi, 32, a slum-dweller regularly visits a jeweller at Bhendi Bazar to pay monthly interest of Rs 500. She has taken a loan of Rs 15,000 for her husband’s medical treatment.
A unique characteristic of Bandra, Agripada, and Bhendi Bazar, all pre-dominantly Muslim areas are, the networks of jewellers who are more interested in giving loans rather than selling gold ornaments. These jewellers cater to all classes of the Muslim community- slum dwellers, middle and the elite classes. Their monthly rate of interest is anywhere between 4 to 10 per cent every month with compound interest rate.
The community is never tired of proclaiming that interest is haram without coming up with a real alternative to cater to such needs. It is exactly such type of exploitative interest, which is the riba forbidden in Islam, but the community is oblivious of these exploiters who many a time take the help of anti-social elements to recover their dues with full interest.
One of the remedies for such type of exploitative loan providers is making micro-credit available to the poor. The term ‘micro’ is, used to denote the small size of loans vis-Ã -vis those of the mainstream credit market. The clientele consists of people unable or having difficulty in accessing mainstream credit.
According to a case study of Mahila Milan Bank, the poor borrow in times of desperate need from Pathans/money-lenders, pawnbrokers at an interest rate of upto 10 percent per month. But on joining saving groups of Mahila Milan Bank, they have been completely freed from the clutches of such sharks.
The fact is that micro-credit services have existed from time immemorial through chit funds, pawnbrokers and the ubiquitous money-lender (collectively known as the informal credit market). The money-lender, made infamous by the media, however, had and continues to have, a large number of good reasons to survive. It is true that in the last four decades the proportion of informal credit has halved, but the moneylender continues to hold the majority of the market within this sector.
The professional micro-finance service providers in India include banks, financial institutions, non-government organizations and non-banking finance companies. They all entered the market with similar objectives: to counter the exploitative arrangements that exist in micro-credit and to make credit more accessible to the poor.
Unfortunately the Indian Muslim community, which has the unique institution of Zakat, has failed to establish micro-credit institutions. Even the concept of interest-free banking has failed to take off and recently acquired the bad reputation with the collapse of the likes of Baitun Nasr and Al-Falah. Even the other interest free non-banking institutions managed by the community have nothing substantial to show as an achievement. Indian Muslims must learn from the experiments of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Aman and Ikhatiyar in Malaysia; and MYRADA in India.
In India, Mumbai has the largest number of slum dwellers (5.82 m) followed by Delhi (1.82 m), Kolkata (1.49 m) and Chennai (1.08 m). In terms of proportion, Muslim slum dwellers to total slum population, Mumbai again ranked first with 28.5 per cent Muslim slum dwellers distantly followed by Delhi (18.8 per cent), Chennai (18.3 per cent ) and Kolkata (12.7 per cent).
For these Muslim slum dwellers, there are very few alternatives available in an emergency. Hence they turn to Pathans/money lenders, pawnbrokers at exorbitant rates.
The micro credit schemes work on the basis of seeking no collaterals, no external guarantors, directly delivering the finances to the clients’ doorstep, provision for repaying of loans simultaneous with saving facilities, and small loans for income generation activities. The micro credit operates by organising the borrowers in small groups, repayment of loans on weekly basis and on interest-charging basis.
Aziza, 41, a widow, is today a self-sustaining woman after she acquired a loan from one of the social organisations. She invested Rs 20,000 in starting a Tiffin service. She is now earning enough to take care of her three kids and herself.
Halima, 36,was literally on the streets after her divorce as her parents themselves were living in the slums and had no permanent source of income. She was helped by the Mahila Milan to start a vegetable stall. Today she is not only taking care of her children, but supporting her parents too.
Konkan Cooperative Credit society in Mumbai is disbursing micro credit to poor Muslim women. They are very successful in this sector. Mahila Milan is also very successful in empowering women this way.
The Muslim community needs many such organisations working at the grassroots, empowering women all over the country. We have thousands of destitute women who have nowhere to go for financial assistance. Training them and providing them micro-credit will go a long way in alleviating their suffering. «
What is the alternative?
Our community is never tired of proclaiming that interest is haram without offering a practical alternative. With Muslim-managed financial companies and banks collapsing like a pack of cards, it is time to establish micro-credit institutions says M H Lakdawala
Mubashira, 28, a housewife visits the jeweller at Bandra to take a loan of Rs 25,000 against her ornaments agreeing to pay 10 per cent interest per month.
Sana, 48,wife of a failed businessman visits the jeweller at Agripada for a loan of Rs 3,00,000, not thinking twice, at the rate of 4 per cent interest per month.
Zaitunbi, 32, a slum-dweller regularly visits a jeweller at Bhendi Bazar to pay monthly interest of Rs 500. She has taken a loan of Rs 15,000 for her husband’s medical treatment.
A unique characteristic of Bandra, Agripada, and Bhendi Bazar, all pre-dominantly Muslim areas are, the networks of jewellers who are more interested in giving loans rather than selling gold ornaments. These jewellers cater to all classes of the Muslim community- slum dwellers, middle and the elite classes. Their monthly rate of interest is anywhere between 4 to 10 per cent every month with compound interest rate.
The community is never tired of proclaiming that interest is haram without coming up with a real alternative to cater to such needs. It is exactly such type of exploitative interest, which is the riba forbidden in Islam, but the community is oblivious of these exploiters who many a time take the help of anti-social elements to recover their dues with full interest.
One of the remedies for such type of exploitative loan providers is making micro-credit available to the poor. The term ‘micro’ is, used to denote the small size of loans vis-Ã -vis those of the mainstream credit market. The clientele consists of people unable or having difficulty in accessing mainstream credit.
According to a case study of Mahila Milan Bank, the poor borrow in times of desperate need from Pathans/money-lenders, pawnbrokers at an interest rate of upto 10 percent per month. But on joining saving groups of Mahila Milan Bank, they have been completely freed from the clutches of such sharks.
The fact is that micro-credit services have existed from time immemorial through chit funds, pawnbrokers and the ubiquitous money-lender (collectively known as the informal credit market). The money-lender, made infamous by the media, however, had and continues to have, a large number of good reasons to survive. It is true that in the last four decades the proportion of informal credit has halved, but the moneylender continues to hold the majority of the market within this sector.
The professional micro-finance service providers in India include banks, financial institutions, non-government organizations and non-banking finance companies. They all entered the market with similar objectives: to counter the exploitative arrangements that exist in micro-credit and to make credit more accessible to the poor.
Unfortunately the Indian Muslim community, which has the unique institution of Zakat, has failed to establish micro-credit institutions. Even the concept of interest-free banking has failed to take off and recently acquired the bad reputation with the collapse of the likes of Baitun Nasr and Al-Falah. Even the other interest free non-banking institutions managed by the community have nothing substantial to show as an achievement. Indian Muslims must learn from the experiments of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Aman and Ikhatiyar in Malaysia; and MYRADA in India.
In India, Mumbai has the largest number of slum dwellers (5.82 m) followed by Delhi (1.82 m), Kolkata (1.49 m) and Chennai (1.08 m). In terms of proportion, Muslim slum dwellers to total slum population, Mumbai again ranked first with 28.5 per cent Muslim slum dwellers distantly followed by Delhi (18.8 per cent), Chennai (18.3 per cent ) and Kolkata (12.7 per cent).
For these Muslim slum dwellers, there are very few alternatives available in an emergency. Hence they turn to Pathans/money lenders, pawnbrokers at exorbitant rates.
The micro credit schemes work on the basis of seeking no collaterals, no external guarantors, directly delivering the finances to the clients’ doorstep, provision for repaying of loans simultaneous with saving facilities, and small loans for income generation activities. The micro credit operates by organising the borrowers in small groups, repayment of loans on weekly basis and on interest-charging basis.
Aziza, 41, a widow, is today a self-sustaining woman after she acquired a loan from one of the social organisations. She invested Rs 20,000 in starting a Tiffin service. She is now earning enough to take care of her three kids and herself.
Halima, 36,was literally on the streets after her divorce as her parents themselves were living in the slums and had no permanent source of income. She was helped by the Mahila Milan to start a vegetable stall. Today she is not only taking care of her children, but supporting her parents too.
Konkan Cooperative Credit society in Mumbai is disbursing micro credit to poor Muslim women. They are very successful in this sector. Mahila Milan is also very successful in empowering women this way.
The Muslim community needs many such organisations working at the grassroots, empowering women all over the country. We have thousands of destitute women who have nowhere to go for financial assistance. Training them and providing them micro-credit will go a long way in alleviating their suffering. «
INP (BJP ) and their communal plan
BJP back on aggressive Hindutva track
By Asghar Ali Engineer
The BJP was so sure of its victory in the last Lok Sabha election that it feigned to have given up its Hindutva card and even tried to appeal (‘appease’) to minorities for votes. In Bihar the then Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee even promised in his speech at Kishenganj that he will appoint 200,000 Urdu teachers, if elected to power. However, the Indian electorate inflicted crushing defeat on the BJP-led NDA and elected the UPA Government instead.
However, the Sangh Parivar overconfident of BJP’s victory could not accept the defeat in true democratic spirit and is feeling highly frustrated. The NDA members, particularly those of BJP are even refusing to behave as a responsible opposition in the Parliament. They have been obstructing the procedure and refusing to allow the parliament to function on one pretext or the other. They raised the issue of ‘tainted ministers’ and stalled parliament for days. They did not even allow debate on budget and it had to be passed without any discussion. They thus made history of sorts. Thus the NDA leaders are responsible for waste of public money and answerable to the electorate. If they do not follow the norms of democratic behaviour they do not deserve to be elected.
What is worse is that they are now adopting quite aggressively their old Hindutva course which, they had assured Indian people, they had abandoned. In 1980 also they had assured people of India that they have adopted ‘secularism and Gandhian socialism’ but abandoned it in favour of aggressive communalism the moment they faced crushing defeat in Parliamentary elections of 1984 when they got only two seats.
Again facing defeat in Lok Sabha elections of 2004 they have gone back to Hindutva politics with vengeance. Thus communal forces can hardly be relied. While in power and sure of their continued hold on it they feign to be secular and adopt aggressive communalism the moment they loose power. They have played the same game this time around. Now they are going back to aggressive Hindutva in view of state elections in Maharashtra and in Bihar after a few months.
One such issue is of Veer Savarkar. Mani Shankar Aiyer ordered removal of poems of Veer Savarkar from the cellular jail of Andaman. The BJP is raising hue and cry over the issue. In Maharashtra of course they have left it to Shiv Sena as Savarkar’s issue is highly emotive in Maharashtra. Thus the BJP who is part of alliance with Shiv Sena wants the Sena to provoke electorate on this issue while it would take up another issues. This itself shows that the BJP is not genuinely concerned with Savarkar issue but wants to exploit it for election purposes through Shiv Sena.
Veer Savarkar’s grand niece Uttara Sahasrabuddhe who teaches political science in the Bombay University, has alleged that both the Congress and BJP-Shiv Sena are trying to turn Veer Savarkar into an election issue. According to her this was hardly a good reason for the Sena and the BJP to boycott Parliament when the budget was being passed, she maintained.
She also said that if the Sangh Parivar was sincere in its protest against what the Congress had done, it should ask the lieutenant governor of the Andamans to put the plaque back. The lieutenant governor Mr. Ram Kapse, was a BJP appointee and belongs to that party. She also said in her statement to The Asian Age that Savarkar was a rationalist. He never thought cow was so sacred and not be killed. He specifically wrote in one of the articles, she noted that "the cow was a useful animal once upon a time when we were dependent on agriculture. But don’t make it a sacred animal. If you believe that God resides in a cow it’s foolish."
Savarkar also maintained, according to her that if you want to differentiate between Western civilisation and Indian civilisation, then you must know that after the Renaissance movement the West took to rationalism as its basis and made tremendous progress. We still stick to what is written in Vedas and Puranas, and because of this tendency we are stuck in the past.
Of course she rightly points out that "The Sangh Parivar cannot eschew or digest these essays. The Sangh Parivar considers cow as sacred and VHP and Bajrang Dal harass even those who take old oxen or buffaloes for slaughter. One of the main agendas of the BJP is to ban cow slaughter throughout India. The BJP even justified killing of Dalits in Haryana who were skinning dead cows a few years ago?
Thus it is clear that the BJP wants to exploit Veer Savarkar's issue for its own political purposes while totally rejecting Savarkar’s rational thoughts. It would hardly convince anyone of its sincerity.
Another issue BJP is preoccupied with is that of arrest of Uma Bharati, former Chief Minister of M.P. In fact there are indications that the BJP wanted to get rid of Uma Bharati as Chief Minister of M.P. and her arrest warrant came as a relief to the BJP central leadership. She may be an aggressive agitator but she was a failure as a chief minister and had created complex problems for the Party.
However, now the BJP is making her arrest as a national issue and flying tricolour is being projected as a national mission. Of course tricolour is our national flag and we are all proud of that but one cannot take pride by making it as an anti-Muslim measure. Uma Bharati went to hoist tricolour on an Idgah, which is a disputed site. The Sangh Parivar had planned to convert the Hubli Idgah issue as a Babri Masjid of the South at that time though the matter was resolved amicably by persuading the Hubli Muslims to hoist the national flag on the Idgah.
Now the Sangh Parivar is thinking of taking out her Yatra flying tricolour. It is an old trick, which the Parivar plays repeatedly. In fact the RSS refuses to fly tricolour in its own Shakhas and flies Bhagwa flag. Let Uma Bharati fly tricolour on the RSS offices if she is so enthusiastic about flying tricolour. Let her fly it on temples as well. She is trying to earn electoral advantage in coming elections by raising these controversies. But now there is news that the Government of Karnataka may petition the Court to withdraw all cases against her thus depriving her the opportunity to be a martyr. The Congress is trying to defeat her game. The BJP has never been comfortable with secular issues or issues of development. It adopted Sadak-Bijli-Pani issue in M.P. election as it was agitating the minds of electorate in the state then. But as it was not sure whether this will click Uma Bharati was repeatedly raising the issue of Saraswati temple and Kamal Maula Masjid in Dhar, M.P. The other members of Sangh Parivar were playing up this issue to entice the voters for Sangh Parivar.
And now since the BJP is not in power at the Centre it has no compulsions or restraints of being in power and can try to go whole hog with Hindutva politics. BJP can never be secularised as long as it is tied firmly to the communal apron of the RSS. The RSS keeps on pressurising it to adopt aggressive Hindutva. And the BJP has to repeatedly assure the RSS that it will never offload the ideology of Hindutva without which it cannot get help of dedicated RSS cadre in the elections.
When the Jan Sangh had merged with the Janata Party and had taken pledge for secularism at the Gandhi Samadhi under the leadership of Jai Prakash Narain in 1977, it had refused to resign from the RSS membership though the dual membership controversy (both membership of the Janta Party and the RSS) had brought down the Morarji Desai Government in 1979. Thus it will be seen that it is firmly tied to the apron strings of RSS and its strident anti-minorities stance will never be diluted. Those so called NDA secular partners are deceiving themselves or fooling the people, if they pretend that the BJP will ever give up its Hindutva plank.
Also, in view of the upcoming elections in Maharashtra in October the Shiv Sena-BJP are trying to stir communal passions. The bombs thrown by unknown motor cycle riders at the mosques during Friday prayers in Prabhani and Jalna is an obvious attempt in that direction. The winning of election in Maharashtra by the Sangh Parivar is of great significance. It thinks it is an opportunity to shake the UPA Government at the Centre. Defeat of the Congress NCP alliance in Maharashtra can have long term consequences. If the BJP-Shiv Sena combination can win in Maharashtra they can try to win over Sharad Pawar and persuade him to join NDA. Sharad Pawar is known to have soft corner for the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. Also, the Mumbai Municipal Corporation under Shiv Sena has passed a resolution making singing Vande Mataram compulsory in municipal schools. They remember Vande Mataram at the time of elections only.
The Sena is also very eager to come back to power and will go to any extent in playing up Hindutva card. It is very unfortunate that the Election Commission is satisfied with these parties signing pledge of secularism although their propaganda machinery aggressively works to propagate communal issues during the elections. What a contradiction. How can a party taking pledge for secularism as required by the election commission openly and aggressively propagate Hindutva? Can they not be disqualified on grounds of breaking their secular pledge? Is it not against the Constitution to propagate Hindutva during the election campaign? It is for the authorities to decide.
It seems secularism is becoming a distant dream in view of increasing communalisation of our politics. Forget about Nehruvian secularism even Gandhian concept of religious harmony is becoming a dream rather than reality. Every religious group, every religious community, wants to bring in sectarian issues in political arena. Those who strive for inter-religious harmony will have to face increasing challenges in coming days. And yet inter-religious harmony is so vital for our multi-religious society. «
By Asghar Ali Engineer
The BJP was so sure of its victory in the last Lok Sabha election that it feigned to have given up its Hindutva card and even tried to appeal (‘appease’) to minorities for votes. In Bihar the then Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee even promised in his speech at Kishenganj that he will appoint 200,000 Urdu teachers, if elected to power. However, the Indian electorate inflicted crushing defeat on the BJP-led NDA and elected the UPA Government instead.
However, the Sangh Parivar overconfident of BJP’s victory could not accept the defeat in true democratic spirit and is feeling highly frustrated. The NDA members, particularly those of BJP are even refusing to behave as a responsible opposition in the Parliament. They have been obstructing the procedure and refusing to allow the parliament to function on one pretext or the other. They raised the issue of ‘tainted ministers’ and stalled parliament for days. They did not even allow debate on budget and it had to be passed without any discussion. They thus made history of sorts. Thus the NDA leaders are responsible for waste of public money and answerable to the electorate. If they do not follow the norms of democratic behaviour they do not deserve to be elected.
What is worse is that they are now adopting quite aggressively their old Hindutva course which, they had assured Indian people, they had abandoned. In 1980 also they had assured people of India that they have adopted ‘secularism and Gandhian socialism’ but abandoned it in favour of aggressive communalism the moment they faced crushing defeat in Parliamentary elections of 1984 when they got only two seats.
Again facing defeat in Lok Sabha elections of 2004 they have gone back to Hindutva politics with vengeance. Thus communal forces can hardly be relied. While in power and sure of their continued hold on it they feign to be secular and adopt aggressive communalism the moment they loose power. They have played the same game this time around. Now they are going back to aggressive Hindutva in view of state elections in Maharashtra and in Bihar after a few months.
One such issue is of Veer Savarkar. Mani Shankar Aiyer ordered removal of poems of Veer Savarkar from the cellular jail of Andaman. The BJP is raising hue and cry over the issue. In Maharashtra of course they have left it to Shiv Sena as Savarkar’s issue is highly emotive in Maharashtra. Thus the BJP who is part of alliance with Shiv Sena wants the Sena to provoke electorate on this issue while it would take up another issues. This itself shows that the BJP is not genuinely concerned with Savarkar issue but wants to exploit it for election purposes through Shiv Sena.
Veer Savarkar’s grand niece Uttara Sahasrabuddhe who teaches political science in the Bombay University, has alleged that both the Congress and BJP-Shiv Sena are trying to turn Veer Savarkar into an election issue. According to her this was hardly a good reason for the Sena and the BJP to boycott Parliament when the budget was being passed, she maintained.
She also said that if the Sangh Parivar was sincere in its protest against what the Congress had done, it should ask the lieutenant governor of the Andamans to put the plaque back. The lieutenant governor Mr. Ram Kapse, was a BJP appointee and belongs to that party. She also said in her statement to The Asian Age that Savarkar was a rationalist. He never thought cow was so sacred and not be killed. He specifically wrote in one of the articles, she noted that "the cow was a useful animal once upon a time when we were dependent on agriculture. But don’t make it a sacred animal. If you believe that God resides in a cow it’s foolish."
Savarkar also maintained, according to her that if you want to differentiate between Western civilisation and Indian civilisation, then you must know that after the Renaissance movement the West took to rationalism as its basis and made tremendous progress. We still stick to what is written in Vedas and Puranas, and because of this tendency we are stuck in the past.
Of course she rightly points out that "The Sangh Parivar cannot eschew or digest these essays. The Sangh Parivar considers cow as sacred and VHP and Bajrang Dal harass even those who take old oxen or buffaloes for slaughter. One of the main agendas of the BJP is to ban cow slaughter throughout India. The BJP even justified killing of Dalits in Haryana who were skinning dead cows a few years ago?
Thus it is clear that the BJP wants to exploit Veer Savarkar's issue for its own political purposes while totally rejecting Savarkar’s rational thoughts. It would hardly convince anyone of its sincerity.
Another issue BJP is preoccupied with is that of arrest of Uma Bharati, former Chief Minister of M.P. In fact there are indications that the BJP wanted to get rid of Uma Bharati as Chief Minister of M.P. and her arrest warrant came as a relief to the BJP central leadership. She may be an aggressive agitator but she was a failure as a chief minister and had created complex problems for the Party.
However, now the BJP is making her arrest as a national issue and flying tricolour is being projected as a national mission. Of course tricolour is our national flag and we are all proud of that but one cannot take pride by making it as an anti-Muslim measure. Uma Bharati went to hoist tricolour on an Idgah, which is a disputed site. The Sangh Parivar had planned to convert the Hubli Idgah issue as a Babri Masjid of the South at that time though the matter was resolved amicably by persuading the Hubli Muslims to hoist the national flag on the Idgah.
Now the Sangh Parivar is thinking of taking out her Yatra flying tricolour. It is an old trick, which the Parivar plays repeatedly. In fact the RSS refuses to fly tricolour in its own Shakhas and flies Bhagwa flag. Let Uma Bharati fly tricolour on the RSS offices if she is so enthusiastic about flying tricolour. Let her fly it on temples as well. She is trying to earn electoral advantage in coming elections by raising these controversies. But now there is news that the Government of Karnataka may petition the Court to withdraw all cases against her thus depriving her the opportunity to be a martyr. The Congress is trying to defeat her game. The BJP has never been comfortable with secular issues or issues of development. It adopted Sadak-Bijli-Pani issue in M.P. election as it was agitating the minds of electorate in the state then. But as it was not sure whether this will click Uma Bharati was repeatedly raising the issue of Saraswati temple and Kamal Maula Masjid in Dhar, M.P. The other members of Sangh Parivar were playing up this issue to entice the voters for Sangh Parivar.
And now since the BJP is not in power at the Centre it has no compulsions or restraints of being in power and can try to go whole hog with Hindutva politics. BJP can never be secularised as long as it is tied firmly to the communal apron of the RSS. The RSS keeps on pressurising it to adopt aggressive Hindutva. And the BJP has to repeatedly assure the RSS that it will never offload the ideology of Hindutva without which it cannot get help of dedicated RSS cadre in the elections.
When the Jan Sangh had merged with the Janata Party and had taken pledge for secularism at the Gandhi Samadhi under the leadership of Jai Prakash Narain in 1977, it had refused to resign from the RSS membership though the dual membership controversy (both membership of the Janta Party and the RSS) had brought down the Morarji Desai Government in 1979. Thus it will be seen that it is firmly tied to the apron strings of RSS and its strident anti-minorities stance will never be diluted. Those so called NDA secular partners are deceiving themselves or fooling the people, if they pretend that the BJP will ever give up its Hindutva plank.
Also, in view of the upcoming elections in Maharashtra in October the Shiv Sena-BJP are trying to stir communal passions. The bombs thrown by unknown motor cycle riders at the mosques during Friday prayers in Prabhani and Jalna is an obvious attempt in that direction. The winning of election in Maharashtra by the Sangh Parivar is of great significance. It thinks it is an opportunity to shake the UPA Government at the Centre. Defeat of the Congress NCP alliance in Maharashtra can have long term consequences. If the BJP-Shiv Sena combination can win in Maharashtra they can try to win over Sharad Pawar and persuade him to join NDA. Sharad Pawar is known to have soft corner for the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. Also, the Mumbai Municipal Corporation under Shiv Sena has passed a resolution making singing Vande Mataram compulsory in municipal schools. They remember Vande Mataram at the time of elections only.
The Sena is also very eager to come back to power and will go to any extent in playing up Hindutva card. It is very unfortunate that the Election Commission is satisfied with these parties signing pledge of secularism although their propaganda machinery aggressively works to propagate communal issues during the elections. What a contradiction. How can a party taking pledge for secularism as required by the election commission openly and aggressively propagate Hindutva? Can they not be disqualified on grounds of breaking their secular pledge? Is it not against the Constitution to propagate Hindutva during the election campaign? It is for the authorities to decide.
It seems secularism is becoming a distant dream in view of increasing communalisation of our politics. Forget about Nehruvian secularism even Gandhian concept of religious harmony is becoming a dream rather than reality. Every religious group, every religious community, wants to bring in sectarian issues in political arena. Those who strive for inter-religious harmony will have to face increasing challenges in coming days. And yet inter-religious harmony is so vital for our multi-religious society. «
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