This is something that i have been thinking of ever since Chomsky et
all brought out their series of letters on Nandigram, left unity etc, and now Tariq Ali on Why he will
not participate in Turin Book Fair. At such points, i imagine the
writer of the letter in an almost kung-fu posture – balanced on one
foot, maybe raised on one toe to make the stance more complete, the
other leg bent at the knee, hands in classic double punch pose. The
moment of “taking a stand”, defining his/her stance.
Continue reading Aman Sethi on Gajar Matar
Ignoramuses Unlimited?
Saffrons have once again demonstrated their idiocy in an ingenious manner.
If you find this to be an exaggeration, then perhaps you are not reading the newspapers properly. Perhaps it is high time that you get to know the recent controversy around a textbook brought out by the NDA government in Orissa. One can just imagine that if it would have been any other state ruled by the ‘pseudo secularists’ then by now a full scale violent agitation would have seen the light of the day with all the affiliated organisations of the Sangh Parivar, lending their support. Unfortunately it is not the case. And the person in charge of education department is none other than Mr Samir Dey, a hardcore RSS pracharak from his early days. Continue reading Ignoramuses Unlimited?
Conscience of the Company
A nocturnal gas leak in 1984 took the lives of more than 7,000 people in Bhopal over a three-day span, and a further 15,000 in the years that followed. The leak came from a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), now owned by Dow Chemical (DOW). The company is still denying its responsibility, and refuses to reveal the toxicological information of the gas, thwarting medical efforts to deliver appropriate treatment to more than 100,000 surviving victims. Should not there be a conscience of the company, which ensures that the Bhopal factory site and its surroundings are promptly and effectively decontaminated, that the groundwater is cleaned up, that the stockpiles of toxic and hazardous substances left at the site are removed, and that full reparation, restitution, compensation and rehabilitation are promptly provided for the continuing damage done to people’s health and environment by the ongoing contamination of the site? Should they not be ashamed of the lack of effective regulation and accountability systems, which have meant that court cases are dragging on, and corporations and their leaders continuing to evade accountability for thousands of deaths, widespread ill-health and ongoing damage to livelihoods?
Of course, our government has the primary obligation to secure universal enjoyment of human rights, and this includes an obligation to protect all individuals from the harmful actions of others, including companies. However, while the government has been frequently failing in regulating the human rights impact of business or ensuring access to justice for victims of human rights abuses involving business, the companies too have been complicit in their human rights abuses. In a democracy, a government will be taken to task for its failure. At the same time, there has also to be a call for the companies to be conscientious and accountable for their activities related to human rights. A few of them claim to engage with human rights responsibilities through voluntary consultations, relief and rehabilitation initiatives. While these have a role to play, such voluntarism can never be a substitute for concrete standards on businesses’ mandatory compliance with human rights. In India, as a minimum requirement, all companies should respect the right to information; free, prior, informed consent; and no displacement without rehabilitation, regardless of the sector, state or context in which they operate.
How To ‘Carve Out A Terrorist’ from an Innocent Person And Say It Works?
(Judge: The papers on my table show he is not Mukhtar. So what is his real name?
Officer: He is actually Aftab Alam Ansari.
Judge: That means you have arrested a wrong person. How can this horrible blunder take place?
The officer stayed silent.
Judge: If he is neither Mukhtar nor Raju, why did not you write that in the petition clearly? Have you written that? Please underline that and show it to me.
As the officer began scanning the petition, he looked puzzled.
Judge: I’m not going to accept this petition. Please go and make a fresh one.)
Aftab Alam Ansari, an electrician with a power company in Kolkatta, is finally free. And the ordeal through which he had to go through as a ‘terrorist’ is finally over.Recenly he met with the Chief Minister of Bengal to apprise him of the whole situation and seek help for his mother’s frailing health.
Continue reading How To ‘Carve Out A Terrorist’ from an Innocent Person And Say It Works?
Climaterror, boredom and media
The pressing, in fact the overpowering need to keep people perpetually agog with false excitement, generated by the fear of impending doom, played out in all its gory details over the last three days across the gossip channels that go in the name of News Channels and Glamour sheets that try to pass of as Newspapers.
26th January had come and gone, Sarkozy had come and gone without giving us the nuclear fuel that would have overnight made the greatest democracy into the second or third or fourth or the nth most happening country in the world.
State Repression In Chhattisgarh And Continued Detention Of Dr Binayak Sen
STATEMENT OF CONCERNED CITIZENS AND PEOPLE’S ORGANIZATONS
A group of former bureaucrats, academicians, lawyers and social activists visited Chhattisgarh from 18 – 22 January 2008 in connection with the prolonged incarceration of Dr Binayak Sen. The team met the Governor and Director General of Police and also met Dr Binayak Sen in the central prison at Raipur. Some members of the group also visited areas in the districts of Bastar, Dantewada and Bijapur.
In the light of the information gathered, the team is of the opinion that the charges filed against Dr Sen under the IPC, CrPC and the Chhattisgarh Public Safety Act (CPSA) are unwarranted and unconstitutional. The CPSA enables the government to interpret the rendering of simple humanitarian acts as unlawful The Act defines “unlawful activity” so broadly that every act of vigilant citizenship can be construed as unlawful and anti-national. Thus it is clear that Dr Sen is being targeted in his capacity as General Secretary of People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Chhattisgarh. The reports produced by the PUCL have highlighted the anti-constitutional violence legitimized by the state through the Salwa Judum campaign.
Continue reading State Repression In Chhattisgarh And Continued Detention Of Dr Binayak Sen
“Any Policeman Can Do This”
“Any policeman can do this”: for us ungrad students in Trivandrum, Kerala, in the 1980s, this was the cool way to refer to any really low-down, low-skill task. Partly it came from the defiant mood of that decade, when political action from marginalized social groups was taking shape and acquiring strength outside mainstream politics and the state. Partly it was rooted in our common feeling that the police force was essentially nothing but an arm of mainstream political forces.
Things, however, have changed in Kerala now. Civil society has changed. Economic inequality has skyrocketed since the 1980s. Kerala now has a substantial anti-political civil society obsessed with acquiring the golden key to consumer citizenship: skills to enter the global job market. The police force, too, has changed. It appears that the police, while still at the beck and call of ruling powers, are forging a new tie with this civil society. Nowhere is this more visible than in the recently reported incidents of civil social vigilantism under the eyes of compliant policemen. A few months back, in mid-2007, a gypsy woman was manhandled by a mob in a busy market in Edappal, in the northern district of Malappuram, and the police remained passive. Comparisons with “Bihar” (which the oh-so-socially-developed-Malayalee-middle class can scarcely endure) feel fast and thick and the government had to suspend the policemen guilty of negligence. Just the other day, a twenty year old man was accused of stealing a mobile phone and attacked by a mob in Trivandrum, and the police watched as he was forced to strip in public to prove his innocence. The phone was found later on someone else. Not that these mobs are anywhere close to consumer citizenship. But the objects which appeared stolen, the loss of which incited the mob to violence in these instances, are symbols of the new wealth of the Malayalee consumer citizen: a baby’s golden anklet, and a mobile phone. Thus the police have finally found their true allies: a thoroughly anti-political civil society paranoid about losing precious objects they have accumulated, who project the blame of such loss onto the outsider. Continue reading “Any Policeman Can Do This”
“Iraq Has Only Militants, No Civilians” by Dahr Jamail
“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H
Name them. Maim them. Kill them.
From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and attacks by the U.S. military have only killed “militants,” “criminals,” “suspected insurgents,” “IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,” “anti-American fighters,” “terrorists,” “military age males,” “armed men,” “extremists,” or “al-Qaeda.”
The pattern for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the early years of the occupation to today. Continue reading “Iraq Has Only Militants, No Civilians” by Dahr Jamail
Ashis Nandy on Modi’s victory
radical Islam in India as this generationu003cbr />remembers with gratitude the handsomeu003cbr />contribution of Rajiv Gandhi and his cohorts tou003cbr />Sikh militancy.u003cbr />u003cbr />The secularist dogma of many fighting the sanghu003cbr />parivar has not helped matters. Even those whou003cbr />have benefited from secular lawyers and activistsu003cbr />relate to secular ideologies instrumentally. Theyu003cbr />neither understand them nor respect them. Theu003cbr />victims still derive solace from their religionsu003cbr />and, when under attack, they cling moreu003cbr />passionately to faith. Indeed, shallow ideologiesu003cbr />of secularism have simultaneously broken the backu003cbr />of Gandhism and discouraged the emergence ofu003cbr />figures like Ali Shariatis, Desmond Tutus and theu003cbr />Dalai Lama – persons who can give suffering a newu003cbr />voice audible to the poor and the powerless andu003cbr />make a creative intervention possible from withinu003cbr />worldviews accessible to the people.u003cbr />u003cbr />Finally, Gujarat’s spectacular development hasu003cbr />underwritten the de-civilising process. One ofu003cbr />the worst-kept secrets of our times is thatu003cbr />dramatic development almost always has anu003cbr />authoritarian tail. Post-World War II Asia toou003cbr />has had its love affair with developmentalu003cbr />despotism and the censorship, surveillance andu003cbr />thought control that go with it. The East Asianu003cbr />tigers have all been maneaters most of the time.u003cbr />Gujarat has now chosen to join the pack.u003cbr />Development in the state now justifies amorality,u003cbr />abridgement of freedom, and collapse of socialu003cbr />ethics.u003cbr />u003cbr />Is there life after Modi? Is it possible to looku003cbr />beyond the 35 years of rioting that began in 1969u003cbr />and ended in 2002? Prima facie, the answer isu003cbr />"no". We can only wait for a new generation thatu003cbr />will, out of sheer self-interest and tiredness,u003cbr />learn to live with each other. In the meanwhile,u003cbr />we have to wait patiently but not passively tou003cbr />keep values alive, hoping that at some point willu003cbr />”,1] );
// –>
Future generations will as gratefully acknowledge the sangh parivar’s contribution to the growth of radical Islam in India as this generation remembers with gratitude the handsome contribution of Rajiv Gandhi and his cohorts to Sikh militancy. [The Times of India, 8 January]
Quote of the day
“It hasn’t got any definite meaning,” CJI K G Balakrishnan said today in response to a PIL that wanted ‘socialist’ deleted from the Constitution’s Preamble.
In a world where “comrades” want to embrace capitalism, does meaning have meaning?
Rights-Free Zones
‘O Father, this is a prison of injustice.
Its iniquity makes the mountains weep.
I have committed no crime and am guilty of no offence.
Curved claws have I,
But I have been sold like a fattened sheep.’
— Abdulla Thani Faris al Anazi, a Guantanamo detainee since 2002, arrested in Afghanistan, and turned over to the US forces by bounty hunters.
— Abdulla Thani Faris al Anazi, a Guantanamo detainee since 2002, arrested in Afghanistan, and turned over to the US forces by bounty hunters
11 January 2008 marks 6 years since the first detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay. The United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay is a rights-free zone, for the detention, treatment and trial of certain people in the ‘war on terror’. Here the Pentagon is authorised to hold non-US citizens in indefinite custody without charge; here detainees are barred from seeking any remedy in any proceedings in any US, foreign or international court; here if any detainee were to be tried, the trial would be by military commission — an executive body, and not an independent or impartial court. A memorandum from the Justice Department to the Pentagon advises that because Guantanamo Bay is not a sovereign US territory, the federal courts should not be able to consider habeas corpus petitions from ‘enemy aliens’ detained at the base.
Gujarat, numbers
The vagaries of the first-past-the-poll system in India make sure that we often over- or under-estimate the meaning of election results going strictly by who’s won how many seats. But if you go by factors such as vote share and seat-by-seat break-up, you will see the complexity of any election result. Once the results are out, the psephologist disappears. But that’s when he should be there.
Given below is a break-up of 33 of Gujarat’s constituencies, as circulated by an activist. Makes for interesting observations. Continue reading Gujarat, numbers
Each day Binayak Sen spends in jail is one day less for democracy in India
ON DECEMBER 10 this year, the day internationally observed as Human Rights Day, the Supreme Court of India denied bail to the veteran rights activist, Dr Binayak Sen, incarcerated since May in Raipur jail under the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. For those present, the 45-minute-long hearing was a horrible experience. We heard the prosecution claim that Dr Sen was part of the dreaded Maoist formation, and that giving him his freedom would mean setting him loose to spread subversion against the State. We saw, to our shock, how no verification was made of the prosecution’s claims, even as the government lawyer presented his summary of the contents of Dr Sen’s computer in the vilest terms, telling the court it contained letters describing how Dr Sen had helped organise an arms training camp at Nagpur. Defence counsel Rajeev Dhawan pointed out that the prosecution was distorting the letter’s contents, that Dr Sen had been in Nagpur in the course of a fact-finding mission into last year’s lynching of a Dalit family at Kherlanji and that he had nothing to do with any underground training. But the court felt that Dhawan’s arguments were matters to be looked into by the trial court, and it was satisfied that there was enough reason to deny Dr Sen bail.
Continue reading Each day Binayak Sen spends in jail is one day less for democracy in India
Paste A Poster, Go To Jail
The recent bill aptly titled ‘Delhi Prevention of Property Defacement Act 2007’ introduced in the Delhi assembly makes depressing reading. According to its provisions a mere act of putting posters on the walls or writing anything with chalk. paint or any other material can make you liable for a punishment of one year in jail. Additionally you can be asked to pay a fine of Rs.50,000.
The proposed act is said to be an improvement in the earlier act in operation in the state which was considered lenient. With this act the state seems to have corrected its mistake and declared it a ‘cognisable offence’. Continue reading Paste A Poster, Go To Jail
Human rights and public health are now the gravest threats to people’s safety
Excerpts from Saikat Datta on the doctored case against Binayak Sen.
What is the basis of the Chhattisgarh police’s case against Dr Sen? The chargesheet against him says he is a Naxalite sympathiser. This conclusion was reached after his name came up when the police recovered three letters from suspected Maoist Piyush Guha, arrested at the Raipur railway station. These were written to Guha by another alleged Maoist, Narayan Sanyal, presently lodged in Raipur Jail. The police claim Guha, under custodial interrogation, confessed that Dr Sen acted as courier.
Dr Sen did meet Sanyal in jail on several occasions. But each time it was with due permission from the jail superintendent and a body search before and after his meetings. And even if we were to accept that Dr Sen smuggled the letters out, what exactly was “incriminating” in them? One letter deals with farmer-related issues, the letter writer’s health and so on. In another note, Sanyal is discussing issues relating to his case and the approach his lawyer has taken in court. In yet another, he complains of there being “no
magazines” to read in jail and terrible conditions in prison.
Activist-lawyers like Prashant Bhushan see the framing of Dr Sen on such flimsy evidence as “a message that clearly states that people must shut their eyes to violations of human rights of the marginalised or risk arrest”.
Continue reading Human rights and public health are now the gravest threats to people’s safety
It’s a new year, and Binayak Sen is still in prison
Binayak Sen’s appeal to the Supreme Court for bail was dismissed on December 10, 2007 (in one of those meaningless ironies, December 10th is of course, International Human Rights Day).
A doctor working in Chhattisgarh, Binayak was arrested on May 14th 2007. His crime? He visited and treated an ailing prisoner in Raipur Central Jail with the permission of the jail authorities. The prisoner is a Naxalite. So Dr Sen is assumed to be a terrorist conspiring to overthrow the state, so dangerous that he cannot be given bail.
Continue reading It’s a new year, and Binayak Sen is still in prison
Three Responses to Prabhat Patnaik – Praful Bidwai, Dilip Simeon, Manash Bhattacharjee
[As part of the ongoing post-Nandigram debate, we publish below three more responses to Prabhat Patnaik’s earlier attack on non-CPM Left intellectuals. We publish them here for record and general interest and do not necessarily endorse all the comments. – Admin]
[Praful Bidwai’s piece was first published in Mathrubhoomi magazine. It was forwarded to us by way of Manju Menon with the following interesting prefatory comment:
“The West Bengal Coastal Zone Management Authority (WBCZMA) that recommended the change in status of Nayachar from CRZ I to CRZ III so that the chemical hub can be located here has as one of its members Smt Tamalika Panda Seth, the Haldia Municipality Chairperson. She is the wife of CPM MP Laxman Seth (“who was largely held responsible for the spiralling violence in Nandigram.”). She was made member of the
Authority when it was reconstituted in March 2005. She was elected as Chairperson when the CPM retained its power in Haldia in the 2007 civic polls.
The state Cabinet had approved the Nayachar site in its August 17 meeting. After this, it was only a matter of time before it prevailed over the WBCZMA! No amount of ‘scientific data’ can possibly stop the change of status of Nayachar from CRZ I to III.
‘Another case of regulatory capture’?”]
THE LEFT NEEDS RETHINKING, NOT ABJECT APOLOGIA
By Praful Bidwai
Prabhat Patnaik has done what no other intellectual allied to West Bengal’s Left Front has even attempted after Nandigram: namely, try to turn the tables on Left-leaning critics of the CPM by gratuitously attacking them for their ” messianic moralism” and their presumed
“disdain” for “the messy world of politics”.
His agenda goes well beyond defending the CPM or apologising for one of the most shameful episodes in the Indian Left’s history, involving the killing of peasants, devastation of thousands of livelihoods, sexual violence, and gross abuse of state power. It is to declare all criticism of the CPM’s policies and actions illegitimate and
misconceived, however sympathetic or inspired by radical ideas it might be.
The impact of Patnaik’s article will be to prevent rethinking within the CPM, which could produce course correction. Ironically for Patnaik, it will only strengthen the party’s neoliberal orientation and the “cult of development” that neoliberalism spawns, which he
rails against.
Worse, it will harden the West Bengal CPM’s readiness to brutalise peasants and workers (in whose name it speaks) in the interests of the rich and powerful, like the Tatas, Jindals, and the Salim group which is a front for Indonesia’s super-corrupt Suharto family.
Looking forward looking back
While the Bali conference is finally over, work on its roadmap is only just begun. Below, am pasting a summary of Bali prepared by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. The full report can be found on their website: http://www.iisd.ca
A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF COP 13 & COP/MOP 3
BALI: ISLAND OF THE GODS AND BREAKTHROUGHS?
You should not be impelled to act for selfish reasons, nor should you be attached to inaction. (Bhagavad Gita. 2.47)
Marking the culmination of a year of unprecedented high-level political, media and public attention to climate change science and policy, the Bali Climate Change Conference produced a two-year “roadmap” that provides a vision, an outline destination, and negotiating tracks for all countries to respond to the climate challenge with the urgency that is now fixed in the public mind in the wake of the headline findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. The outline destination is an effective political response that matches both the IPCC science and the ultimate objective of the Convention; it was never intended that the Bali Conference would focus on precise targets. Instead, the divergent parties and groups who drive the climate regime process launched a negotiating framework with “building blocks” that may help to square a number of circles, notably the need to reconcile local and immediate self-interest with the need to pursue action collectively in the common and long-term interests of people and planet. The informal dialogue over the past two years has now been transformed into a platform for the engagement of parties from the entire development spectrum, including the United States and developing countries.
A Circus, Some Laughter, A Film Festival
I would be very reluctant to call the recently – concluded Twelfth International Film Festival of Kerala (7-14 December) a ‘circus’, but well. When the CPM in Kerala wears Caesar-like accoutrements, one may have to call it just that! At the press conference organized a few days before the festival – actually the day on which Buddhadev admitted to his ‘mistake’ — M A Baby, CPM intellectual and Minister, Cultural Affairs, Government of Kerala spoke at length about how Lenin and other worthies of the Soviet Union had endorsed cinema as a medium to ‘educate and entertain’ the masses. However when he announced the name of the opening film after many such lofty words, ripples of laughter filled the hall.
The opening film was Hana Makhmalbaf’s ‘Buddha Collapsed out of Shame’! Of course, the CPM intellectuals could not laugh; nor could they snap at back-benchers who asked whether it wasn’t ‘Buddhadev Collapsed out of Shame’. Thus it was clear, that despite the circuses, the spectre of the people continues to haunt the CPM, to borrow Partho Sarathi Ray’s words.
Monobina Gupta on Inconvenient Women
Recently Kiran Bedi, the country’s first woman police officer, sought voluntary retirement after being in the eye of a storm following her allegations of gender discrimination in the police force. Bedi, who had transformed Tihar jail from filthy dungeons to a clean and livable place and has had an outstanding career, was superseded for the post of Delhi’s police commissioner. Because she was a woman.
Women in civil service have come up against sexism time and again. Madhu Bhaduri, who joined the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in 1968, recalls how women IFS officers launched their first protest against blatant gender discrimination in this elite branch of service, which was at that time wrapped up in layers of discriminatory codes.
Here is an account of how it all started…
Charu Gupta on Om Shanti Om and Saawariya
Like many other lovers of Bollywood cinema, I too was caught up since October this year in the countdown to the battle of all battles, with the release of Om Shanti Om (OSO) and Saawariya on 9 November 2007. Reams have been written, debated and analysed on the two films in newspapers, television networks, and everyday discussions. They have been depicted as films catering to very different sensibilities, and representing vastly diverse forms. The verdict seems to have declared both as average films, though OSO seems to be faring better than Saawariya at the box office. I enjoyed the first half of OSO particularly and thought Saawariya as a film with great form, but not much content.
However, as a fan of Bollywood popular cinema, what struck me most was one striking similarity between the two films. I thought both the films offered great visual pleasure and feast for the female spectators, where the spectacular and stylish nude male bodies and images of both Ranbir Raj Kapoor and Shahrukh Khan, though very different from each other, were the prime objects of desire and erotic spectacle. Both OSO and Saawariya have urban heroes, whose bodies are produced and carved, rooted in providing a voyeuristic visual treat especially to most straight women and gay men. The identity of both the heroes in these films in centrally tied to the consumption of their nude bodies by the viewer. The films in some senses signify the coming of age of a new genre of Bollywood cinema, where it is not so much the female body but the male body which circulates and is on display, offering a sexualised imaginative anatomy. They also signify that the language of discourse of Hindi films has undergone a dramatic post modernist change in its conception of desire, where most of it is conducted not through the soul but through the body. There is no central heart, but a decentring of emotions at play here. In the recent past too, nude male bodies of Hrithik Roshan and Salman Khan have been offered to the viewer. It perhaps is also a reflection of the fact that more and more women are crowding the cinema halls and form at times the major chunk of spectatorship, and they are a vital part of the cinematic experience.
