The street that connects that Malaknag and Chheni Chowk areas of Islamabad/Anantnag in south Kashmir. Photo by Nasir Patigaru, via Facebook, posted on 27 June.
Which Indian has not heard of General Dyer? General Dyer opened fire on unarmed protesters. Hundreds died, the figures are disputed between Indian and British version to this day. A commission of enquiry was set up by the English. General Dyer told the Hunter Commission, “I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself.” Continue reading A conversation in Sopore and other stories→
“The Muslim is not wanted in the armed forces because he is always suspect – whether we want to admit it or not, most Indians consider Muslims a fifth column for Pakistan” [Vengeance! India after the assassination of Indira Gandhi (New Delhi, Norton, 1985), pp. 1995-96] -George Fernandes
Amnesty International defines racial profiling as the targeting of individuals and groups by law enforcement officials, even partially, on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion, except when there is trustworthy information, relevant to the locality and timeframe, that links persons belonging to one of the aforementioned groups to an identified criminal incident or scheme.
Amidst the blood lust evident in the mass media in the run up to and especially the aftermath of the judgement on Kasab, comes a slight relief in the form of the following story in The Telegraph, Calcutta. Sociologist Andre Beteille, not particularly known for his radical and loony views, said “It appears that people want vengeance — not justice,” underlining that “the media’s role is crucial in whipping up passions. I’m not really surprised”.
A photograph and some extracts:
Special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam outside the court after the death sentence was delivered on Thursday. (PTI)
May 6: Special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam was asked outside court this afternoon: “Sir, what’s your score?”
Nikam figured out the question in a split second, beamed like a gladiator and replied with a chilling echo of Ab Tak Chhappan: “Thirty-eight death penalties and over 600 life terms.”
Clap, clap, clap….
The crowd, not entirely made of journalists, could not resist the temptation to celebrate. Crackers were burst, drums beaten, cheers whooped, effigies hanged and mock funerals held in an outbreak of exultation. “Death to Kasab! Hang him! Hang him!” they cried; Nikam waved heroically and flashed more Vs — the prize fighter who’d delivered the knockout punch for India…
[This article was first published in Dawn 12 April 2009. It is reproduced here courtesy South Asia Citizens Web. The recent reports of the most spine-chilling instance of flogging of a young woman by Taliban goons unleashed a wave of indignation across Pakistan. This comment by Pakistani journalist Beena Sarwar is self-explanatory. For all the political illiterates and those given to anti-Muslim hate-speech in this country, this report and the innumerable discussions and posts on sites like Chowk, should indicate how much the Taliban and terrorism are hated and resisted by ordinary ‘secular’ people and women’s and human rights groups in Pakistan. They should indicate that ‘Islam’ and ‘being Muslim’ are themselves intensely contested ideas. But of course, we know that nothing can teach these hate-mongers anything, for they are the mirror-image of the Taliban. And as for us, as the old song goes: hum korea mein hum hain hindustan mein/ hum roos mein hain, cheen mein japan mein…And one might add: Pakistan mein bhi hain aur sare jahaan mein…
(There we are in korea and in hindustan/in russia we are, in china and in japan/and in pakistan too we are, we’re in the whole wide world…)
It is people like us there who must fight the Taliban, and people like them here who must fight the Hindutva fascists – always, relentlessly…Even when in the minority and especially when the political parties and leaders desert en masse. – AN]
Demo against woman's flogging, courtesy LA Times
In the “flogging video’s” undated footage shot with a cellphone in Swat (judging by the language and clothes) a man whips a woman in red, her pinned face down on the ground and encircled by men. The leather strap strikes her back as she cries out in pain.
The video, circulated on the Internet before local television channels broadcast it, caused a furore both in Pakistan and internationally. What caused the outrage? The public punishment meted out to a woman — or the fact that it was broadcast?
Synopsis:
This report is based on police statements, press reports, testimonies of families and friends of the accused and other documentary evidence. It highlights the numerous contradictions in the police version(s) about the ‘encounter’ and the accusations.
A Karnataka dacoit with links to a radical Hindu rightwing group has confessed to having carried out the Hubli district court bombing of May10, 2008.
The blast took place as the first phase of polling for the Karnataka Assembly elections was on – in a magistrate’s courtroom where cases against top SIMI leaders including Safdar Nagori were scheduled to be heard two days later.
Does anybody remember the bomb blasts in Hubli (Karnataka, May 2008 ) courts last year when preparations were on for the coming state assembly elections? These blasts which took place on a holiday did not witness any casuality although they extensively damaged the court premises. But the most important part played by these blasts was the atmosphere it created in favour of the BJP.
As it always happens after any such mysterious sounding blasts, many innocents belonging to minority community were illegally detained and quite a few among them also were booked for their ‘role’ in the blasts. The police had promptly claimed that ‘sleeper cells belonging to LeT and SIMI’ had executed the blasts. Continue reading Hindutva Terrorism in Karnataka→
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, USA, UK, Spain, the Russian Federation, to name a few, are a testimony to the cruel attacks on civilians and other human rights abuses in the recent past by non-state armed groups, including terrorist groups. They are showing utter disdain for the lives of civilians and others, continuing a pattern of serious crimes and crimes against humanity. They fail to abide by even the most basic standards of humanitarian law. The attacks and other abuses by armed groups are so frequent and the security situation so grave, that it is impossible to calculate with any confidence the true toll upon the civilian population, let alone the long term consequences that so many people inevitably suffer.
Recently the clamour for a draconian terror bill came to fruition with rare alacrity. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment (UAPA) Bill was introduced and passed within two days by both houses of Parliament – quite a contrast to, say, the Women’s Reservation Bill, gathering dust now for more than a decade. Coming from a government that repealed POTA soon after it assumed power, the Bill unimaginatively mimics POTA almost entirely, revealing that little has been learnt from the recent history of TADA and POTA and the problems leading to their removal. While such statutes giving extraordinary powers to the police are introduced to cater to ‘exceptional’ situations, they can easily be deployed in ‘ordinary cases’ and indeed routinely are. The bleeding of one category into the other is inevitable, when the police alone decide which is which.
I have asked two colleagues who have been working on civil liberties in the war against terror to do an analysis of the Amendment to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the National Investigation Agency Act, and its implications. But in the meanwhile, here is a useful analysis by Rajeev Dhavan where he describes the amendment as a return of POTA and TADA. As if to fulfill Shuddha’s prophecies, the government according to Dhavan has created a law where everyone is suspect
After months in pre-trial detention under brutal investigation, the police will extract even untruths. The Bill casts a shadow on all of us. It is founded on the principle that everyone is suspicious or a suspect, with no fine distinction between the two. We are creating a suspicious state to empower suspicious officials and citizenry to act suspiciously against any supposed suspect. This Bill goes further than TADA or POTA in its creation of a suspicious state. India must fight terrorism, but the last thing India wants to be is a terrorist anti-terrorist state. – Rajeev DhavanContinue reading Rajeev Dhavan on The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act→
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially “Islamist” terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime in itself. [The Guardian, Saturday, 13 December 2008]
“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of a cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalistic industry, along plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good die like dogs, for no good reason.”
– Hunter Thompson in Generation of Swine
We, in the business of media, are running a trade in ‘faces;’ swapping ordinary ones for the attractive, distorting news coverage and not really giving a damn about it. But the craft of journalism was not always so warped. We made it so.
You have said everything there is to say, and felt everything there is to feel. You have shouted angrily or reflected seriously or stated in the calm tone of conviction that terrorists are as authoritarian as the states they target, that terrorists have no religion, that terrorists are cowards who target soft civilian populations. You have despaired at the carnage wreaked on a city sick and tired of having to be “resilient”; of having faced one disaster after the other – from floods to targeted attacks on specific communities to bomb blasts – and “emerged with its spirit intact”. Your heart has clenched painfully at the inconsolable tears of baby Moshe; at the blood-spattered, newly motherless one-year old Viraj in an exhausted Head Constable Salunkhe’s arms, entrusted to him by his father, a utensil seller wounded by bullets at CST. You have gazed numbly at the image of Maharashtra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare’s young son with drawn countenance bearing the ritual paraphernalia of his father’s cremation ceremonies. Despite yourself you felt a sudden glimmer of hope steal into you at the stony dignity in Kavita Karkare’s dry-eyed grief at her husband’s funeral, at her steadfast bindi and her coloured sari. You have hated yourself for being relieved that those you know in that poor torn city are safe, when hundreds you did not know were not.
In fear and foreboding the feeling has overcome you – “What lies ahead of us now?”
Anjum Altaf has sent us two posts on The South Asian Idea that reflect on the terrorism in Mumbai and discuss how best we can respond as Southasian citizens:
Those two M’s recur, on this blog and elsewhere, in the heated discussions around the tragic, provocatove events that have unfolded this past week. I am reminded of this point Martha Nussbaum wrote after Obama won: Continue reading “Mindless,” “Muslims”→
What is happening? The Taj is burning, gunmen are shooting, the police is storming, the Oberoi is burning, the army is descending, people are running; bleeding; dying. Barkha Dutt is talking, Rajdeep Sardesai is talking, Srinivasan Jain is talking, Vilas Rao Deshmukh is talking, L.K Advani is talking, Manmohan Singh is talking, Vikram Chandra is talking, an eye-witness is talking, the army chief is talking, the naval chief is talking, an ex-hostage is talking, the terrorist is talking, Javed Jaffery is talking, Arnab Goswami is talking, is anyone even listening, is everyone listening—But what is happening?
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That’s our problem.”
– Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit
Three month old Babu who is affectionately called Yuvraj also is not in a position to read the changes in his mother’s face nor can comprehend why everyone in the family has suddenly started looking tense these days. For the kid the world remains the same, but for his family members it has rather changed a lot.
On Wednesday, I met some young men from Dhule. I am not at all sure where Dhule is and I said as much to them. “There was some violence there. It has been in the news lately,” they said. “Did any bombs go off in Dhule?” said I. “No bombs, no. But there was communal violence. It was on the news.” “I only watch prime time news. I don’t usually manage to view the afternoon bulletins. Nor the eleven PM one (informative though they are),” I explained. “So where exactly is Dhule?” I persisted. “It is a district on the north-western tip of Maharashtra. It’s not so far from Malegaon.” Ah, Malegaon! Where the blasts occurred? Finally I had a co-ordinate. Continue reading Such absurdity on a Wednesday→
The well known journalist Praveen Swami, who is celebrated by some as an ‘encounter expert’ and ‘authority on terrorism’ has finally offered his comment on the Jamia Nagar encounter in the Hindu. See Behind the Batla House Encounter. It smells fresh.
Now, I really like Lewis Carrol, and am happy that Swami has invoked Carrol, Alice and Wonderland while criticising those (like me) who have chosen to take a skeptical stance towards the official handout of what exactly happened on the 19th of October in L-18, Batla House, Jamia Nagar. With due respect to Praveen Swami, lets read him in the spirit of Carrol and come to conclusions about who is Alice, who is the Red Queen and who is the white Rabbit, in due course.
It takes far more intelligence to read Swami than it must take for Swami to write like Swami. Which is disconcerting, given, that in Swamis case, he has a whole bureau full of intelligence to back him up, and all we have is the stuff between our individual ears, and occasionally our own eyes, our own ears and our own two feet. No wonder, we have to strain our credibility to believe the six and more impossible things that the police’s special cell, the intelligence bureau and its anointed experts would have us swallow whole for breakfast, with each morning’s headlines in the newspapers.
Guest post by AZIZ BURNEY, Editor, Rashtriya Sahara (Urdu), Delhi
It is a truth universally acknowledged that anything viewed from various angles presents various shapes. It is also a fact that your angle of view determines to a large extent the picture registered by your brain. An askew angle of view is bound to distort the picture. Reality defies comprehension without proper perspective. To date, we have not been able to understand what kind of picture the Delhi police is trying to draw in order to explain the incidents of September 19 as they happened. Continue reading Was it a recce or a planned raid?→
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 