Gmail - Chitralekha.JPG

Gmail - Chitralekha.JPG

The Verdict 2007, Gujarat : " The Development Unabated "Goes Unabated

The Verdict -2007 , Gujarat: "The Development" goes Unabated

Gujarat has again passed the majority test.
It apparently means that hating, killing and raping of minority is
okey, if
you have the sanction of majority.
Let the minority be condemned for ever to live as second class citizens,
always begging for their lives and honour.
This is just not a case of our Consitution being undermined by the
proponents of hindutva alone.
If we take the recent developments in Nandigran of West Bengal, or
those reported
from the states of Jharkhand, Chathisghad Andhrapradesh, Orissa Kerala
or any other state for that matter,
cases of cynical betrayal of the Rule Of Law by each political
partyor group , which competes with the others to push through a
neoliberal economic
agenda of Development can be seen. Despite the apparent differences in
degrees in their
stated commitments to formal democracy and peaceful forms of
governance with
allegiance to the Constitution, there seems to be a consensus running that
it is neither unethical nor undemocratic to kill, rape or loot people, if
'democratically' sanctioned by "people's mandate".
Be it the Salva Judum, the Hindutva brigade, or the armed party cadres
(with police on their side)
fighting the unarmed people engaged in democratic struggle
to protect their agricultural lands from being taken away for the sake
of SEZ,
the scenario is same everywhere notwithstanding the differences in
rhetoric.
How could it otherwise happen that the secular and non-hindutwa based
Rajeev Gandhi Foundation and the popular magazine India Today (again,
secular) capped Narendra Modi with the title of the best CM who had fared
well in bringing development to any State in recent times? Apparently,
these were outcomes of opinion polls conducted / partaken by the
representatives of classes aspiring for higher GDPs even at the
expense of
letting down vast multitudes of less privileged people.
The latter, the same people who eagerly wait outside for the crumbs of
Development are virtually being told that their fortunes depend on
supporting the very same agenda of Development: ( Never mind those
killings, rapes or lootings of 2002 done in broad daylight, though you
were
actually missing a chance, when you had been assured of impunity for
three
days not only for doing anything to dismember 'the other' , but also to
help yourself by appropriating the booty)
Though there is no claim to adding any new insight to the too familiar
discourse of Upholding Democracy Against Hate and Bigotry, I would
suggest that it is
imperative to focus more on the near consensus between the ruling
classes over the neoliberal agenda of Development as one that obscures and
subverts the Rule of Law and the Constitution , than on dwelling too
much on
the agenda of Hindurashtra itself (because it is unmistakably clear,
anyway).

South Asia Is Cynical About HR

Indian Express
December 25, 2007

SOUTH ASIA'S CYNICAL ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS

by Ratna Kapur

Casting a glance across the South Asian region,
social and political protests abound. States
continue to oppress and exclude sections of their
citizenry from political participation or use the
very tools of law to justify incarceration in the
name of national security. As Sri Lanka quietly
slides back into civil war, Pakistan sets up a
facade of democracy, Nepal remains paralysed by
political equivocation, Burma silences its
protesting monks and India still drags its heels
over providing justice to Muslims in Gujarat and
Sikhs in Delhi, the question arises as to why the
region remains so afflicted by political
instability, civil conflict and reactionary
nationalism? Sixty years after the adoption of
the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, most
countries in the region face
serious instability,
impunity and human rights abuses.

There is no comprehensive explanation why
compliance with human rights remains such an
elusive possibility within our region. But there
is no question that human rights advocates must
take a moment to reflect on the ways in which
human rights have at times been implicated in
producing some of the harms we are witnessing
today. When the US bombs Afghanistan partly in
the name of women's rights, or proponents of
Hindutva use equality rights discourse to attack
special measures for Muslims, there is a need to
interrogate how and why human rights are
susceptible to promoting such agendas.

Human rights constantly need to be addressed
within the context in which they operate rather
than be linked to some universal prescription to
'do good'. In countries such as India or Sri
Lanka, the forces of reactionary nationalism have
pushed in the
direction of 'one nation, one
people' to justify the incarceration, if not the
extermination of those who refuse to comply with
such a claim. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa
government has declared an all-out war against
the LTTE and the elimination of its entire cadre.
The government's hand is strengthened by the
Buddhist Sinhalese nationalists. They have
characterised any proposal for the opening of a
full office by the High Commissioner for Human
Rights as nothing more than foreign interference
and an abrogation of Sri Lanka's sovereignty and
national integrity. Politically, while the High
Commissioner's visit in October to Sri Lanka
marked a high water point in drawing attention to
the impunity with which atrocities were being
inflicted by all sides, the government failed to
address the seriousness of these complaints in
its watered-down proposal to simply chronicle
abuses rather than effectively
redress them.

In Nepal, the failure of the Seven Party Alliance
to ensure polls in November after the successful
people's movement has dashed expectations for a
stable democratic structure in the short term.
Many issues thrown up by the decade-long armed
conflict - which resulted in disappearances and
human rights violations by all sides - remain
unresolved. In Pakistan, a military dictatorship
is attempting to refashion itself as a
standard-bearer for democracy. Even while
everyone recognises that in this instance the
emperor has no clothes, Washington has declared
Musharraf a true democrat. Meanwhile, the human
rights violations of lawyers, the subordination
of the judiciary, and the impunity with which the
government conducts its affairs, has amplified
the voice of religious fundamentalists, and
shrunk the space for civil society. This does not
bode well for any future progress on human
rights
in that country.

While India stands firm in its commitment to the
democratic process, the Sangh Parivar continues
to attack special provisions for Muslims and
appeasement as non-secular and violating
constitutional commitments to equality. It is
indeed a prime example of how rights can be used
to advance non-progressive agendas and are not
per se liberatory nor emancipatory. At the same
time, the Left has lost the plot in its
intransigent opposition to the nuclear deal. The
deal promotes the human right to development and
has the ability to transform the lives of the
poor.

The history of human rights has not been a long
one towards progress. But the Janus-faced aspect
of human rights needs to be acknowledged. While
they can be used to advance equality, liberty and
freedom, it is also at the same time informed by
racial, religious and gender superiority, all of
which are used to
justify the exclusion of human
rights protections to a host of people.

The exclusive potential of human rights remains
evident in all countries in our region. It is a
site of power, where different visions of the
world are being fought out. To cede this terrain
would enable less progressive forces to define
the meaning of human rights. It is a messy
terrain, where ultimately mere good intentions do
not always result in progressive ends, and where
quite clearly virtue does not always move in the
direction of the virtuous.

The writer is director, Centre for Feminist Legal Research

Gmail - SACW Digest, Vol 54, Issue 7

Gmail - SACW Digest, Vol 54, Issue 7

LET'S SHARE THE CONCERNS OF THE DAY

ON THE WORLD HUMAN RIGHTS DAY,THE 10th OF DECEMBER,
LET US RENEW OUR PLEDGE TO DO WHATEVER LITTLE POSSIBLE TO END
UNNECESSARY VIOLENCE AND HATRED TOWARD THE LESS PRIVILEGED;
LET'S CONTINUE TO SHARE THE VISIONS ABOUT A POSSIBLE WORLD
WHERE RELIGION, ETHNICITY,RACE, CASTE,GENDER MATTER LESS,
AND HUMAN RIGHTS TALKED ABOUT IN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR UNIVERSAL
ACCEPTANCE, RATHER THAN THEIR VIOLENT ABUSES AND DEPRIVATIONS BY
SOVEREIGN STATES AND ORGANIZED NON-STATE ENTITIES.

THASLEEMA VICTIM OF NOT BIGOTRY ALONE, BUT ALSO OF POLITICAL OPORTUNISM AND MANIPULATIONS(Two Pieces Of Writings)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112807N.shtml

Exiled by Bigots' Edicts
By J. Sri Raman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 28 November 2007

A woman writer who won literary trophies in her twenties. An aged artist once known and loved for his bare-foot charm and innovative brush. Both are on the run today. And no force in the vast South Asian region, stretching from New Delhi to Dhaka, can help either return home in dignity.

Painfully dramatic events over the past week, involving the persecuted Bengali writer and reminding many of the banished painter, illustrate a major threat to peace in the subcontinent - inside and between its impoverished nations. Competing forces of bigotry, whose edicts have condemned both to cruel exiles, can coexist with each other, comfortably so. But they cannot coexist with enduring South Asian peace.

Forty-five-year-old writer Taslima Nasreen is being kicked around like a football for a week now within India, where she sought asylum 13 years ago. She has been living in Kolkata (once Calcutta), capital of the State of West Bengal, which shares a border and the Bengali language and culture with Bangladesh, despite a religious divide. In this city and State, known for its love of literature and arts, she has seemed happy and at home. Not any more. It now appears doubtful whether she can return to even her first place of exile and resume her life there for long.

Maqbool Fida Husain is more than twice Nasreen's age. The 92-year-old painter, among the best-known artists of India, was forced to flee abroad in 2006. He now divides his time between Dubai and London, telling every interviewer about how much he misses his Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and the country that inspired his canvases. He, too, however, has no realistic hope of returning home in the foreseeable future.

Nasreen's exile within an exile began on November 21. That was the day Kolkata, seat of a Left Front State government, surprised the whole country with a violent agitation demanding Nasreen's expulsion from West Bengal, if not her deportation from India. The Muslims of the city and the State, whom the agitators claimed to represent, had never raised this demand in all these years.

What made the event more intriguing was it came as an unexpected twist to a rally supposedly in solidarity with a struggle of farmers in Nandigram, a far-away village that had witnessed much violence earlier. The farmers were soon all forgotten, as agitators turned the city streets into a battlefield and would not relent until Nasreen's flight became known.

Starting as a physician in a government hospital in Dhaka, Nasreen acquired both fame and infamy as she turned increasingly to writing in the early nineties. It is for literary critics to judge the quality of her works. It was her courage of conviction, as a writer for women's rights at the risk of incurring the clerics' wrath, that won her instant recognition and increasing admiration besides opposition of a most obscurantist kind.

Her strong views on this subject inevitably made her a staunch opponent of politico-religious forces that stood for persecution of the minorities (including the Hindus and Ahmedia sect of Islam) in Bangladesh. In 1994, she came out with her best-known novel titled "Lajja (Shame),"' which brought out the sectarian backlash against the minorities following the demolition of the Babri mosque in India's Ayodhya by the far-right hordes.

This brave effort brought her honors abroad, including the Sakharov Freedom of Thought Award from the European Parliament. What followed in Bangladesh, however, was an official ban on the book. The slew of court cases launched against her soon forced her to flee the country with the government encouraging her self-exile.

Husain's troubles also began in the early nineties, which saw the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political front of the far right, advancing towards power in New Delhi through the Ayodhya agitation. Interestingly, the anti-Husain campaign was initiated with a far-right journal abrupt re-publication of some of his portraits of a Hindu pantheon, dating back to the seventies, and assailing them as a crime against the majority community.

Husain was alleged to have offended "Hindu sensibilities" by painting some of the female deities in an "indecent" fashion. The far-right crusaders for "cultural nationalism" did not even seem to know of the similarly exquisite sculptures of the same deities in shrines where common Indians have worshiped down the centuries without any qualm.

A series of court cases hounded Husain too. When threats to his life made it even worse, Husain left India in 2006.

It is not only opponents of religious bigotry who see a parallel in the two cases of persecution. The tormentors of Nasreen actually cite the two cases together as evidence of even-handedness. Their repeated refrain is they had supported the cause of majority sectarianism in Husain's case and would like the courtesy to be reciprocated.

Some observers point to a certain subtle difference between the two cases. Husain's persecution was a punishment the majority meted out to an offender from a minority. Nasreen's torture, however, was an example of a minority community chastising one of its own. While the observation has a certain validity, it is not as if Husain has been a darling of the obscurantists of his own community.

He faced their ire when his experimental film titled "Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities" was released in 2004. Clerics took strong exception to one of the songs in the film on the grounds it reproduced words from the Quran and, therefore, amounted to a gross blasphemy. The film had to be pulled out of theaters after a day's showing.

The BJP has not agreed to back the bullying of Nasreen as a quid pro quo for the minority sectarians' support for Husain's banishment. It has, in fact, seized the opportunity to mount an offensive on the Left and the Manmohan Singh government. The episode, the far right claims, exposes the hypocrisy of its political foes and the skin-deep nature of their "secularism."

It is true that often, perhaps too often, parties and forces that claim to fight the BJP and the rest of the far right fail to do so frontally and betray a lack of firmness in the face of a rabble-rousing campaign by religious fundamentalists. This, however, does not make the BJP's allegedly pro-Nasreen agitprop anything but an extension of its anti-minority offensive, which includes demonization of Muslims and Islam as a whole.

The most outrageously funny part of the BJP campaign must be the pro-Nasreen perorations emanating from Narendra Modi. The BJP chief minister of the State of Gujarat, who presided over the anti-minority pogrom of 2002, has offered Nasreen unsolicited protection. He has invited her to seek asylum in Gujarat, if she cannot return to Kolkata. No one has asked him where the thousands of Muslims, who were forced to flee Gujarat and still cannot return home, will find their refuge.

Even as politics rages all around her, Nasreen is being shifted from place to place for "her own safety" as intelligence agencies continue to insist. And, even as his name is being bandied about in the debate over her, there is no word about anyone doing anything to ensure the return of nonagenarian Husain who has brought laurels to his nation as Nasreen did to hers.

---

A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of "Flashpoint" (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.

II.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2219223,00.html

'Condemned to life as an outsider

Driven out of Kolkata by violent protests last week, Taslima Nasrin talks to Kathleen McCaul from hiding about her battle for free expression

Friday November 30, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Writers lives are proverbially quiet, but Taslima Nasrin's is a frighteningly noisy one. Last week in Kolkata, where the Bangladeshi author has been living since 2004, Muslim groups who claimed she had insulted Islam demonstrated to demand she leave India. Hundreds took to the streets and violence flared.

"There was burning going on and I was terrified. The two policemen who were supposed to be guarding my door had gone. People said I would be killed by Islamic fundamentalists, the mob would come and attack my house," Nasrin says, her voice shaky as she speaks from a safe house near Delhi.

It's not the first time public feeling about her writing has forced her to flee. Angry, atheistic, and sexually explicit, her work has long been the source of fierce controversy. In 1994, she slipped out of Bangladesh after her books' vehement attacks on the position of women in Islamic societies led to charges of blasphemy. She then spent a decade in Sweden where, she has said, she felt "condemned to life as an outsider". Her novels, poetry and journalism have been translated from Bengali into 20 languages but life as an insider, it seems, remains a distant hope.

Nasrin was born in 1962 into a devout Muslim family. Her own experience of sexual abuse and her work as a gynaecologist in Bangladesh - where she routinely examined young girls who had been raped - informs her angry writing about the treatment of women in Islam and against religion in general. Her most famous novel, Lajja (Shame), focused on state-sponsored persecution and violence against Bangladesh's Hindu minority and sparked off protests which led to the proceedings against her. Her four volumes of sexually explicit memoirs - still banned in Bangladesh - and outspoken newspaper articles have also fuelled her notoriety.

She subsequently became a standard-bearer for freedom of speech and was written about admiringly in the New Yorker and Time. She remembers how every country wanted to give her shelter: she was viewed as a status symbol of democracy. But she wanted to go home. She tried again and again before finally settling three years ago in the Indian state of West Bengal, which, together with modern day Bangladesh, made up the old pre-partition state of Bengal.

"I want to live in Kolkata, I don't want to live in Europe, I can't write there," she said. "I write in Bengali and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture." For two years it seemed she might have found a home there, but last week's events - which saw 50 people injured and a curfew imposed - have put paid to that dream.

She first travelled under the cover of a burqa to the western Indian state of Rajasthan, thousands of miles away from West Bengal, but the police there said they couldn't provide her with adequate security. She was moved to Delhi in a convoy of cars, chased by media who picked up grainy images of her in the back of an official car being whisked away.

Nasrin's critics say she is intentionally outrageous and should have seen this coming. Earlier in the year an Islamic group offered a reward for her beheading and protesters - including local politicians - ransacked a book launch in Tamil Nadu for her novel Shodh (Getting Even).

"This is a culmination of the offence her writing has caused over the years, " said Dr Alum Mansoor, general secretary of All India Milli Council, one of the groups which has been protesting against Nasrin.

Nasrin first enraged clerics with a series of Bangladeshi newspaper columns which criticised the treatment of women under Islam; describing in one article the execution of a 21-year-old woman by burying her waist-deep in a pit and then stoning her because her marriage was deemed un-Islamic.

But all this was over 10 years ago, and Nasrin thinks the timing of this flare-up of violence is very suspicious. In recent years she has been directing her frank prose not towards Muslim fundamentalists but at Calcutta's literary circles, with kiss-and-tell autobiographies describing, in detail, sexual encounters with prominent Bengali poets. (She caused one furore when she claimed that one renowned poet was having an affair with his sister-in-law.)

"I'm writing a lot, but not about Islam," she explains. "It's not my subject now. This is about politics. In the last three months I have been put under severe pressure to leave Bengal by the police."

Even Muslim figures such as Dr Mansoor think she is being used by the West Bengal government as a way of diverting attention from an altogether different scandal - the dispute between the state and Muslim farmers in the rural district of Nandigram. When the government tried to take over Nandigram to turn it into an industrial hub, the farmers fought back. Fourteen people were killed in one encounter and reports of ongoing violence have continued to shock India.

At a candle-lit vigil for Nasrin in Delhi on Tuesday, her defenders were passionate in her defence. "There has been disquiet over the number of Muslim deaths in Nandigram and who is the obvious symbol of disquiet in West Bengal? Taslima. She is an easy target. Some extremely political moves are being made in the state and she is being caught in the crossfire despite not opening her mouth on the issue," said Rita Menon, her publisher, holding a large placard in the growing dark.

Nasrin says that her treatment has nothing to do with Nandigram and is unusually quiet on the subject. But with the state in such turmoil, a quiet return to Kolkata for Nasrin looks unlikely. Menon is bleak.

"We do worry. I have no idea what will happen. She can go anywhere but she needs a particular environment in which to write - a place where she can speak to language and she has a cultural context in which to write," she said.

Nasrin, meanwhile, describes herself as "traumatised". "This has upset me so much," she says. "I can't think of anything else. I write from the heart. I see the truth and I want to tell the truth. We can't let the fundamentalists win."

The Indian media, government and literary establishment have come out to support Nasrin - in front page news, TV headlines and major editorials - despite the criticism of her work in recent years. She has become the latest symbol of the fight for freedom of expression in a country fraught with communal tensions. Whether she will win her own fight, for a voice and a home, remains uncertain.