Lefty Locus Desi Focus

Hindutva groups try to scuttle any broader discussion about human rights violations in Kashmir, the conditional annexation by India in 1947 or right to self-determination by limiting it to the issue of the displacement and killings of the upper caste minority Kashmiri Hindu Pandits in the late 1980s and by insisting that Kashmir is not an international issue. Similarly, Zionists seeking to draw attention away from Israel's abuses of Palestinians' human rights often focus exclusively on suicide bombings or the rule of Hamas. Their aim is to silence any discussion of the historic Palestinian demands for the implementation of the refugees' right of return, an end to the military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and equality for Palestinian citizens in Israel.

And the front line in the battle to influence US public opinion towards both the Kashmir and Palestine struggles can be found at the university campus. "There is a well-orchestrated and funded campaign of intimidation and harassment by Zionist and Hindutva groups on campuses to target academics," says Sunaina Maira, Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis campus. Zionist academics tried to pressure the University of California, Berkeley to cancel an event last month titled "What Can American Academia Do to Realize Justice for Palestinians," organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine. In a letter to the school's chancellor, the groups urged him to withdraw official university sponsorship of the event and publicly condemn the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid at the school's campus.

A similar attempt was made in 2006 by Indian American members of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, when they tried to cancel a panel titled "South Asian-Arab solidarity against Israeli apartheid" at Stanford University. The objective was to bring South Asians and Arabs together to take a unified stand against US imperialism and Israeli apartheid and speak up against the Zionist-Hindutva alliances. Despite the attempts by outside groups to stifle free speech, both these events eventually did take place on the campuses and were quite successful. The attempts to silence those who speak out in the US are not the only thing that Kashmir and Palestine have in common. Both Kashmiris and Palestinians are struggling for justice and freedom against highly-militarized occupations. The recent protests by stone-throwing Kashmiri youth drew comparisons to the first intifada in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Those in the US who defend the status quo may resort to tactics of intimidation. But just as state repression in Kashmir and Palestine has failed to quell those struggles for freedom, those of us in the US concerned with justice in Palestine and Kashmir -- and the US government's role in each -- will not be intimidated into silence.

The Indian Navy has already been conducting formal exercises annually with several foreign navies since several years, such as the Varuna series with the French Navy, the Indra series with the Russian Navy and the Konkan series with the U.K.’s Royal Navy.

The visit also seeks to demonstrate the Indian Navy’s blue water capability to deploy, operate and sustain a maritime task force well away from home for an extended duration.

After the last Loksabha elections, the number of multi-billionaires in the parliament became 300

between 1989-90 and 2001-02, only 20 percent of the urban population had an increase of commodity consumption (by 40 percent), while the same period saw a net decrease in rural commodity consumption by 80 percent.

India is ranked first in infant mortality.

The annual per capita food grain availability (not purchase power) which was 177 Kgs in 1990 has gone down to 152 Kgs in 2005. The latter number is equivalent to the food grain availability in a famine-like situation.

This year, the union finance minister has given the call for a ‘second green revolution’ in Eastern India. The essential idea is to promote widespread contract-farming and replacing cultivation of food-crops with cash-crops. Also, there will be surge in producing fruits and flowers and a voluminous increase in horticultural products, food-processing, dairy products and processed fish-meat products.

The ‘seed act’ supplements this ‘revolution’. The farmers’ natural right of seed preservation is taken away. Using only the seeds sold by companies will become the norm. Already the agricultural giants, through their bio-tech innovations and experimentations on seeds and farm animals are exercising considerable control in this sector.

It is remarkable that our country’s agricultural policy is crafted by a few agricultural universities and United States Agency for international Development (USAID).

What do multinationals want? That investment is essentially directed to strategic production of certain crops and its export. This will be accompanied by setting up of agro-produce processing, food processing and spinning centers. May be some agro-chemical industries will follow. India will be the home for labor-intensive farming and the associated exportable agricultural products. The industrialised west wants to use India as their agricultural and food basket. There is also a clear intention of taking control of India’s mineral deposits, forest produces and coastal resources. To be precise, India is to be the supplier of raw material for the west. And, also a large market to sell the finished products. This neo-imperial attack is the same horror as the British East India Company.

the draconian Agricultural Knowledge Initiative (AKI).

“President Obama intends this trip to be — and intends our policy to be — a full embrace of India’s rise,” Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, said to reporters on Air Force One en route to India.

“We don’t know what Cold Start is,” said India’s defense secretary, Pradeep Kumar

Indian officials and some analysts say Cold Start has taken on a nearly mythical status in the minds of Pakistani leaders, whom they suspect of inflating it as an excuse to avoid engaging militants on their own turf. “The Pakistanis will use everything they can to delay or drag out doing a serious reorientation of their military,” said Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution.

When Pakistani military officials are asked to justify the huge investment in upgrading that arsenal, some respond that because Pakistan has no conventional means to deter Cold Start, nuclear weapons are its only option.

“They are grasping at straws because they have a predicament in the Afghan theater that they cannot fix without Pakistan’s help,” said Ashley J. Tellis, a former diplomat and South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They are looking at India to do something to placate the Pakistanis.”

And writ­ers like Jhumpa Lahiri explained India to Amer­i­cans and Amer­ica to Indi­ans, and showed, in her lit­tle fam­ily micro­cosms, what life might look like were the two worlds to blend.

In the United States, mean­while, books on med­i­ta­tion, yoga and ayurvedic med­i­cine pro­lif­er­ated; as one coun­try learned from the other how to light dynamism’s fire, another learned how to slow it down and live with bal­ance.

It hap­pened in the book­stores. In India, where the self had for many mil­lions tra­di­tion­ally been some­thing to sub­li­mate to the fam­ily and clan, the stores began to fill with take-charge-of-your-life Amer­i­can self-help titles like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive People.” U.S.-style man­age­ment phi­los­o­phy like­wise taught a ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of Indian man­agers to invig­o­rate their fathers’ slug­gish enterprises.

It hap­pened in the arts and cul­ture. A new crop of Bol­ly­wood song mak­ers merged Amer­i­can hip-hop beats into their tracks and some­times even rap inter­ludes.

Indian adver­tise­ments began to speak in the Amer­i­can lan­guage of self­hood, free­dom and choice — “The Inter­net is under new man­age­ment. Yours,” declared an ad for Yahoo in The Hin­dus­tan Times. Film­mak­ers began to make pop­u­lar off-Bollywood films more likely to appeal to West­ern­ers: darker, grit­tier, shorter song-and-dance-free titles like “Life in a Metro” and “Love Sex aur Dhokha.”

Amer­ica rec­i­p­ro­cated with an Acad­emy Award for “Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire,” with the cast­ing of Aish­warya Rai in “Bride and Prej­u­dice,” with Indian char­ac­ters in main­stream tele­vi­sion shows like “Out­sourced” and movies like “Office Space.”

Each coun­try became more com­fort­able with pub­lic offi­cials with ties to the other coun­try.

It hap­pened in the realm of style. In India, the jeans slowly grew skin­nier and acquired delib­er­ate, paid-for wear and tear, while slip­ping from the waist down to the hip. Slinky tank tops mul­ti­plied on the streets of Mum­bai and Delhi, sold by men who would faint if they saw their wives wear­ing one.

bottom-up bilat­eral warm­ing

places like the Bagel Shop in the Ban­dra quar­ter of Mum­bai, where expats and locals min­gled; the Grand Hyatt hotel nearby, where con­fer­ences were held to give Indian and Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists and power bro­kers unprece­dented access to each other; Rasika, an Indian restau­rant in Wash­ing­ton, where Indi­ans and Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ist types dined side by side; the business-class cab­ins of Continental’s and Delta’s direct U.S.-India flights, aboard which it became increas­ingly com­mon for reg­u­lar pli­ers of that route to run into one another.

the quiet daily sum­mitry of mil­lions of ordi­nary peo­ple

It can build a rela­tion­ship over long years and can make diplo­matic break­throughs, impor­tant though they are, seem merely like acknowl­edge­ments of what already, inex­orably is.

So why did Rosa Luxemburg reject the whole notion so passionately?

No one apart from rabid Sinhala nationalists would claim that Tamils have not been grievously oppressed in Sri Lanka. But was the LTTE’s solution – armed struggle for national self-determination in the form of an ethno-nationalist Tamil Eelam – an acceptable one? Right from the beginning, it involved massacres and ethnic cleansing of Sinhalese civilians from the territory claimed by LTTE leaders, massacres and ethnic cleansing of Muslims, and the torture and murder of thousands of Tamils who opposed this barbaric vision.

The situation in Kashmir is, if anything, even more complicated. The Indian ultra-nationalists, most vociferously represented by the Sangh Parivar but present even among sections who claim to be more liberal, are undoubtedly a major part of the problem there. Their dogmatic assertion that Kashmir is an integral part of India – as though India’s national boundaries are god-given and any questioning of them is blasphemy – goes with a justification of the horrific atrocities committed against Kashmiris by the Indian security forces.

To destroy India’s integrity as a democracy in order to preserve its territorial integrity is, hopefully, not a ‘solution’ that most people would find morally or politically acceptable.

Indeed, even the meaning of ‘azadi’ is far from clear. For one of the keynote speakers at the meeting, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, it means that Kashmir would be an Islamic state and would be part of Pakistan.

SAS Geelani was the voice of Azadi at the Delhi meeting, it is worth following through the logic of his position as articulated to a Kashmiri audience (as opposed to positions articulated for the consumption of an Indian human rights audience). He believes that Hindus and Muslims constitute two different nations which have nothing in common with each other, that the only identity a Muslim can possess is that of being a Muslim, and therefore stands for Kashmir’s accession to Islamic Pakistan: i.e., he is opposed to an independent Kashmir, and even more fervently opposed to secularism.

Rather, to Geelani, the mantle of “authenticity” falls on people like himself, Islamists who advocate Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan’ (Sikand 2010).

For dogmatic Leninists and Maoists too, the lack of democracy in the ‘solution’ is not a problem, and the moral dilemma is resolved very easily with the mantra that ‘the violence of the oppressor must never be equated with the violence of the oppressed’. It is worth examining this formula more carefully, since it has been used as a cover for many ghastly atrocities. Its unstated premise is that those who are oppressed in one relationship are always and in every relationship the victims of oppression, and can never be oppressors. This may be true in fairy tales, but real life is more complicated. For example, a male worker who is oppressed by his employer may come home and thrash his wife. According to this formula, the male worker is still ‘the oppressed’ in the relationship with his wife, and we must never, ever, equate his brutality to her with the oppression he faces as a worker, even if he kills her.

what is often justified as ‘the violence of the oppressed’ is actually the violence of oppressors, albeit different oppressors from those who are seen as being ‘the enemy’. For example, the LTTE’s violence against Sinhalese and Muslim civilians, Tamil dissenters and Tamil children whom they recruited forcibly, was all the violence of the oppressor. The Taliban’s violence against women and ethnic and religious minorities is the violence of the oppressor. Only where the violence is directed strictly towards actors inflicting violence on a community can we talk of the violence of the oppressed: Vietnamese shooting down planes that were dropping bombs and napalm on their towns and villages, South Africans fighting against the Apartheid state, and so on. Yes, in such cases we should not equate the violence of an imperialist/colonial state with the armed resistance to such violence. But we can say this only when we have examined each case to see who the victims of the so-called ‘violence of the oppressed’ are.

Unlike the Maoists, Arundhati Roy is not comfortable with the assumption that sharing a platform with Geelani amounts to an endorsement of his politics, although that conclusion would be the normal one.

Mandela was fighting against an Apartheid state in which discrimination against non-Whites was written into the constitution; by contrast, Geelani is fighting against the Indian state, whose constitution affirms non-discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, sex, etc. And three: Mandela was fighting for a democratic state whose constitution would guarantee non-discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, sex, etc, whereas Geelani is fighting for a theocratic state whose constitution will guarantee discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, sex, etc. So it is not a crime to sit on the same platform as Nelson Mandela, but sharing a platform with Geelani is not quite as blameless.

Luxemburg’s point was that the ‘nation’ has no unified ‘self’ or ‘will’, because it consists of diverse classes and groups that are often at loggerheads with one another. By pretending that the ‘nation’ has a unified ‘will’, proponents of the doctrine of the ‘right of nations to self-determination’ privilege the leaders of the most powerful group in the prospective nation, ignoring or disempowering others, and in some cases even encouraging the most powerful group to annihilate or evict the others, as happened in Sri Lanka.

A solution that protects the democratic rights of all the diverse peoples of Jammu and Kashmir cannot be summed up in the slogan of ‘Azadi’ or formula of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’; it requires a process of discussion and negotiation between all the diverse peoples in the state.

the chiefs of the armed forces are adamant that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), which provides impunity for such crimes, must stay? All their arguments fall to the ground the moment they are scrutinised. They say that repealing the act will provide ‘carte blanche’ to insurgents, but do not explain how their ceasing to rape, torture and kill unarmed civilians will aid armed insurgents. On the contrary, reports of the recent outbreak of stone-pelting make it clear that the gratuitous violence of the security forces encouraged by impunity is actually the main cause of the problem, not any kind of solution to it (Parthasarathy 2010).

The decision as to whether AFSPA and other laws providing impunity for crimes committed by state security forces should be repealed or not is a political – not military – decision. Such laws violate the constitution in multiple ways. By dividing citizens into two sections, one of which (state security forces) can commit crimes with impunity while the other (civilian victims) cannot appeal to the law for protection, they violate the right to equality under the law and equal protection of the law, and also deprive civilians of other fundamental rights, including the right to life.

The marathon ten-year fast of Irom Sharmila, winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Peace Prize and many other awards, is in pursuance of the same demand.

‘Azadi’ may seem like a more revolutionary demand than the repeal of AFSPA, but it is not. As we saw, ‘azadi’ is compatible with authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing and the murder of political rivals: hardly a radical departure from the present.

In India, a campaign for ‘Azadi’ may not get widespread support, partly because the meaning of the slogan is unclear and partly because the goal may be a situation no better than the present one, whereas a campaign against draconian legislation and human rights violations could appeal to a far wider constituency, on the grounds that failure to take up these issues undermines both India’s moral legitimacy and its claim to be a democracy.

a show-cause notice has also been issued to it as to why the clearance for the one million tonnes per annum alumina refinery at Lanjigarh in Orissa should not be cancelled in view of gross violation of environment norms.

“While rejecting this (Vedanta) project, I have also cleared an important irrigation project in the State in which over 1500 hectares of forest land is involved,” the Minister said.

The unpalatable truths in Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead,” a memoir of the Persian Gulf war, make that book more important and eye-opening, he writes, “than anything written by the likes of Noam Chomsky and the rest of the admirable antiwar brigade.”

“A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb” carries in the crook of its own arm Mr. Kumar’s plaintive appeal. If we’re to bridge the perilous divide that separates us from those poor and unnamed people who resent us, we first need to see them, to look into their eyes. We need, Mr. Kumar writes, “to acknowledge that they exist.” This angry and artful book is a first step.