Slokas After A Noon Namaaz

Muslim children study Sanskrit and Hindu ones read Quran in these UP madrassas

We arrive at Madrassa Anwarul-Islam Salfia at 12.45 pm, a little before namaaz. As the students gather around the row of taps to wash their hands and feet and line up for prayers, this modest building in the dusty, narrow bylanes of Chauri in Jalalpur, in eastern UP's Jaunpur district, looks exactly how we expect a madrassa to be: a place for rigorous study of Islam, Urdu, Arabic. What we encounter instead is a complete contradiction. The bare, red brick walls of the Standard 7 classroom are yet to be plastered, the window frames still to be fitted. Here, 12-year-old Nadima Bano and Hishamuddin are reciting, their pronunciation perfect and elocution chaste, this ode to India, "Yasyottarasyamdishibhati bhumao Himalayah parvatraj eshah..."

It's a sloka in Sanskrit that translated means 'the land shielded by the Himalayas in the north'. "Sanskrit padhne se zubaan saaf ho jaati hai (the diction becomes clear by learning Sanskrit)," Hishamuddin tells us. "Sanskrit is considered the mother of all languages," says their teacher Rabindra Kumar Mishra. "It's ironical that institutions like this madrassa should be nursing it while it's vanishing elsewhere."

That it's no exception we have stumbled upon becomes clear to us as we proceed north to Ambedkarnagar district, to Madrassa Azizia Islamia in Kamharia village. The hands of the wall clock might be stuck at 6.45 in this primary school or maktab, but the school itself has progressed in other ways. Space is obviously at a premiumClasses 2-5 are being held simultaneously in separate, little rows in a large hall. Sirajuddin is teaching Sanskrit grammar to Class 3. "It was my favourite subject when I was a child," he says with a smile. "Balakah pathati; Sah pathati; Balakau pathatah (A child studies, he studies, they study)...," his student Muhammad Shahid recites for us. They soon move on to another lesson. "Asmakam deshasya asti ateev shobhanah (our country is very beautiful)...".

However, this story is not only about Hishamuddins learning Sanskrit. It's also about 13-year-old Ravi Prakash Pandey, a Brahmin and the son of a Sanskrit professor, opting to learn Quran in Class 1. A former student of Azizia Islamia, he can now recite the holy text from memory and has a copy at home that he peruses religiously. "Quran teaches that we must help others and do good deeds and stay away from evil," he says, without batting an eyelid, and then rushes to wash himself and wear a cap before reading it aloud for us.

We hear this echo back in Salfia where two Hindu - year-old Arti Kumari and Anita Kumari - are writing about Prophet Mohammed in Urdu on the blackboard: "Jab hamare Hazrat ki umr paintees baras ki thi (when our prophet was 35 years old)...". "They face absolutely no problem in writing, reading or understanding Urdu," their teacher Kaiser Jahan informs us.

At Madrassa Arbiya Zia-ul-uloom in Mandey in Azamgarh district, sisters Manju and Ranju Kumari have been learning Urdu from Class 1. They mean it when they recite: "Urdu hai jiska naam hamari zubaan hai, duniya ki har zubaan se pyaari zubaan hai (Urdu is the sweetest of the languages in the world)." Passing by Class 1, you can hear Prashant Kumar explaining Urdu numerals to his classmates.

The teachers on either side of the linguistic divide find much in common between Sanskrit and Urdu: both languages, they say, have an evolved, complex grammar. "Their grammar must be the toughest," says Muhammad Tariq of Madrassa Arbiya. They see this coexistence of Sanskrit and Urdu as normal and not deliberately symbolic in these troubled, divisive times. "How can you associate a language with any religion?" asks Brijesh Kumar Yaduvanshi, a long-time resident of Jaunpur and president, All India University Students' Union."Urdu doesn't belong to Muslims nor does Sanskrit have to do just with Hindus."

Nevertheless, the focus on Sanskrit, a language that has long gone out of everyday use, is intriguing. "It's not about helping students get jobs," says Qari Jalaluddin of Salfia, "but about teaching them humanity, about great thoughts and the right way to live, about being able to distinguish right from wrong." Sanskrit is taught at Salfia till Class 9, Urdu is compulsory in Class 1-5, after which it's up to the Hindu students to decide whether they want to study it further. Well versed: Ravi Prakash reciting Quran.

This easy cohabitation of Sanskrit and Urdu in Jaunpur's madrassas could well be regarded as a legacy of the town's liberal Sufi past. "It was a centre of education in the middle ages," says Yaduvanshi, "has never witnessed a single Hindu-Muslim riot, and has always been a symbol of unity." The Salfia madrassa has, in fact, been built on land bought from a Brahmin family in 1987.

The Azamgarh-Mau madrassas too offer a counterview for an area that has of late been made infamous for its alleged association with terrorist activities. "After all, it's the land of Rahul Sankritayan, Maulana Shibli, Firaq Gorakhpuri," says Sanjay Srivastava, professor at the Poorvanchal University. "It's a literary and cultural centre and people here have been feeling humiliated for being targeted for all the wrong reasons."

At a time when stereotypes about madrassas, especially those in eastern UP, as breeding grounds for terrorists have been gaining currency and every succeeding terror attack has boxed Indian Muslims further into neat categories as either educated, patriotic liberals or misinformed, misled fundamentalists, these madrassas are a powerful rejoinder, a heartening testimony to the unspoken, uncelebrated, broad-mindedness and inclusiveness of the common, faceless Muslim. The madrassas we visit have a sizeable number of Hindu students. Salfia currently has 475 students, of whom about - 45 per cent - are Hindus. In Azizia Islamia, 35 of the 143 students are Hindus. The newly set up Madrassa Faizul Quran operates out of a small makeshift building in an obscure corner of Amari village in Azamgarh district. The maktab has 100 kids, of whom 20 are Hindus. At Arbiya, 22 of the 374 students are Hindus.

There is little to distinguish students. You know Vinky and Reena Yadav from Soni and Rehana Banu only by their names or in the way they wear their head scarves. "We don't believe in bhed bhav," says Salfia's Jalaluddin. "Tameez and tehzeeb are the same in every religion." And though the madrassas do teach hifz, or memorization of the Quran, all have a progressive vision too. "You can't move forward with religious education alone, our students need to be taught everything: science, geography, math, English," says Salfia principal Muhammad Saikat. It is the only school in the village which offers high school education for girls, or else they'd have to walk 10 km to the next school. The aim now is to start computers and electronics classes.

Like many others, these madrassas are yet to get government aid. There is no midday meal scheme, nor are students given free uniforms; it is all provided by the madrassa management boards. Azizia and Arbiya give students free books and charge no fee. In Salfia the fee's just Rs 5. Faizul Quran charges Rs 40 but only 10 per cent of the students pay up. The teachers themselves get no regular pay from the government but survive on the grants patrons give to the madrassas, the salary averaging from Rs 800-1,500. In contrast, teachers on the government payroll get a princely sum of Rs 3,000.

Humble and ill-equipped though they are, these madrassas are incredible examples of how Hindus and Muslims live as one than as separate entities in these forgotten hamlets."They represent the Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti of our villages. Why would anyone want to break the sacred thread of this age-old relationship?" asks Srivastava. Why indeed?

[From Outlook Magazine, 22 December 2008 issue]

At a Fork in the Road

By: Arundhati Roy

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian cities this year [2008] in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded.

Though nothing can ever 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.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America’s ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan is careening towards civil war. The Pakistani government is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam should rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much as it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India’s shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of ‘non-state actors’ with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbors.

How should we view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful in as much as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which

have made the United States the most hated country in the world. These wars have contributed greatly to the unravelling of the American economy. Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives. The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies and US interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically.

Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It’s not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor, we have a military occupation in Kashmir, and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than a hundred and fifty million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half-a-million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

What we’re experiencing now is the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds.

The only way to contain terrorism is to look at the monsters in the mirror: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says ‘Justice’, the other ‘Civil War’. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

[Edited by Mahendra Meghani from Outlook : 22-Dec-2008]

Death of a Salesman and Other Elite Ironies

By: Tarun J. Tejpal

Rohinton Maloo was among the 13 diners at the Oberoi, who were marched out onto the service staircase, ostensibly as hostages. But the killers had nothing to bargain for. The answers to the big questions — Babri Masjid, Gujarat, Muslim persecution — were beyond the power of anyone to deliver neatly to the hotel lobby. The small ones — of money and materialism — their crazed indoctrination had already taken them well beyond. With the final banality of all fanaticism — AK-47 in one hand; mobile phone in the other — the killers asked their minders, “Uda dein?” The minder, probably a maintainer of cold statistics, said, “Uda do.”

Rohinton caught seven bullets. He was just 48, with two teenage children, and a hundred plans. In his outstanding career in media marketing, he was ever at the cutting edge of the new . The place was always Mumbai, and he exemplified its attitudes: the hedonism, the get-go, the easy pluralism.

For me there is a deep irony in his death. He was killed by what he set very little store by. He was bemused and baffled by TEHELKA’s obsessive engagement with politics. He was quite sure no one of his class — our class — was interested in the subject. Politics happened elsewhere. Mostly, it had nothing to do with our lives. Eventually he came to grudgingly accept we may have some kind of a case. But he remained unconvinced of its commercial viability. Our kind of readers were interested in other things — food, films, cricket, fashion, gizmos, television, health. Politics, at best, was something they endured.

In the end, politics killed Rohinton, and a few hundred other innocents. In the final count, politics, every single day, is killing, impoverishing, starving, denigrating, millions of Indians all across the country. If the backdrop were not so heartbreaking, the spectacle of the nation’s elite — the keepers of most of our wealth and privilege — frothing on television screens and screaming through mobile phones would be amusing. They have been outraged because the enduring tragedy of India has suddenly arrived in their marbled precincts. The Taj, the Oberoi. We dine here. We sleep here. Is nothing sacrosanct in this country any more?

What the Indian elite is discovering today on the debris of fancy eateries is an acidic truth large numbers of ordinary Indians are forced to swallow every day. Children who die of malnutrition, farmers who commit suicide, dalits who are raped and massacred, tribals who are turfed out of century old habitats, peasants whose lands are taken over for car factories, minorities who are bludgeoned into paranoia — these, and many others, know that something is grossly wrong. The system does not work, the system is cruel, the system is unjust, the system exists to only serve those who run it. Crucially, what we, the elite, need to understand is that most of us are complicit in the system. In fact, chances are the more we have — of privilege and money — the more invested we are in the shoring up of an unfair state.

It is time each one of us understood that at the heart of every society is its politics. If the politics is third-rate, the condition of the society will be no better. For too many decades now, the elite of India has washed its hands off the country’s politics. Entire generations have grown up viewing it as a distasteful activity. In an astonishing perversion, the finest imaginative act of the last thousand years on the subcontinent, the creation and flowering of the idea of modern India through mass politics, has for the last 40 years been rendered infra dig, déclassé, uncool. Let us blame our parents, and let our children blame us, for not bequeathing onwards the sheer beauty of a collective vision, collective will, and collective action. In a word, politics: which, at its best, created the wonder of a liberal and democratic idea, and at its worst threatens to tear it down.

We stand faulted then in two ways. For turning our back on the collective endeavor; and for our passive embrace of the status quo. This is in equal parts due to selfish instinct and to shallow thinking. Since shining India is basically only about us getting an even greater share of the pie, we have been happy to buy its half-truths, and look away from the rest of the sordid story. Like all elites, historically, that have presided over the decline of their societies, we focus too much of our energy on acquiring and consuming, and too little on thinking and decoding. Egged on by a helium media, we exhaust ourselves through paroxysms over vacant celebrities and trivia, quite happy not to see what might cause us discomfort.

For years, it has been evident that we are a society being systematically hollowed out by inequality, corruption, bigotry and lack of justice. The planks of public discourse have increasingly been divisive, widening the faultliness of caste, language, religion, class, community and region. As the elite of the most complex society in the world, we have failed to see that we are ratcheted into an intricate framework, full of causal links, where one wrong word begets another, one horrific event leads to another. Where one man’s misery will eventually trigger another’s.

Let’s track one causal chain. The Congress creates Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to neutralize the Akalis; Bhindranwale creates terrorism; Indira Gandhi moves against terrorism; terrorism assassinates Indira Gandhi; blameless Sikhs are slaughtered in Delhi; in the course of a decade, numberless innocents, militants, and security-men die. Let’s track another. The BJP takes out an inflammatory rath yatra; inflamed kar sewaks pull down the Babri Masjid; riots ensue; vengeful Muslims trigger Mumbai blasts; 10 years later a bogey of kar sewaks is burnt in Gujarat; in the next week 2,000 Muslims are slaughtered; six years later retaliatory violence continues. Let’s track one more. In the early 1940s, in the midst of the freedom movement, patrician Muslims demand a separate homeland; Mahatma Gandhi opposes it; the British support it; Partition ensues; a million people are slaughtered; four wars follow; two countries drain each other through rhetoric and poison; nuclear arsenals are built; hotels in Mumbai are attacked.

In each of these rough causal chains, there is one thing in common. Their origin in the decisions of the elite. Interlaced with numberless lines of potential divisiveness, the India framework is highly delicate and complicated. It is critical for the elite to understand the framework, and its role in it. The elite has its hands on the levers of capital, influence and privilege. It can fix the framework. It has much to give, and it must give generously. The mass, with nothing in its hands, nothing to give, can out of frustration and anger, only pull it all down. And when the volcano blows, rich and poor burn alike.

And so what should we be doing? Well, screaming at politicians is certainly not political engagement. And airy socialites demanding the carpet-bombing of Pakistan and the boycott of taxes are plain absurd, just another neon sign advertising shallow thought. It’s the kind of dumb public theater the media ought to deftly side-step rather than showcase. The world is already over-shrill with animus: we need to tone it down, not add to it. Pakistan is itself badly damaged by the flawed politics at its heart. It needs help, not bombing. Just remember, when hard-boiled bureaucrats clench their teeth, little children die.

Most of the shouting of the last few days is little more than personal catharsis through public venting. The fact is the politician has been doing what we have been doing, and as an über Indian he has been doing it much better. Watching out for himself, cornering maximum resource, and turning away from the challenge of the greater good.

The first thing we need to do is to square up to the truth. Acknowledge the fact that we have made a fair shambles of the project of nation-building. Fifty million Indians doing well does not for a great India make, given that 500 million are grovelling to survive. Sixty years after independence, it can safely be said that India’s political leadership — and the nation’s elite — have badly let down the country’s dispossessed and wretched. If you care to look, India today is heartbreak hotel, where infants die like flies, and equal opportunity is a cruel mirage.

Let’s be clear we are not in a crisis because the Taj hotel was gutted. We are in a crisis because six years after 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in Gujarat there is still no sign of justice. This is the second thing the elite need to understand — after the obscenity of gross inequality. The plinth of every society has been set on the notion of justice. You cannot light candles for just those of your class and creed. You have to strike a blow for every wronged citizen.

And let no one tell us we need more laws. We need men to implement those that we have. Today all our institutions and processes are failing us. We have compromised each of them on their values, their robustness, their vision and their sense of fair play. Now, at every crucial juncture we depend on random acts of individual excellence and courage to save the day. Great systems, triumphant societies, are veined with ladders of inspiration. Electrified by those above them, men strive to do their very best. Look around. How many constables, head constables, sub-inspectors would risk their lives for the dishonest, weak men they serve, who in turn serve even more compromised masters?

I wish Rohinton had survived the lottery of death in Mumbai last week. In an instant, he would have understood what we always went on about. India’s crying need is not economic tinkering or social engineering. It is a political overhaul, a political cleansing. As it once did to create a free nation, India’s elite should start getting its hands dirty so they can get a clean country.

[Edited from Tehelka Magazine issue of 13 December 2008]

Once Upon A Time In Hinduism...

By: Anna Sujatha Mathai

Hinduism once had a large and open heart (Bowstringed!, Oct 20). It can no longer claim that, if the bullying and mob violence by its extreme fringe goes unchallenged by the all-too-silent majority. If there were mass conversions, why are Christians still such a small minority? Hindus too go abroad and set up ashrams and temples everywhere. Hindu literature is freely distributed in the West. The first state-aided temple has opened in London. Diwali is celebrated right across the UK, and it should be so. It is good to be able to share one’s view of the sacred. Equally, one should reserve the right to have one’s own view of the Universe, which may not be religious at all.

Christianity has always served the lowly, the dispossessed. Christians have set up so many great institutions, hospitals, schools, colleges. Did these not serve people of every religion? Did Mother Teresa refuse to hold a dying Hindu? Have Christians ever asked for a separate state or retaliated with violence? I write all this with a heavy heart. People who raped and killed children at an orphanage can’t claim to be high on the scale of human evolution. Gandhiji believed violence against fellow humans ultimately degrades us and prevents us from building a fine society. Christ too was a radical and revolutionary against a barbaric Roman empire and a caste-conscious Jewish people. India should be proud to be home to so many faiths. Kerala’s indigenous [Christian] church is 2,000 years old; it also has the first Indian synagogue. There was no persecution of Jews here. This is the country we must regain. We can’t be run by fear and mob violence. In a civilized country, we can follow any religion we choose, read any book, see any film and draw conclusions by virtue of our reason and compassion.

[Outlook Express, 3 Nov, 2008]

Clash of Conversations

By: Valson Thampu

About five years ago, at the height of communal polarization, I took a calculated risk in suggesting a voluntary moratorium on conversions as a Christian sacrificial investment in peace-making. This envisaged a temporary suspension of the fundamental right of all citizens as enshrined in article 25 of the Constitution to “propagate” one’s faith. Perhaps I was the only Christian priest who ever made such a proposal. This was done not because I had lost faith in article 25 but to test the waters: to map the extent to which the Sangh Parivar really considers conversions a serious issue. I knew that it is merely an emotive catalyst to activate mass animosity. No one from the Sangh Parivar responded to my initiative and no debate ensued.

It is surprising that the vast, educated middle class in this country are not amused at the blanket assumption that all conversions are necessarily by “force, fraud or allurement”. One has to be willfully credulous to buy the canard that a tiny community like the Christians (2.18 per cent of the population) can convert anyone by “force”! All available evidence proves that the truth is the other way round: force is used against the Christian community. That leaves us with “fraud” and “allurement”. What is the fraud that is perpetrated on the alleged victims of conversion? What are the ingredients of this allurement? Help in times of sickness? The prospect of dignity and empowerment? If these comprise the substance of “allurement” then what political parties promise is worse than “allurement”.

The agenda of the Sangh Parivar is to convert India into a theocratic State; a tolerant, non-violent, secular society into a homogenized, militant and intolerant society.

Addressing the National Integration Council, the Prime Minister lamented that violence is increasing in many parts of the country and that the spirit of tolerance is waning. This is true. But what the PM needs to take into account is the fact that this is happening for two reasons. First, unless the rule of law is effectively upheld we grant, by default, free play to the agents of violence. Second — an unprecedented taste for, and faith in, violence is emerging in our midst. When the rule of law is kept in suspended animation and the dogs of war are let loose, the public at large — especially the youth — can come to only one conclusion: nothing pays like violence and only violence pays.

Those of us who have abiding faith in the spirit of India, even against sinister evidence, are obliged to believe that sanity will prevail . That after the present surfacing of poison, the elixir of life will emerge. But that still leaves us with the all-important question: who will drink this emerging poison, in the meanwhile?

The writer is a member of the National Integration Council and the principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi...

[The Indian Express, Oct. 23, 08]

Everyman’s Tagore

EVERYMAN'S TAGORE : Edited by Mahendra Meghani, Lokmilap Trust, 2008, p.96, Rs. 30

Rabindranath Tagore was described as the Poet of Humanity by Jawaharlal Nehru. Tagore’s 147th birth anniversary fell on May 7th, 2008. A few days before that, Lokmilap Trust published Everyman’s Tagore. Compiled by Mahendra Meghani, who last year had given Everyman’s ABC of Gandhi, this book contains 400 extracts from the poetry and prose of the Poet, who was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Here are a few specimens from Everyman’s Tagore:

All the great civilizations that have become extinct must have come to their end through slavery imposed upon fellow-beings, through parasitism on a gigantic scale bred by wealth.

*

The butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine,
I lose the one that is netted by me.

*

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked – this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind.

*

Wrong cannot afford defeat, but right can.

*

Every child comes with the message that
God is not yet discouraged of man.

*

Grant me that I may not be a coward,
feeling your mercy in my success alone;
but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

*

I am able to love my God because
He gives me freedom to deny Him.

*

I love India, not because I have had the chance to be born in her soil, but because she has saved through tumultuous ages the living words that have issued from the illuminated consciousness of her great sons. I love India, but my India is an idea and not a geographical expression. Therefore I am not a patriot. I shall seek my compatriots all over the world.

*

The leaf becomes flower when it loves.
The flower becomes fruit when it worships.
Let life be beautiful like summer flowers,
and death like autumn leaves.

*

Let me not beg for the stifling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

*

Make me thy poet, O Night, veiled Night!
There are some who have sat speechless for ages in thy shadow;
let me utter their songs.

*

The moon has her light all over the sky,
her dark spots to herself.

*

My King, thou has asked me to play my flute at the roadside, that they who bear the burden of voiceless life may stop in their errands for a moment and say, the flowers are in bloom, and the birds sing.

*

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water
sings the pebbles into perfection.

*

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby’s limbs – does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl, it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love – the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby’s limbs.

*

They try to hold me secure who love me in this world.
But thy love is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.

*

The life is the crossing of a sea,
where we meet in the same narrow ship.
In death we reach the shore, and go to our different worlds.

*

When a religion develops the ambition of imposing its doctrine on all mankind, it degrades itself into a tyranny and becomes a form of imperialism. That is why we find a ruthless method of fascism in religious matters prevailing in most parts of the world.

*

“Who is there to take up my duties?” asked the setting sun.
“I shall do what I can, my Master,” said the earthen lamp.

*

The 96-page hard cover book costs $5 outside India, inclusive of airmail postage, and 25 copies will be available at $4 each.

Being simultaneously published in Gujarati is રવીન્દ્રનાથ સાથે વાચનયાત્રા (Ravindranath Sathe Vachanyatra). Also edited by Mahendra Meghani, it contains about 90 selected translations of Tagore’s writings by about a dozen writers, including Nagindas Parekh, Jhaverchand Meghani, and Umashankar Joshi. The 160-page book in hard cover costs $5 outside India, inclusive of airmail postage, and 25 copies will be available at $4 each. Books sent by airmail from India usually take a fortnight to reach USA.

Those interested in buying either book may send their checks to: Lokmilap Trust, P.O.Box 23, Bhavnagar, 364001, India. Their telephone number is: (0278) 256 6402, and E-mail address: lokmilaptrust2000@yahoo.com.

The Challenge of Our Times

By: Rabindranath Tagore

[Extracts from a letter to Professor Gilbert Murray: September 16, 1934]

We have seen Europe unscrupulous in its politics and commerce, spreading slavery over the face of the earth. And yet, in this very Europe, protest is always alive against its own iniquities. Martyrs are never absent whose lives of sacrifice are the penance for the wrongs done by their own kindred.

There was a time when we were fascinated by Europe. She had inspired us with a new hope – of liberty. We had come to know only her ideal side through her literature and art. But modern Europe has portioned out this wide earth. In our traffic with her we have learnt, as the biggest fact of all, that she is efficient, terribly efficient. But this is only one side of Western civilization. The Western humanity, when not affected by its unnatural relationship with the East, preserves its singular strength of moral conduct in its social life which has its great inspiration for all of us.

In India, what is needed more than anything else is the broad mind which, because it is conscious of its own vigorous individuality, is not afraid of accepting truth from all sources. Fortunately we know what such a mind has meant in an individual who belongs to modern India. I speak of Rammohun Roy. Thoroughly steeped in the best culture of his country, he was capable of finding himself at home in the larger world. The ideal I have formed of the culture which should be universal in India, has become clear to me from the life of Rammohun Roy.

Religion today in its institutionalized forms both in the West and the East has failed in its function to control and guide the forces of humanity; the growth of nationalism and wide commerce of ideas through speeded up communication have often augmented external differences instead of bringing humanity together. Yet I do not feel despondent about the future. There is today all over the world, in spite of selfishness and unreason, a greater awareness of truth. It is this stirring of the human conscience to which we must look for a reassertion of man. In this fact lies the great hope – this emergence in every nation, in spite of repression and the suicidal fever of war-mindedness, of individual consciousness. To these individuals of every land and race, these youthful spirits burning like clean flame on the altar of humanity, I offer my obeisance from the sunset-crested end of my road.

I feel proud that I have been born in this age. Let us announce to the world that the light of the morning has come, not for entrenching ourselves behind barriers, but for meeting in mutual understanding and trust

The Job of the Media

[Joseph Lelyveld, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, was executive editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and was recalled to the newspaper in 2003, after a period during which it went through a credibility crisis. He has reported from India from 1966 to 1969. In an interaction with The Indian Express staff, Lelyveld talks about American politics, reporting, and new trends in the media.]

Q: When you returned to the New York Times, it was going through a credibility crisis. How did you go about correcting the situation?

A: My theme when I returned was that we are just going back to work and we are going to do things the way we know was the right way to do them. I was also trying to push authority down, because one of the features of the previous regime was that there were a lot of edicts out there and people were afraid to do things without making sure that the guys on top were going to approve it in advance.

Q: What is the guiding philosophy of the New York Times which makes it such a standard of excellence in journalism?

Basically, the New York Times covered everything — the whole world, culture, business and finance, sports, everything. And did it in a responsible way with its own reporting and a high standard of journalist excellence. It was a general interest newspaper with a vengeance. Now the New York Times and all other papers are getting smaller because of the finances in the newspaper business and it can’t promise quite as much. . The Times in London loses money, the New York Post loses huge amounts of money. Even the New York Times had to announce cuts of over a 100 journalistic positions. They have a staff of over a 1,000 journalists and a large foreign staff.

Q: How does media shape public opinion?

The most important ways newspapers shape opinion is by what they choose to cover and the subjects they go into deeply. I don’t think it’s our job to worry about the effects of the story. Our job is to give people information so they have the opportunity of making reasonable judgments.

Q: How do you decide the balance between what the people may want to read and what you think the people should be reading? You don’t believe that what the reader wants is what you should give?

I’ve always mistrusted that phrase “the reader wants”, because how do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that’s very well-written and covers all sorts of things —.social trends, fashion, the works but I think you are at your best when you give the reader something the reader wants that the reader didn’t know he or she wanted it till you gave it to her. Today, reporting staffs are getting smaller. Major news organisations that maintain large foreign staffs have gotten smaller. The number of American news organisations that still cover the world the way they covered it in 50 years earlier is two or three. And in the US, it’s also about the number of reporters the national news organisations maintain around the country. It’s just down, down, down.

[Condensed from The Indian Express : May 11, 2008. The full text is available at http://www.indianexpress.com/story/308046._.html]

Letters : Sukhpreet Kaur's Stance

(Note : Sarabjit Singh is an Indian National sentenced to death in Pakistan for his alleged involvement in the Lahore bomb blasts in 1990. Sarabjit Singh's wife Sukhpreet Kaur said the family did not want him repatriated from Pakistan "in exchange for any hardcore Pakistani terrorist lodged in Indian jails,” in a statement to PTI on March 19, 2008. The Hindu readers' responses:)

Commendable

I salute Sukhpreet Kaur, Sarabjit Singh’s wife, for saying she does not want her husband in exchange for hardcore Pakistani terrorists lodged in Indian jails. It is patriotism at its best. It is all the more laudable because Sukhpreet has said this knowing full well that it may harm her cause of getting her husband released from the death row in Pakistan.

Her resolve is significant, especially in the context of the release of three terrorists in exchange for the passengers of a hijacked plane in 1999.

C.P. Srinivasan, Chennai

Sukhpreet’s statement that she is not for trading her husband’s release in exchange for hardcore Pakistani terrorists should serve as an eye-opener for the nation which was witness a few years ago to the release of some terrorists in exchange for the release of a Union Minister’s kidnapped daughter.

A.K. Pradeep Kumar, Thalasserry

I bow my head in salute to Sukhpreet Kaur. This is bravery of the highest order which should be widely publicised. It is an outstanding demonstration of putting the nation’s interest before one’s self.

S. Rajagopalan, Chennai

Our political leaders whose actions reek of parochialism and opportunism should learn a lesson or two on patriotism from Sukhpreet.

K.K. Cherian, Bangalore

Ms Kaur is truly one of a kind. What courage! I salute her. All the jingoistic raving and ranting on the cricket field, by comparison, seem so hollow.

P.R. Lochan Sarathy, Chennai

It is heartening to see Sukhpreet Kaur take such a brave and bold stand. No doubt, she wants her husband to be freed from the Lahore jail. At the same time, she and her daughters do not want his release in exchange for any hardcore Pakistani terrorists. Their patriotism deserves the highest praise.

Subhas Yadawad, Bijapur

(Condensed from The Hindu : March 21, 2008)

The Meaning of News and Getting It Right

By: Hasan Suroor

To ask “what is news” might seem like a silly question. Vaguely, we all know what is news. We read it in newspapers, hear it on radio and television and some of us often end up making news ourselves, even if for all the wrong reasons. The COED (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) defines it as “newly received or noteworthy information about recent events.”

Yet the question pops up frequently. It is asked, especially, after every new case of media “excess” such as a sting operation gone too far; or an exposé turned ugly. And at what point does news descend into titillation dressed up as analysis or investigation?

Take the controversy in Britain over the media reporting of a cluster of suicides by young people in the Bridgend area of South Wales. Over the past year, 17 youngsters have killed themselves for no apparent reason.

The debate over the Bridgend coverage is not that the suicides should not have been reported, but whether they should have been reported the way they were. And it is apparent that outside the cosy media fraternity the overwhelming sense is that much of the coverage, especially in the regional press and the tabloids, was insensitively sensational — based more on pub gossip than hard facts.

As a journalist I must admit that we, in the media, are not always on the same wavelength as our readers. Although the media might strive to give readers what they want, the fact is that frequently they get it wrong. A major problem, according to British readers, is the level of media intrusion into privacy.

Particularly distasteful is the sight of television crews camped outside people’s homes with complete disregard for public decency or sensitivities of those they may be targeting at a given point — a grieving family, a controversial public figure, a celebrity whose picture they must have because there is money to be made from it.

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of complaints about the media’s intrusive behaviour. Last year alone, the Press Complaints Commission received 4,000-plus complaints — a 30 per cent increase over the previous year — mostly relating to breaches of privacy. Although celebrity magazines and regional newspapers were among the worst culprits, the national press too had its share of brickbats. Commentators said the PCC’s figures were simply the “tip of the iceberg” as many cases went unreported.

Meanwhile, a new book Flat Earth News by Guardian’s award-winning journalist Nick Davies raises some fundamental issues about modern approach to news, the commercial and political pressures on newspapers and broadcasters, and the increasing trend of cost-cutting even in major media outlets which, he says, has reduced reporters to “cutting and pasting” wire stories, or peddling “PR material.” (Researchers from the journalism department of Cardiff University, commissioned by him, reported that a “massive 60 per cent” of stories in Britain’s four quality newspapers — The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent — and the mass-circulation Daily Mail consisted “wholly or mainly of wire-copy and/or PR material.”)

The book, whose title refers to the trend of recycling a story simply because it is “widely accepted as true … even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda,” is a scathing attack on British journalistic practices and will be an eye-opener to British media’s starry-eyed admirers in the Third World. It portrays a picture of journalism in which “any meaningful independent journalistic activity by the press is the exception rather than the rule.”

Mr. Davies raises questions such as: Is there a moral dimension to news? Is there such a thing as completely “objective” news? Who decides what’s news and to what extent the decision is influenced by commercial and political considerations?

Although he discusses these issues specifically in the context of the British media, they will resonate wherever there is a functioning press. India, with its bourgeoning media and a “look-West” tendency, must beware of the “flat earth news” syndrome.

(Condensed from The Hindu, March 18, 2008)

Read the original at : http://www.thehindu.com/2008/03/18/stories/2008031854521000.htm

In Gujarati - આપણી માંહેલા ‘ભલા જર્મનો’

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માનવજાતને બીજા વિશ્વયુદ્ધના મહાવિનાશમાં ઘસડી જનાર જર્મનીના સરમુખત્યાર એડૉલ્ફ હિટલરના સિતમોના દાવાનળમાં યુરોપના મુલકો એક પછી એક ભસ્મીભૂત થતા ગયા ૧૯૩૫ પછીના લગભગ એક દાયકા સુધી. એ દાયકા દરમ્યાન થયેલા અમાનુષી અત્યાચારોનો ઇતિહાસ દુનિયા જેમ જેમ જાણતી ગઈ, તેમ એને એક વિમાસણ થતી રહી કે જર્મનો જેવી સુસંસ્કૃત પ્રજાએ આવી સંહારલીલા સાંખી કેમ લીધી હશે? તેના જવાબમાં કેટલાક જર્મનો બોલેલા કે, અરેરે! અમને તો આ બધી હેવાનિયતની કાંઈ ખબર જ નહોતી!

એ વાતને યાદ કરીને, "આપણી માંહેલા ‘ભલા જર્મનો’" મથાળા વાળો એક લેખ ફ્રઁક રીચ નામના પત્રકારે ‘ન્યુ યોર્ક ટાઇમ્સ’ના ૧૪ ઑક્ટોબરના અંકમાં લખ્યો છે. તેનો આરંભ તે આ રીતે કરે છેઃ

"‘બુશ જૂઠાણાં ચલાવે છે,’ એમ કહેવાથી હવે કશું વળતું નથી. આપણે જ આપણી જાત સાથે જૂઠાણાં ચલાવીએ છીએ, તે વધુ કારમી વાસ્તવિકતાનો સામનો કરવાની ઘડી આવી પહોંચી છે."

ઇરાક પરના આક્રમણ દરમ્યાન અમેરિકન સેનાએ તેના વિરોધીઓની જે ઘોર રિબામણી કરી છે તેના દાખલાઓ ટાંકીને ફ્રઁક રીચ કહે છે કે આ બધાંનો એકસરખો જવાબ પ્રમુખ બુશ તરફથી મળતો રહે છે કે, "અમારી સરકાર કોઈની રિબામણી કરતી નથી."

પોતે કેદ પકડેલા ઇરાકીઓ પાસેથી માહિતી કઢાવવા તેમની પર અમેરિકન સૈનિકો જે જુલમ ગુજારે છે, તેની છબીઓ સાથેની સાબિતી ત્રણ વરસ પહેલાં પ્રગટ થઈ ત્યારથી અમેરિકન પ્રજા જાણે છે કે પોતાના નામે ચાલતી સરકાર મનુષ્ય ઉપર કેવા કેવા સિતમ ગુજારે છે. એ બાબત અમેરિકન સંસદના કેટલાક સભ્યો જરીક ગણગણાટ કરે છે અને પછી બીજી વાતે ચઢી જાય છે. પાનું ફરે છે.

યુદ્ધો તો અનાદિકાળથી થતાં રહ્યાં છે. પણ દરેક યુગમાં યુદ્ધમાં પણ કેટલાક નિયમો પળાતા રહ્યા છે. આધુનિક કાળમાં સહુ રાષ્ટ્રોએ એવા જે નિયમો પાળવાનું સ્વીકારેલ છે તેનો ભંગ કરનારાને યુદ્ધ-ગુનેગારો ગણવામાં આવે છે. બીજા વિશ્વયુદ્ધમાં પરાજિત જર્મની અને જાપાનના ઘણા આગેવાનો પર વિજેતા મુલકોએ સ્થાપેલી અદાલતોમાં યુદ્ધ-ગુનેગારો તરીકે કામ ચલાવવામાં આવેલું ને તેમને દેહાંતદંડ સુધીની સજાઓ થયેલી.

આવી જાતના અપરાધો ઇરાકની લડાઈમાં અમેરિકનોના હાથે થાય છતાં તેનું આળ પોતાની પર ન આવે, તે માટે બુશ સરકારે એક કરામત કરી છે. તેને જરા વિગતે સમજીએ.

બધી સરકારોને લશ્કર રાખવાં પડે છે. ઘણા દેશમાં, કાયદા મુજબ, લડાઈ આવી પડે ત્યારે તેના નાગરિકોને લશ્કરમાં ફરજિયાત ભરતી થવું પડે છે. ભારતમાં સ્વરાજ પહેલાં અને પછી ગરીબી અને બેકારી એટલી બધી રહી છે કે લાખો માણસો સામે ચાલીને લશ્કરમાં નોકરી કરવા પડાપડી કરતા હોય છે. એટલે આપણા દેશમાં ફરજિયાત લશ્કરી ભરતી કરવી પડતી નથી. બીજા વિશ્વયુદ્ધ વખતે અને તે પછી અમેરિકામાં ફરજિયાત લશ્કરી ભરતી લગભગ દરેક યુદ્ધ વખતે થયેલી છે. હાલમાં તેમ નથી. અનેકવિધ સવલતોથી આકર્ષાઈને હજારો અમેરિકન જુવાનો સ્વેચ્છાએ લશ્કરમાં ભરતી થાય છે. તેવાની જરૂર ઓછી પડે માટે બુશ સરકારે ઇરાકમાં ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓની જંગી ફોજ કામે લગાડી છે. ઇરાક પર જબરદસ્ત વિમાની બાઁબમારો અને તોપમારો ચલાવીને અમેરિકનોએ પહેલાં વિનાશ વેર્યો. પછી સડકો, પૂલો, મકાનો વગેરે બાંધવાનું કામ હજારો કાઁટ્રાક્ટરોને સોંપાયું, તેમના નોકરિયાતોની સંખ્યા ૧,૮૦,૦૦૦ જેટલી થવા જાય છે. તે પૈકી ૪૮,૦૦૦ હથિયારધારી નોકરિયાતો એવા છે કે જેની પર ઇરાકની કે અમેરિકન સરકાર સુઘ્ધાં કશો કાબૂ ધરાવતી નથી.

સરકારી સેનાની કામગીરી વિષે અમેરિકન સંસદમાં ને અખબારોમાં ટીકા થઈ શકે છે, પણ આ ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓને હાથે જે હત્યાઓ થાય તેના કોઈ આંકડા જાહેર થતા નથી. કેટલા ઇરાકી પ્રજાજનોની ખુવારી આ લડાઈમાં થઈ તે પણ ઘણા સમય સુધી જાહેર થયું નહોતું. ચાલીસ લાખથી વધુ ઇરાકીઓ યુદ્ધને લીધે નિર્વાસિત થયા છે ને તેમાં પ્રમાણ બહારનાં તો બાળકો છે. બ્લૅકવોટર નામના એક અમેરિકન કૉન્ટ્રાક્ટરના ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓએ ૧૬મી સપ્ટેમ્બરે બગદાદમાં સત્તર નિર્દોષ ઇરાકીઓની કતલ ચલાવેલી, તે અંગે ઇરાકી સરકાર કે અમેરિકન સેનાથી કશું થઈ શકતું નથી. ૨૦૦૫ની સાલ પછી ગોળીબારોની તડાફડીના આવા ૨૦૦ બનાવોમાં બ્લૅકવોટરની સંડોવણી બહાર આવી છે. પણ ઇરાક પરની ચડાઈ વખતના સર્વોચ્ચ અમેરિકન અધિકારી બ્રેમરે તે વેળા કાઢેલા ફરમાન મુજબ આવા ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓને ઇરાકના કાનૂનોથી પર રાખવામાં આવ્યા છે. અને છતાં એ કૉન્ટ્રાક્ટરો અબજો ડૉલર મેળવે છે અમેરિકન સરકાર પાસેથી, એટલે કે કરવેરા ભરનારા અમેરિકન નાગરિકો પાસેથી.

ફ્રઁક રીચ એમના લેખમાં કહે છે કે ઇરાકની લડાઈ વિષે અમેરિકન પ્રજાને સુખકારી અજ્ઞાનમાં રાખવાની બુશ સરકારની કુનેહભરી યોજના રહી છે. અમેરિકન સંસદ અને અખબારોએ પોતાની ફરજ બજાવી હોત તો ઘણા વધારે નાગરિકોએ આ લડાઈ વિષે વધુ વાંધા ઉઠાવ્યા હોત. અંતમાં લેખક કહે છે કે, ઇરાકની ભીષણતાઓ માટે આપણે બુશ સરકારને દોષ દેવાનું ભલે ચાલુ રાખીએ, પરંતુ આપણે નામે જે બીભત્સ કૃત્યો આચરવામાં આવ્યાં તે માટેની આપણી જવાબદારી કેટલી છે તે પણ તપાસવું જોઈએ.

ફ્રઁક રીચનો આ લેખ ભારતનાં અમુક અંગ્રેજી અખબારોમાં છપાયો હોય એવી આશા હું રાખું છું. બે કૉલમ જેટલા એ લેખમાં ૧/૮ ભાગ જેટલી કાપકૂપ કરીને ઈ-મેઈલથી તે અહીંના ને ભારતના કેટલાક મિત્રોને મેં મોકલ્યો છે. પણ ગુજરાતી છાપાં-સામયિકોયે પોતાના વાચકોના ઘ્યાન પર તે લાવે એવી મારી નમ્ર વિનંતી છે. કારણકે ગુજરાતની પ્રજામાં પણ આવા "ભલા જર્મનો"ની સંખ્યા સારી એવી હશે. ઇરાકની લડાઈ વિષે જેમ અમેરિકન પ્રજાને બુશ સરકારે સુખકારી અજ્ઞાનમાં રાખી છે, તેમ ગુજરાતનાં રમખાણો વિષે આપણી પ્રજાને બેહોશીમાં રાખવાની ભરચક કોશિશ રાજયના સત્તાધારીઓ કરતા રહ્યા છે. જેમ અમેરિકન સાંસદો અને અમેરિકન અખબારો, તેમ ગુજરાતના મોટા ભાગના ધારાસભ્યો અને છાપાં પણ પોતાની
જવાબદારી અદા કરવામાં નિષ્ફળ નીવડ્યાં છે. હિટલરની છૂપી પોલીસ ગેસ્ટાપોને શોભે તેવી તરકીબો જેમ બુશના અમેરિકામાં તેમ મોદીના ગુજરાતમાં અજમાવવામાં આવી છે, તેથી આપણી માનવતા નીચી પડી છે. એ લોકો આવું કરતા રહે ત્યાં સુધી આપણે જેટલા લાંબા કાળ લગી નિષ્ક્રીય ખડા રહેશું, તેટલા આપણે પેલા "ભલા જર્મનો" જેવા લાગશું, જે એમના પોતાના જ ગેસ્ટાપો વિષે અજાણ હોવાનો દાવો કરતા હતા.
ફ્રઁક રીચના લેખનો અંત આ શબ્દો સાથે આવે છે : "નિદ્રાભ્રમણ કરતા સાંસદો સરકારની નીતિને રોજેરોજ પડકારતા રહે તે માટે એમને જગાડવાની જવાબદારી આપણી છે. તેમાં હવે આપણે કશું ગુમાવવાનું રહ્યું નથી - સિવાય કે આપણા દેશનું ઉજ્જ્વલ નામ."

ગુજરાતના "નિદ્રાભ્રમણ કરતા" હાલના ધારાસભ્યોને જગાડવામાં આપણે નિષ્ફળ નીવડ્યા હોઈએ, તો એમને સ્થાને જાગતા ધારાસભ્યોને બેસાડવાની તક ડિસેમ્બર માસમાં જ પ્રજાને મળવાની છે.
હિટલરની હેવાનિયત લાખો નરનારી-બાળકોને ભરખી રહી હતી તે વરસો દરમ્યાન તેના મૂંગા પ્રેક્ષક બનીને બેસી રહેનારા પોતાના બાપ-દાદા વિષે જર્મનોની આજની પેઢી જે નામોશી અનુભવી રહી હશે, તેના જેવો અનુભવ કરવાનું ગુજરાતની આવતી પેઢીઓનાં બાળકોના કિસ્મતમાં ન આવે, તે માટે આપણે આજે કશુંક પણ કરશું?

છએક માસનો વતન-વિયોગ વેઠીને ઘરભણી પાછાં વળતાં આ સવાલ મારો કેડો છોડતો નથી.

[અમેરિકાથી લિખિતંગ મહેન્દ્ર મેઘાણી]

Our Feathered Friends

By: Ranjit Lal

Birds of India: A Literary Anthology, edited by Abdul Jamil Urfi, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.385, Rs.650.

As birds and birding rapidly gain popularity in India, the number of books on birds that has been published in the last decade or so has also risen considerably. This wonderfully entertaining and eclectic collection of writings about birds and birders and ornithologists can only make birds even more popular in the public perception, with hopefully the add-on benefits of such popularity (better conservation, better conservation, better conservation!) accruing in their favour too.

For a start, Urfi has picked a star cast of writers: The contributors include Kipling, the emperor Jahangir, Khushwant Singh, Mark Twain, Maulana Azad, Jim Corbett, M. Krishnan, Jawaharlal Nehru, EHA, Salim Ali, Jerdon, Malcolm Macdonald, E.P. Gee, Nissim Ezekiel, Douglas Dewar, Peter Jackson, Madhav Gadgil, A.R. Rahmani, Otto Pfister, Theodore Baskaran, Zai Whitaker and Zafar Futehally, pretty much the Who’s Who of Natural History writing in India, past and present.

He has chosen the pieces, he says in his introduction, not merely on the basis of their information content or ornithological value, but majorly on the basis of their ranking high in reading pleasure. Every piece is a gem: sheer good, sometimes classy writing backed up by sharp observation and comment; of course some shine brighter than others, but that will always be the case.

The book has been divided into six broad sections namely, Birds in the Human Mindscape; Sport, Entertainment and Falconry; Naturalists on the Prowl; Natural History and Science; Birdwatching and Beyond; and Personalities and Controversies. It is not the kind of book you need to start at the beginning and read chronologically, but you can dip in anywhere at will, and enjoy yourself equally. Of course, by the end of it you will pull favourites as I did. Mark Twain’s wonderful piece, “In Praise of the Indian Crow”, is surely a classic. Maulana Azad’s “Sparrows of Ahmad Nagar Fort Prison” came as a pleasant surprise.

Apart from the lay reader, I think this book ought to be made mandatory reading in schools — both for language and content. There’s a wonderful range of writing styles on display, and the content is pretty much faultless too.

(Condensed from The Hindu, March 9, 2008)
You can read the original at http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2008/03/09/stories/2008030950140700.htm

Genocide, Denial and Celebration

By: Arundathi Roy

I never met Hrant Dink. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one". [One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]

I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting.

"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail.And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."

Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor. This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well. The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant. The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002. I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes. Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'.The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states. As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India. It's an old human habit, genocide is. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:

"Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."

Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million), Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:

"Those that escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice...."

And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire...hacked, burned, set on fire... we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it... I have just one last wish...let me be sentenced to death... I don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay... I will finish them off... let a few more of them die... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."

I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial. Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child? Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him). In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population). None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.

And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruelest genocides in human history?

The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system. It's a habit as old, as persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and agriculture. Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one. The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia. Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress. 'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide. Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of 'progress' is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun. It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

"Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."

Then:

"In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation... All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots...The foreign races in Hindustan... may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen's rights."

And again:

"To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."

By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva—the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery. But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level of society, something that no other organisation can claim. The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch). Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on... On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the dock. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder. Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician was publicly butchered. In the words of a man who took part in the savagery:

"Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword... chopped off his hand, then his legs... then everything else... after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive."

The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place. In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. Modi did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists.

Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation. The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off." With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.

(Abridged from a lecture delivered in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.)

(Click http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080204&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1 to view the original article in Outlook, 4-Feb-2008 issue)