South Asia Citizens Wire - 24 May 2016 - No. 2896
[since 1996]
Contents:
1. Bangladesh safer than Syria for jihadis - Interview with Taslima Nasreen
2. ’Honor killings’: Why Pakistan must act against this brutality | Sherry
Rehman
3. India: Two Year of Narendra Modi Govt - select commentary | Bharat Bhushan /
Shiv Visvanathan
4. India - Pakistan: Fishermen in troubled waters | Jatin Desai
5. India: Hindutva linked terror accused in Malegaon blasts & other cases being
let off and fine work by Hemant Karkare being taken down | Subhas Gatade and
Julio Ribeiro
6. India: The Police, the counter-insurgency vigilantes and the maoists all
responsible for displacement and division in Chhattissgarh villages
7. Breaking the silence on domestic abuse within progressive activist circles -
A personal account | Swati Kamble
8. The Last Years of Victor Serge via his Mexican diaries
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
India: RSS welfare projects in UP with 2017 assembly elections in view
India: AAP releases NIA officer’s note against RSS leader Indresh Kumar
India: At World Hindu Economic Forum in Bangalore VHP leader says The word
‘industry’ comes from Indus
India: Right-wing Bajrang Dal men training its 'vigilante' men in Uttar
Pradesh in use of rifles and other arms
Richard David Williams: A review of Brahmans Beyond Nationalism, Muslims
Beyond Dominance: A Hidden History of North Indian Classical Music’s
Hinduization, by Justin Scarimbolo
India: Muslim families shrinking fastest among Indian communities
India: vote share figures concerning 2016 Assam assembly elections
Secular India where Inter religious marriages are damned: How a
Hindu-Muslim love story that started in Agra school ended in flames (Naveed
Iqbal)
India: Why saffron terror is not a myth - by shielding Hindu terror
suspects, the Modi government is making a big mistake (Ashok Swain)
India: Politics of indigeneity - A Letter to the National Media from Two
‘Migrants’ in Assam (Mayuri Bhattacharjee and Anwesha Dutta)
India: Govt aggressively pushing its Hindutva agenda - wants Akbar Road
Renamed
India: BJP Won’t Capture Kerala Yet But RSS Culture Is Sweeping the State
(Latha Jishnu)
Secularism is a fig leaf. We’re more Pakistani than we think (Aakar Patel)
Pakistan: ‘With no space for pluralism, religious intolerance thrived’ -
report by Zoya Anwer on a teachers workshop held in Karachi
India - Personal Law: Why it’s no conspiracy if courts intervene in Muslim
personal law (Tahir Mahmood)
India: Why exoneration of Sadhvi Pragya should worry everyone who stands
for justice (Subhas Gatade)
Pakistan: Right Wing Religious Alliance vows to Protect Blasphemy Law . . .
.
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Can Aung San Suu Kyi avoid the mistakes of Burma’s past? - Editorial, The
Washington Post
11. The Real Source of Terror in Bangladesh | Willam B. Milam
12. Nepal headed for another showdown: Madhes agitation moves to Kathmandu |
Hari Bansh Jha
13. India: Re-Naming Akbar Road Is About Politics and Hindutva | Gopalkrishna
Gandhi
14. Nuclear Battles In South Asia | Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
15. India: CNDP Press release on 18th anniversary of India’s Nuclear Tests
16. Ex-president of the Maldives granted asylum in UK | Patrick Wintour
17. 'The official silence on the Cultural Revolution in China' - Editorial, The
Telegraph
18. Culture and Power in the Chinese Communist Revolution | Jennifer Altehenger
19. Venezuela and the Silence of the Left | Pedro Lange-Churion
========================================
1. BANGLADESH SAFER THAN SYRIA FOR JIHADIS - INTERVIEW WITH TASLIMA NASREEN
========================================
Since 2013, more than 20 people – including secular writers, bloggers,
professors, members of religious minorities and foreigners – have been killed
in targeted attacks in Bangladesh. Why are secular individuals being targeted
in Bangladesh? Who is killing them?
http://sacw.net/article12763.html
========================================
2. ’HONOR KILLINGS’: WHY PAKISTAN MUST ACT AGAINST THIS BRUTALITY | Sherry
Rehman
========================================
In 2016, there is no reason that Pakistan’s people, mainly its women, should
have to live in fear of the savagery and brutality of honor killings.
http://sacw.net/article12769.html
========================================
3. INDIA: TWO YEAR OF NARENDRA MODI GOVT - SELECT COMMENTARY
========================================
INDIA: NARENDRA MODI’S TWO YEARS HAVE INSTILLED FEAR IN THE MINDS OF MANY
SECTIONS OF INDIAN SOCIETY
by Bharat Bhushan
On 16 May, 2014 Narendra Modi was elected with a resounding majority to
Parliament. And on 26 May, he was sworn in as India’s Prime Minister. Two years
later, has Modi managed to deliver on the promises that made people vote him to
power?
http://sacw.net/article12757.html
IN TWO YEARS THE NARENDRA MODI REGIME HAS EMASCULATED DEMOCRACY INTO A
DEMAGOGIC AND THREATENING MAJORITARIANISM
by Shiv Visvanathan
Under the Modi regime What one is witnessing is more than cultural McCarthyism.
To the witch-hunt, we are adding a cultural uprooting, inquisition-style. To
the overt brutality of violence, one has to add the deeper violence of cultural
disruption.
http://sacw.net/article12764.html
========================================
4. INDIA - PAKISTAN: FISHERMEN IN TROUBLED WATERS | Jatin Desai
========================================
To be in prison in one’s own country is itself a nerve-wracking ordeal. But
imagine how much more agonising it must be to languish in another country’s
prison, often endlessly, and for no fault or for minor transgressions,
especially if the two countries in question happen to be India and Pakistan?
http://sacw.net/article12778.html
========================================
5. INDIA: HINDUTVA LINKED TERROR ACCUSED IN MALEGAON BLASTS AND OTHER CASES
BEING LET OFF AND FINE WORK BY HEMANT KARKARE BEING TAKEN DOWN
========================================
The developments in the Malegaon blasts case have shown that the Hindutva
forces are succeeding. Articles by Subhas Gatade and by Julio Ribeiro are
posted below
http://sacw.net/article12771.html
========================================
6. INDIA: THE POLICE, THE COUNTER-INSURGENCY VIGILANTES AND THE MAOISTS ALL
RESPONSIBLE FOR DISPLACEMENT AND DIVISION IN CHHATTISSGARH VILLAGES
========================================
A delegation comprising of Sanjay Parate, Chhattisgarh State Secretary CPI-M,
Vineet Tiwari, Joshi-Adhikari Institute, CPI member, New Delhi, Archana Prasad,
Professor Jawaharlal Nehru University and CC member AIDWA, and Nandini Sundar,
Professor, Delhi University visited Bastar Division from 12 to 16 May 2016. We
visited the following districts: Bijapur, Sukma, Bastar and Kanker. The focus
of the visit was on the situation of ordinary villagers who are living through
the conflict between the state and Maoists.
http://sacw.net/article12774.html
========================================
7. BREAKING THE SILENCE ON DOMESTIC ABUSE WITHIN PROGRESSIVE ACTIVIST CIRCLES -
A PERSONAL ACCOUNT | Swati Kamble
========================================
My reason for writing this narrative is that I want to face the demons. I want
to make sense of the things that happened to me. But not just for me. I want
people to know, especially the young girls and women who are conditioned to
endure violence and who are silently fighting abuse. I want them to know that
they are not alone in this fight. To the society that pretends it is a private
matter, I want to say loud and clear that domestic abuse is real.
http://sacw.net/article12765.html
========================================
8. THE LAST YEARS OF VICTOR SERGE VIA HIS MEXICAN DIARIES
========================================
Victor Serge (1890–1947) spent the last six years of his life in Mexico,
joining the exodus from Marseille in 1941 and remaining behind after the War.
Here he completed his two most celebrated works. Memoirs of a Revolutionary
evokes his vagabond anarchist youth, passage to revolutionary Russia, years as
assistant to Zinoviev in the Comintern and Left Oppositionist, prison, exile; a
cast of thousands from the Old Bolshevik generation recalled in vivid detail.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev was the most powerful of his ‘documentary novels’
on the turmoil of the inter-war years. Extracts from Serge’s 1944, 45 and 47
diaries had appeared in Les Temps modernes in 1949
http://sacw.net/article12755.html
========================================
9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================
India: Narendra Modi govt's new move on education: Coming soon a Vedic and
Sanskrit education board
India: RSS welfare projects in UP with 2017 assembly elections in view
India: AAP releases NIA officer’s note against RSS leader Indresh Kumar
India: At World Hindu Economic Forum in Bangalore VHP leader says The word
‘industry’ comes from Indus
India: Right-wing Bajrang Dal men training its 'vigilante' men in Uttar
Pradesh in use of rifles and other arms
Richard David Williams: A review of Brahmans Beyond Nationalism, Muslims
Beyond Dominance: A Hidden History of North Indian Classical Music’s
Hinduization, by Justin Scarimbolo
India: Muslim families shrinking fastest among Indian communities
India: vote share figures concerning 2016 Assam assembly elections
Secular India where Inter religious marriages are damned: How a
Hindu-Muslim love story that started in Agra school ended in flames (Naveed
Iqbal)
India: Why saffron terror is not a myth - by shielding Hindu terror
suspects, the Modi government is making a big mistake (Ashok Swain)
India: Politics of indigeneity - A Letter to the National Media from Two
‘Migrants’ in Assam (Mayuri Bhattacharjee and Anwesha Dutta)
India: Govt aggressively pushing its Hindutva agenda - wants Akbar Road
Renamed
India: BJP Won’t Capture Kerala Yet But RSS Culture Is Sweeping the State
(Latha Jishnu)
Revolutionary Bhagat Singh and Freedom Movement
Secularism is a fig leaf. We’re more Pakistani than we think (Aakar Patel)
Pakistan: ‘With no space for pluralism, religious intolerance thrived’ -
report by Zoya Anwer on a teachers workshop held in Karachi
India - Personal Law: Why it’s no conspiracy if courts intervene in Muslim
personal law (Tahir Mahmood)
India: Why exoneration of Sadhvi Pragya should worry everyone who stands
for justice (Subhas Gatade)
Pakistan: Right Wing Religious Alliance vows to Protect Blasphemy Law . . .
.
India: Caste-based UP school (Atul Chandra's report for Catch News)
India - Bovine Matters in Modi Government : At first of kind cattlesheds
conference, ministers were a bit cowed down by slogans & scuffles
India: Rohit Vemula's Family gets a home but with help from the Muslim Right
Making Goebbels proud of India (Jawed Naqvi)
India - Assam Assembly elections 2016 - How Divided Speech United Voters
Behind Two Poles (Rajeev Bhattacharyya)
India: Malayalee scholar MN Karassery's fight against religious
fundamentalism will continue beyond elections in Kerala
India - Malegaon Blasts: NIA must Probe RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s Admission
and Allegations about Art of Living (Shamsul Islam)
-> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
========================================
10. CAN AUNG SAN SUU KYI AVOID THE MISTAKES OF BURMA’S PAST? - EDITORIAL, THE
WASHINGTON POST
========================================
(The Washington Post - May 20, 2016)
Can Aung San Suu Kyi avoid the mistakes of Burma’s past?
By Editorial Board
THE TRANSITION from military rule and dictatorship to democracy is treacherous.
In the past generation, not every nation that has embarked on that journey has
arrived at its hoped-for destination, nor has every revolutionary leader
delivered on the promise. Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, a champion of human
rights and democracy in Burma who has taken most of the reins of power, no
doubt has studied lessons from Lech Walesa, Boris Yeltsin and Nelson Mandela.
In the weeks since her government assumed control, ending decades of military
rule during which she was held under house arrest, she has moved gingerly and
cautiously.
Beyond doubt, she realizes the enormity of the obstacles facing her and
threatening Burma’s transition, but at the same time she sees that popular
expectations are running high. She has freed political prisoners and set a new
tone. Thin Yu Mon, a human rights activist in Rangoon who was recently in
Washington, marveled at the atmosphere she encountered in a public festival.
“Now we are really free,” she said.
But Burma’s democratic trajectory is not assured. The Obama administration
properly recognized this Tuesday with a calibrated easing of sanctions on
Burma, also called Myanmar, that left some in place, signaling a continuing
concern over human rights abuses, ethnic conflict and the continuing influence
of the military, which is trying to preserve undemocratic power through a
constitution it wrote before allowing free elections.
One of Aung San Suu Kyi’s most daunting challenges, therefore, is to deal with
these powerful and unelected generals, who control a quarter of the seats in
parliament not subject to election and thus can block constitutional reform;
who hold the key Defense, Home Affairs and Border Affairs ministries; and who
have grown accustomed to profiting handsomely from the nation’s bounty. In the
latest action, the United States has retained an arms ban, as well as sanctions
on individuals and entities that are obstructing political reform, committing
human rights abuses or engaging in illicit military trade with North Korea.
At the same time, Aung San Suu Kyi faces a cauldron of ethnic tension and
conflict. Among the most severe is the plight of the 1 million Rohingya, a
Muslim minority who have been subject to persecution and misery, denied
citizenship and crowded into squalid camps. Some 100,000 Rohingya were driven
from their homes in 2012 in a wave of violence. Subsequently, many fled and
lost their lives on rickety ships at sea. Nationalist Buddhists have insisted
the Rohingya are not Burmese and call them “Bengalis,” as did the former
military government. Shockingly, after the U.S. Embassy expressed condolences
recently for the loss of at least 20 people whose boat capsized on April 19,
Aung San Suu Kyi suggested to the new U.S. ambassador that the United States
should not use the word “Rohingya.” Ever careful, she may have been catering to
Buddhist nationalists, but if so, it was an egregious error.
She must find a way to correct the mistakes of the past, not repeat them.
========================================
11. THE REAL SOURCE OF TERROR IN BANGLADESH
by Willam B. Milam
========================================
(The New York Times - May 19, 2016)
On Friday, a doctor in western Bangladesh was hacked to death. Last weekend, it
was a Buddhist monk, in the southeastern part of the country. The week before,
it was a Sufi Muslim leader, up north. Less than two weeks earlier, it was an
L.G.B.T. activist. Just days before that, an English professor.
Some of these attacks have not yet been claimed, but they follow a gruesome
pattern: There have been at least 25 violent, sometimes public, killings of
religious minorities, secularists and free-speech advocates in Bangladesh since
February 2015. A dozen more people have been assaulted in similar ways and
survived.
Of these attacks, more than 20 have been claimed by the Islamic State, about
half a dozen by Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and one each by the
indigenous Bangladeshi extremist groups Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and
Ansar al-Islam.
The surge is worrying Western governments, which fear that local Islamist
terrorists may now be competing for the attention of international jihadist
networks or cooperating with them. Several Western countries have responded
with antiterrorism measures: Japan is providing aviation security; the United
States has called for strengthening cooperation with the Bangladeshi
authorities to counter terrorism and violent extremism.
This is a predictable reaction, but it is misguided, and dangerous, because it
proceeds from the wrong diagnosis.
The recent string of vicious killings in Bangladesh is less a terrorism issue
than a governance issue: It is the ruling Awami League’s onslaught against its
political opponents, which began in earnest after the last election in January
2014, that has unleashed extremists in Bangladesh.
A zero-sum mentality has been the rule of Bangladeshi politics since the end of
the military dictatorship in 1991. Between then and 2007, the country’s two
main parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (B.N.P.),
traded power every term. Whichever one was leading the government focused on
enriching itself and weakening the other. That left the private sector largely
alone to invest in economic expansion and NGOs to provide education, health
care and other social services the government wasn’t delivering.
In some respects, the government’s failure to do its job served the country
well: The economy has grown by an average of 5-6 percent annually over the last
two decades; Bangladesh has outdone India and Pakistan on various social
development indicators, such as health care and education. But the country’s
political culture steadily deteriorated.
Photo
A student with a portrait of the English professor A.F.M. Rezaul Karim
Siddique, who was hacked to death on his way to work in April. Credit
Associated Press
Major protests broke out in late 2006, after the then-ruling B.N.P. tried to
rig elections scheduled for 2007. The army took over for a time. The Awami
League was voted back into office in 2009 and in 2011 used its vast majority in
Parliament to remove from the Constitution a clause providing that general
elections be overseen by nonpartisan caretaker governments.
The B.N.P. boycotted the 2014 election, largely in response to that amendment,
and since winning that one-party election the Awami League has been hellbent on
turning Bangladesh into a one-party state. The B.N.P. has become the primary —
really, the only — target of the government’s so-called law enforcement
efforts. The Awami League routinely deploys the judiciary and the police
against its political opponents and any dissenting voices in civil society.
High-ranking B.N.P. members have been framed on spurious corruption charges,
among other things. According to the International Crisis Group and Human
Rights Watch, the government has silenced critics by resorting to enforced
disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings. Journalists who dare cover
any of this are being charged with sedition and treason.
The Awami League’s relentless campaign against the political opposition and
civil society has allowed violent radicals of all stripes to let loose.
Concentrating the state’s limited judicial and police powers on the B.N.P. and
its supporters reduces the resources that can be devoted to preventing
terrorism and crime. Using illegal means to quiet perceived opponents
undermines the rule of law, creating an atmosphere of impunity that emboldens
extremists.
The first machete killing — of a secularist blogger — occurred in February
2013, before the last general election. The Awami League reacted as you would
expect from an incumbent party: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left her office to
offer condolences to the family and vowed to catch the culprits. But since the
party was re-elected, its response to similar attacks has become constructively
evasive.
It is not clear whether Awami League leaders are even paying their respects to
the victims’ families. At the same time that the leaders deny the presence in
Bangladesh of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent or the Islamic State, they
accuse the B.N.P. — or what is left of it — of conspiring with the Islamist
party Jamaat-e-Islami to destabilize the government. Ms. Hasina repeated this
charge most recently a few weeks ago, after the killing of the L.G.B.T.
activist and U.S. Embassy employee Xulhaz Mannan.
More pernicious still is the government’s wavering on free expression. On the
eve of a Hindu holiday in September, Ms. Hasina told a group of Hindu leaders
that people had the right to practice their own religion but not “to hurt
others’ religious sentiment.” At a Bengali New Year celebration last month, she
reportedly said the writings of bloggers criticizing Islam were “filthy words”
and asked why the government should take responsibility if those writings “lead
to any untoward incidents?” Islamists could be forgiven for interpreting these
statements as a free pass to attack people they consider to be enemies of
scriptural Islam.
Bangladesh has a history of fringe extremist groups. Some of those are a legacy
of the war in Afghanistan, in which some Bangladeshis fought; others are
byproducts of the Wahhabi influence that Bangladeshi workers in the Persian
Gulf brought back when they returned home. But before the string of attacks
that started last year, the last known terrorist attack in Bangladesh (by
Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh) dated back to 2005.
It’s difficult to gauge the current terrorist threat in Bangladesh, especially
any links between local and international groups. Whatever its exact nature,
however, it is largely the result of the government’s repression against
mainstream dissent. Responding to this wave of attacks as though it were
principally a security issue, rather than a governance problem, would only make
matters worse.
This article has been updated to reflect news developments.
William B. Milam is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in
Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh and Pakistan.
========================================
12. NEPAL HEADED FOR ANOTHER SHOWDOWN: MADHES AGITATION MOVES TO KATHMANDU
by Hari Bansh Jha
========================================
(Catch News - 23 May 2016)
The six-month long Madhes-centric agitation against the new Constitution in
Nepal has now become Kathmandu-centric. Since 14 May, the Madhes-based
political parties together with hill-based indigenous (Janajati) political
forces - including the Sherpas, Magars, Gurungs and Rai-Limbus - have come
together in a joint front called "Federal Alliance" in their bid to oppose the
new Constitution promulgated on 20 September, 2015.
The Constitution curtailed much of their rights enshrined in the Interim
Constitution 2007. The agitating groups have placed 26 demands before the
government, which includes re-writing of the Constitution.
AFP
With a view to creating pressure on the government to address their grievances,
thousands of political cadres belonging to Madhes-based political parties and
hill-Janajati groups have been opposing the Constitution by organising
different forms of protests.
Also read: Nepal: India's emasculated responses have emboldened KP Oli
Towards this end, they organised rallies, performed a two-day sit-in programme
at Singha Durbar, the administrative unit of the government and a one-day
sit-in programme at the official residence of the Nepalese Prime Minister. The
government, however, turned a deaf ear towards their demands and termed the
agitation as "pointless drama"
"Many fear Nepal may plunge into further political instability and the
situation could turn violent"
Therefore, the agitating groups extended their protests for 10 days.
Accordingly, they have been protesting against the Constitution in Kathmandu
Valley and also in Pokhara and Birgunj. Over last few days, people's
participation in the agitation is growing, despite the government's attempts to
thwart it..
Of course, the government sent letters inviting the agitating groups to come
forward and resolve differences over Constitution-related issues. But the
agitating groups rejected the offer stating that the government wasn't serious
about addressing their concerns in the three dozen times talks were held. They
also add that the government hasn't created a congenial atmosphere for dialogue.
However, there is growing anxiety over the stand-off between the government and
agitating groups. Many fear that Nepal would move further towards political
instability and the situation could become violent if the stand-off continues
for long.
Also read: Nepal constitution: Madheshi protests end but the anger remains
Last year, such a standoff led to an economic blockade of Nepal for 5 months,
which created severe shortage of such essential items as oil and cooking gas in
the country. According to estimates, each month of blockade caused a loss of $2
billion to Nepal's economy.
The entire economy was paralysed and Nepal's rate of economic growth has become
negative.
On top of that, 58 agitators lost their lives and thousands were injured during
that period. Human rights bodies have highlighted the excesses committed by the
security forces against the agitating groups.
Also read: 100 days of Oli-garchy: Nepal PM's joke is on the people
Unfortunately, the government does not appear to be in a mood to address the
demands of the Madhesis, Janajatis, Muslims, Dalits and women groups,
constituting over 70% of Nepal's population. Both the India-Britain and
India-European Union press communiqués released at the end of visit of Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's to Britain and Brussels, Nepal was advised to
make the Constitution inclusive and accommodate the concerns of different
agitating groups to ensure peace and political stability in the country.
Even US Secretary of State John Kerry gave similar advice to Kamal Thapa,
Deputy Prime Minister of Nepal. But the government of Nepal not only ignored
such friendly advice but even opposed it.
"The entire economy was paralysed and Nepal's rate of economic growth has
become negative"
To make matters worse, the government of Nepal in its recent policies and
programmes has made an announcement to hold local level elections by
November/December this year. In political circles, such a step is seen as as an
effort to institutionalise the new Constitution. However, there is no sense in
conducting this election as local elections fall under the jurisdication of
states and the issue of demarcating states hasn't been resolved as yet.
In 2005, King Gyanendra also tried to conduct local level elections, pending in
the country since 1997. But he failed due to strong opposition from political
parties.
Lack of flexibility on the part of the government to address the problems of
the agitating groups is likely to intensify the confrontation. But this time,
the Kathmandu-centric agitation is likely to be more effective than the
Madhes-centric agitation as it has the support of the hill-based indigenous
groups and other political forces in Nepal.
Also read: False dawn in Kathmandu: how PM Oli lost the plot & what India can do
Besides, Western powers also appear to be sympathetic towards the cause of the
Madhesis and Janajatis. In view of this development, the state needs to avoid a
confrontation by addressing the core demands of the agitating groups such as
the formation of one or two states in Terai, parliamentary elections on the
basis of population, proportional representation and removal of discriminatory
provisions in citizenship-related rules. Rewriting the Constitution is
unavoidable for addressing these demands.
Edited by Aditya Menon
========================================
13. INDIA: RE-NAMING AKBAR ROAD IS ABOUT POLITICS AND HINDUTVA
by Gopalkrishna Gandhi
========================================
(The Wire - 19 May 2016)
This re-naming fever is about soft warfare, cultural politics.
General Vijay Kumar Singh is a soldier and a Rajput. He has in abundance a
soldier’s perseverance and a Rajput’s pride. A soldier is expected by training
to do his duty unflinchingly, a Rajput is expected by custom to speed to battle
in a cloud of dust and determination, returning only if victorious.
A general must retire when the time comes for him to do so. V. K. Singh has
retired from the Indian Army. But no Rajput retires from being a Rajput. Singh
is a Rajput forever.
The former army chief’s wish to have New Delhi’s Akbar Road re-named as
Maharana Pratap Singh Road has to be seen as a retired soldier’s fascination
for military history and an un-retirable Rajput’s untiring Rajput chromosomes.
No one can fault a lion for roaring.
With no war declared, no one bugling him to battle, Singh’s instincts and
training have made him turn from the solatiums of the present to the
stimulations of the past. He has created a diorama of the battle fought four
hundred and forty years ago at Haldighati between Maharana Pratap Singh and
Akbar’s army commander Man Singh. There is true passion in the box-scenes, true
nostalgia, true kinship. To the former general from the Rajput Regiment, I
offer a salute for his miniaturisations of soldierly courage and a khamaghani
for the magnifications of Rajput pride.
But the matter cannot be left there. His recommendation has been made as a
minister. To another minister. And that, in an official letter. With that the
idea goes beyond the cloisters of an individual’s imagining to the chambers of
public office. It makes the suggestion a communication of a minister’s idea,
made by him as minister, to another minister who is thought by the ‘sending’
minister to be the right ‘receiving’ minister for that minister’s ministerial
action. All this anoints the recommendation with the governmental equivalent of
rose-water, which is, the official ink.
Unless withdrawn by him or officially disowned by the union government, his
recommendation cannot be taken as an individual’s stray thoughts. It has to be
seen as a reflection, howsoever individualised, of this government’s
ideological gradient, its historical mount, its political axle.
And those are patent enough.
Hindutva
B.R. Ambedkar gave a now famous message to the All India Depressed Classes
Conference at Nagpur in 1942 – Agitate, Educate, Organise. That can be
re-worked in Hindutva’s vocabulary as ‘Regurgitate, Resuscitate, Polarise’.
Regurgitate old prejudices, resuscitate dying biases, polarise communities. Of
these, the first two are about methods, the third is about policy. And the
policy is to polarise India first, on religious lines as between Hindus and
Muslims and then, on thinking lines as between those who want India to be
plural and those who want it to be Hindu-dominated, between those who want
India to be liberal and those who want it to be tersely majoritarian. In other
words, polarising India between India that is Bharat and India that is
Bharatiya, between India that is Hind and an India that is Hindu.
The re-naming of Aurangzeb Road as A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Road had little to do
with Aurangzeb. It had less to do with Kalam. It had everything to do with
polarising, with wanting to turn the knife in India’s Hindu-Muslim duality. It
had little to do with history and everything to do with politics. It had little
to do with social memory and everything to do with communal manipulation. It
was about regurgitating memories of Mughal bigotry, resuscitating ‘Aurangzeb
the Bad’ and, above all, polarising Bharat and Hind.
Aurangzeb Road was renamed A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Road, ‘Bad’ Muslim to ‘Good’
Muslim, with a hidden snigger. The call for turning Akbar Road into Maharana
Pratap Singh Road, great Muslim to great Hindu, is being made with an open
sneer. The first re-naming idea was clever, this one is morbid. The first
caused a gasp of astonishment, this stifles the breath of belief.
Akbar
Akbar is ‘Akbar the Great’ not because he was a great Mughal but because he
was, simply, exceptional. In his use of power for creating a nation unified by
a moral direction, Akbar ranks with Ashoka and with Ashoka alone. Not just the
Hindustan he ruled but the India of subsequent centuries has recognised him as
one who “died as he had lived for many years, a man whose religion nobody could
name” – an ideal condition for the ruler of a country with many religious
traditions. Akbar stands at a rare intersection of scholarly esteem and popular
endorsement as a figure of national convergence.
His urbane treatment of India’s Hindu majority including his marrying Hindu
princesses, doing away with the outrageous pilgrim tax and the appointment of
Hindus to the highest possible military and civilian commands can be
interpreted as acts of political canniness as indeed they were. But his
extension of the same civility to Jains, Parsis and Christians has to have had
inner roots in eclecticism. If the Din-i-Ilahi stabilised his throne and
burnished his personal image, it also becalmed the country.
Akbar sought to build trust. He tried to win and retain the confidence of his
people in his impartiality, his justice. Ashoka erected pillars and carved
edicts across his empire to proclaim the Dhamma; Akbar built the Ibadat Khana
(House of Worship) in his gardens at Sikri to be used as a discussion hall to
debate, in a free and enquiring spirit, questions of religion and theology.
Does Singh not know this? Of course he does. But then he is captive, captive to
the ideology of his political party.
Why, four and a half centuries on, should Akbar’s name on a road make him want
to erase it? Is pluralism threatening? Is debate unwelcome? Is civility shown
by a Muslim a challenge?
Or has it become necessary, urgently necessary now, to further Hindutva
consolidation, and here through the great veins of Rajput self-pride?
The answer is patent.
Hindu consolidation
The minister could have asked for a brand new building, flyover or a road to be
named after the lion-hearted Maharana Pratap Singh of Mewar. I do not know if
Mansingh Road is named after Akbar’s commander or another of the same name. If
the former, that name could in some logic though in bad form, have been sought
to be renamed but that would not have satisfied their Hindutva. Replacing
Akbar’s name on the New Delhi road by that of Akbar’s brave adversary, does. It
does so by staging a proxy Haldighati, a diorama battle in which the great
Mughal becomes ‘the oppressor’ and the great Rana the liberator, the great
Mughal becomes the Muslim and the great Rana becomes the Hindu. It continues
Hindutva’s plan to un-ravel, strand by strand, the great weave of India’s
pluralism. It continues the self-deluding and India-defeating agenda of Hindu
consolidation.
It is not about the person any more. It is about the religion.
Babur Road, Humayun Road, Akbar Road, Jehangir Road, Shahjahan Road have all
been placed by road re-namers on a death row. They will all have Maharana
Pratap equivalents. Ashoka Road will be a harder case. Unless of course someone
suggests that it be re-named Kalinga Marg.
Supporting Singh’s recommendation, a BJP spokesperson has said that road names
such as Akbar Road’s should go because they represent India’s oppressors.
Imagine, she said, Israel having a road named after Hitler. One can be sure
that from ‘the other side’, there will be equally intemperate and ill-tempered
howls of protest comparing Hindus to the Nazis, Indian Muslims to the Jewish
victims of the second world war.
The re-namings do not have to be done, as they say, ‘actually’. It is enough
for purposes of consolidation that they be recommended. Twist the lime-drop
into the milk and wait for it to curdle. The khoya can take its own time. And
so, suggest, suggest, recommend, recommend. And do nothing more. Sit back and
let ‘them’ fight. The next re-naming tranche could be recommended for places –
Allahabad, Aurangabad, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Secunderabad, Nizamabad,
Shahjahanabad, Faizabad, Ahmednagar, Fatehpur… And then for cultural signets.
Soft power is a phrase of dubious distinction used for another gambit of
suspicious intent, cultural diplomacy. This re-naming fever is about soft
warfare, cultural politics. If, in Pakistan and elsewhere the beautiful Khuda
Hafiz has been sought to be replaced by Allah Hafiz, Hindutva will want to and
try to replace Jai Hind! By Bharat Mata ki Jai!. And the simple Namaste with
Jai Sri Krishna! to be responded, do not forget, by Radhe! Radhe ! But that
will be tough, in Tamil Nadu certainly where, thanks to Periyar and the
Dravidar movement, speakers of that classical language, despite all their
piety, will not countenance replacing Vanakkam with Jai this or that deity.
Rend, rend, that which time has stitched; tear , tear what time has darned.
And cut, cut what has stayed whole. This is what Muslim bigotry and Hindu
consolidation are about.
Sare Jahan Se Achcha
Sadly, however, for the zealots, and fortunately for India, its people, for Hum
Bharat Ke Log or Hum Hind Ki Awam, are just that many, that many too many, and
too many too sensible, to be bamboozled by the cultural demagoguery, political
roguery and emotional thuggery. We do not want to be good or bad Muslims, good
or bad Hindus. We just want to be fortunate citizens, fortunate in the
intentions of our rulers, fortunate in their wisdom not their cleverness, in
the honesty of their hands not the smartness of their fingers. Our rulers
cannot be Ashoka or Akbar. But they can try to be their heirs. Nehru did,
Ambedkar did. What did they re-name ? Nothing, certainly not India. They kept
that name, adding to it a grand synonym, Bharat. And that is what Rakesh Sharma
celebrated, I am sure, when gazing down at the Time-carved peninsula of India
from his sky-seat, he answered Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s question of how
India looked from ‘up there’, with ‘Sare Jahan Se Achcha’.
Today’s rulers, in their mundane seat of brief office can never, howsoever hard
they may try, ever hope to erase the shape of Hindustan from the name and style
India that is Bharat.
========================================
14. NUCLEAR BATTLES IN SOUTH ASIA
by Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
========================================
(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 4 May 2016)
The armies of Pakistan and India are practicing for nuclear war on the
battlefield: Pakistan is rehearsing the use of nuclear weapons, while India
trains to fight on despite such use and subsequently escalate. What were once
mere ideas and scenarios dreamed up by hawkish military planners and nuclear
strategists have become starkly visible capabilities and commitments. When the
time comes, policy makers and people on both sides will expect—and perhaps
demand—that the Bomb be used.
Pakistan has long been explicit about its plans to use nuclear weapons to
counter Indian conventional forces. Pakistan has developed “a variety of short
range, low yield nuclear weapons,” claimed retired General Khalid Kidwai in
March 2015. Kidwai is the founder—and from 2000 until 2014 ran—Pakistan’s
Strategic Plans Division, which is responsible for managing the country’s
nuclear weapons production complex and arsenal. These weapons, Kidwai said,
have closed the “space for conventional war.” Echoing this message, Pakistani
Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry declared in October 2015 that his
country might use these tactical nuclear weapons in a conflict with India.
There already have been four wars between the two countries—in 1947, 1965,
1971, and 1999—as well as many war scares.
The United States, which at one time deployed over 7,000 tactical nuclear
weapons in Europe aimed at Soviet conventional forces, has expressed alarm
about Pakistan’s plans. Amplifying comments made by President Barack Obama,
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained in April 2016 that “we’re
concerned by the increased security challenges that accompany growing
stockpiles, particularly tactical nuclear weapons that are designed for use on
the battlefield. And these systems are a source of concern because they’re
susceptible to theft due to their size and mode of employment. Essentially, by
having these smaller weapons, the threshold for their use is lowered, and
the[re is] risk that a conventional conflict between India and Pakistan could
escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons.”
Responding to US concerns, Kidwai has said that “Pakistan would not cap or curb
its nuclear weapons programme or accept any restrictions.” The New York Times
reported last year that so far, “an unknown number of the tactical weapons were
built, but not deployed” by Pakistan.
India is making its own preparations for nuclear war. The Indian Army conducted
a massive military exercise in April 2016 in the Rajasthan desert bordering
Pakistan, involving tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and 30,000
soldiers, to practice what to do if it is attacked with nuclear weapons on the
battlefield. An Indian Army spokesman told the media, “our policy has been
always that we will never use nuclear weapons first. But if we are attacked, we
need to gather ourselves and fight through it. The simulation is about doing
exactly that.” This is not the first such Indian exercise. As long ago as May
2001, the Indian military conducted an exercise based on the possibility that
Pakistan would use nuclear weapons on Indian armed forces. Indian generals and
planners have anticipated such battlefield nuclear use by Pakistan since at
least the 1990s.
Driving the current set of Indian strategies and capabilities is the army’s
search for a way to use military force to retaliate against Pakistan for
harboring terrorists who, from time to time, have launched devastating attacks
inside India. In 2001, Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed credit for an
attack on India’s parliament. India massed troops on the border, but had to
withdraw them after several months. International pressure, a public commitment
by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to restrain militants from future
strikes, and Pakistan’s threat to use nuclear weapons if it was attacked caused
the crisis to wind down. Following the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai by
Pakistan-based militants, General Deepak Kapoor, then India’s army chief,
argued that India must find a way to wage “limited war under a nuclear
overhang.”
Paths to destruction. It could come to pass that Pakistan’s army uses nuclear
weapons on its own territory to repel invading Indian tanks and troops.
Pakistan’s planners may intend this first use of nuclear weapons as a warning
shot, hoping to cause the Indians to stop and withdraw rather than risk worse.
But while withdrawal would be one possible outcome, there would also be others.
It is more likely, for instance, that the use of one—or even a few—Pakistani
battlefield nuclear weapons would fail to dent Indian forces. While even a
small nuclear weapon would be devastating in an urban environment, many such
weapons may be required to have a decisive military impact on columns of
well-dispersed battle tanks and soldiers who have practiced warfighting under
nuclear attack.
India’s nuclear doctrine, meanwhile, is built on massive retaliation. In 2003,
India’s cabinet declared nuclear weapons “will only be used in retaliation
against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere …
nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict
unacceptable damage.” According to Admiral Vijay Shankar, a former head of
Indian strategic nuclear forces, such retaliation would involve nuclear attacks
on Pakistan’s cities. Kidwai describes such Indian threats as “bluster and
blunder,” since they “are not taking into account the balance of nuclear
weapons of Pakistan, which hopefully not, but has the potential to go back and
give the same kind of dose to the other side.” For nuclear planners in both
countries, threatening the slaughter of millions and mutual destruction seems
to be the order of the day.
There are also risks short of war, of course. Nuclear weapon units integrated
with conventional forces and ready to be dispersed on a battlefield pose
critical command-and-control issues. Kidwai believes that focusing on “lesser
issues of command and control, and the possibility of their falling into wrong
hands is unfortunate.” He claims “Our nuclear weapons are safe, secure and
under complete institutional and professional control.” The implication is that
communications between the nuclear headquarters and deployed units in the field
will be perfectly reliable and secure even in wartime, and that commanders of
individual units will not seek—or have the capability to launch—a nuclear
strike unless authorized.
It is difficult to believe these claims. Peering through the fog of war,
dizzied by developments on a rapidly evolving battlefield, confronting possible
defeat, and fuelled by generations of animosity towards India as well as a
thirst for revenge from previous wars, it cannot be guaranteed that a Pakistani
nuclear commander will follow the rules.
Add to this the risks in what now passes for peacetime in Pakistan. The
Strategic Plans Division may dismiss fears that its nuclear weapons will be
hijacked. However, the military has rarely succeeded in anticipating and
preventing major attacks by militant Islamist groups in Pakistan. Look no
further than the May 2011 attack on Karachi’s Mehran naval base. The attackers,
who may have numbered up to 20 and had insider help, “scaled the perimeter
fence and continued to the main base by exploiting a blind spot in surveillance
camera coverage, suggesting detailed knowledge of the base layout,” The
Guardian reported. It took elite troops 18 hours to regain control of the base.
It is also unclear how the officers who are in charge of Pakistan’s military
bases and those who make security-clearance decisions are chosen, and whether
their own commitment to fighting Islamic radicalism is genuine. In 2009, the
former commander of Pakistan’s Shamsi Air Force Base was arrested for leaking
“sensitive” information to a radical Islamist organization. In 2011, a one-star
general serving in Pakistan’s General Headquarters was arrested for his
contacts with a militant group. In a religion that stresses its own
completeness, and in which righteousness is given higher value than obedience
to temporal authority, there is room for serious conflict between piety and
military discipline.
Grasping at straws? A first step to reducing all these nuclear dangers is to
prevent an escalation of tensions. This must start with Pakistan tackling the
threat of Islamist militancy at home and preventing militant attacks across the
India-Pakistan border. The outlook is mixed on both fronts. Pakistan’s army
accelerated its war against radical Islamist groups after a 2014 attack on an
army school in Peshawar that killed more than 140 students and staff. Despite
military claims of success, though, responding with massive force and
inflicting countless deaths will not resolve what is at its core a political
and social problem. Ending the threat of radical Islam in Pakistan will require
sweeping changes in public attitudes and major policy reversals in many areas.
These are nowhere in sight.
To its credit, Pakistan has recently been more forward-leaning in dealing with
militants who attack India. Following the assault on India’s Pathankot airbase
in January 2016, Sartaj Aziz, foreign affairs adviser to Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif, made the surprising revelation that a mobile phone number used by the
attackers was linked to the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed based in
Bahawalpur, Pakistan. To collect evidence for possible legal action against
Jaish-e-Mohammed leaders, Pakistan sent a fact-finding mission to Pathankot
with the approval of the Indian government. This kind of cooperation by the two
governments is unprecedented.
Rather than limit cooperation to crisis management after an attack, Pakistan
and India could agree on a South Asian version of the Open Skies Treaty to
provide each with limited access to the other’s air space for surveillance
purposes. India has an interest in monitoring possible militant camps within
Pakistan and border areas where militants may cross. Pakistan seeks early
warning in case India is preparing to mount a surprise attack. The 1992 Open
Skies Treaty, covering the United States and fellow North Atlantic Treaty
Organization members and Russia and its former Soviet and Eastern European
partners, allows for controlled surveillance flights with agreed instruments
such as photographic and video cameras, radar, and infrared scanners. The goal
is to promote “greater openness and transparency in their military activities”
and “to facilitate the monitoring of compliance with existing or future arms
control agreements and to strengthen the capacity for conflict prevention and
crisis management.” The United States and other parties to the Open Skies
Treaty could share their technical tools and flight management experience with
Pakistan and India, as well as what they’ve learned about the value of the
agreement.
The two countries should also prepare in case things go wrong. The 1999 Lahore
Agreement committed Pakistan and India to “notify each other immediately in the
event of any accidental, unauthorised or unexplained incident that could create
the risk of a fallout with adverse consequences for both sides, or an outbreak
of a nuclear war between the two countries, as well as to adopt measures aimed
at diminishing the possibility of such actions, or such incidents being
misinterpreted by the other.” The question is, who will each side call and how?
One possibility is a direct line of communication—a hotline—from Pakistan’s
Strategic Plans Division chief to the head of India’s Strategic Forces Command.
There are other hotlines, and they are not always used or used wisely, but in a
crisis this may be better than relying on television, Facebook, Twitter, or
Washington.
Progress towards even such limited measures will confront the fact that in both
India and Pakistan, nationalist passions forged over seven decades are being
reinforced by the institutional self-interests of emerging nuclear
military-industrial complexes and their political patrons and ideological
allies. The United States and Soviet Union saw such deepening militarization
during the Cold War. The institutional forces and ideas—what the great English
anti-nuclear activist, thinker, and historian E.P. Thompson called “the thrust
of exterminism”—proved so strong that even when the Cold War ended, and the
Soviet Union fell, the Bomb remained. With expansive and costly nuclear arsenal
modernizations underway in the United States, Russia, and the other established
nuclear weapon states, the Bomb now seems ready for a second life. Increasingly
subject to the same exterminist forces, South Asia may be locked in its nuclear
nightmare for a very long time.
Pervez Hoodbhoy has taught in the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University
in Islamabad for 40 years and now also teaches at Forman Christian College in
Lahore. He has won many awards, including the Abdus Salam Award for
Mathematics, the Book of the Year Award from the National Book Council of
Pakistan, and UNESCO's Kalinga Award for science popularization. In addition to
producing many documentaries for Pakistani television, he has written the books
Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality,
Education and the State: Fifty Years of Pakistan, and Confronting the Bomb:
Pakistani and Indian Scientists Speak Out. He is a member of the Bulletin's
Board of Sponsors.
Zia Mian is at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.
He is co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM).
[also available at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/message/1691]
========================================
15. INDIA: CNDP PRESS RELEASE ON 18TH ANNIVERSARY OF INDIA’S NUCLEAR TESTS
========================================
http://sacw.net/article12744.html
sacw.net - 11 May 2016
Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP)
PRESS RELEASE | May 11, 2016
May 11th and May 13th, 2016 will mark the anniversaries of nuclear tests that
India conducted in 1998.
After 18 years of the nuclear tests, the security that the atomic weapons were
supposed to bestow on us is conspicuously missing and South Asia is becoming
more dangerous with each passing day. India has become the world’s largest arms
importer, with a share of 14 per cent in the entire world’s weapons’ trade.
Between 2006–10 and 2011–15, India’s weapons imports have grown by 90 per cent.
Similarly, Pakistan’s defence budget has also seen a steep rise. Evidently, the
claims of nuclear weapons supporters that these lethal weapons would bring
security and stability to the region have proven to be untrue.
It’s time we realise that nuclear weapons do not provide us security. They just
push the world into a spiral of insecurity and arms racing. As the documents
from the Cold War era unclassified in recent years have shown, nuclear
deterrence is a dangerous myth and the non-use of nuclear weapons since
Hiroshima has been more a matter of of sheer luck given various close calls
caused by both accidents and near-fatal miscalculations.
Totally unprovoked, and in fact carried out at a time when India’s relationship
with both Pakistan and China were getting better in the 90s, India’s nuclear
tests in Pokharan had more to do with the militant Hindu-majoritarian jingoism
of the BJP and RSS. The rise of religious fundamentalism in both India and
Pakistan has made the region more dangerous and there is a real possibility of
a limited conventional war that can then escalate to a nuclear exchange. In
today’s world, only South Asia is a region which has two nuclear-armed
neighbours with an unabated history of of hot and cold wars from 1947 onwards.
The increasing privatisation of defence sector in India under the Modi
government is also creating entrenched lobbies that have an inherent interest
in deepening insecurities. Mr. Modi’s manifesto in the last general elections
vowed to reconsider India’s declared policy of ‘nuclear restraint’ – namely
reassessing no-first-use doctrine, while pursuit of triadic deployment of
nuclear weapons makes a mockery of the notion of being committed to a policy of
minimum and stable deterrence. The Modi government’s evident lack of
professionalism in foreign policy and the ideological penchant for jingoism to
divert public criticism on domestic issues has only worsened the situation and
there are apprehensions that the BJP might promote war hysteria as we reach
closer to the next elections.
At this important juncture, we demand that confidence building measures
pertaining to nuclear weapons in South Asia be urgently pursued, that a
moratorium on nuclear use in the region must be signed at the earliest. That
India and Pakistan along with neighbours pursue a South Asian Nuclear Weapons
Free Zone as well as actively supporting the global efforts to outlaw and
abolish nuclear weapons.
For CNDP,
Achin Vanaik
Lalita Ramdas
Abey George
Anil Chaudhary
Kumar Sundaram
========================================
16. EX-PRESIDENT OF THE MALDIVES GRANTED ASYLUM IN UK
by Patrick Wintour
========================================
(The Guardian - 23 May 2016)
Malé government calls diplomatic situation ‘charade’, after jailed former
leader Mohammed Nasheed was only allowed to go to Britain on medical grounds
Mohammed Nasheed with his lawyer Amal Clooney. Nasheed said his country was
slipping into authoritarianism. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Britain has granted political refugee status to the former president of the
Maldives, who was jailed in 2015 after a trial that drew widespread
international criticism for being part of a slide to authoritarianism in the
country .
His lawyer disclosed that Mohammed Nasheed had sought political asylum, and
this was confirmed by UK diplomatic sources. Nasheed, the Maldives’ first
democratically elected president, was allowed to go to Britain in January for
treatment on his back, after President Abdulla Yameen came under international
pressure to let him leave.
Shortly after arriving in the UK in December, Nasheed met David Cameron in
Downing Street to raise concerns about the deteriorating situation in the
Maldives. Cameron was strongly supportive after the meeting where Nasheed was
accompanied by Amal Clooney, wife of the Hollywood actor George Clooney. She
has been representing Nasheed legally in the UK.
The Madives government said on Monday they were disappointed that the UK
government had agreed to “be part of this charade”, adding British ministers
were helping with efforts to circumvent the law. Nasheed was jailed for 13
years on terrorism charges after illegally ordering the arrest of a judge in a
trial that put a spotlight on instability in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a
destination for the super-rich holidaymakers.
Former Maldives president warns of return to dictatorship on UK trip
Since his release from jail, on the grounds of ill-health, Nasheed has called
for sanctions against Yameen and his allies for detaining political prisoners,
mainly opposition leaders, and for alleged human rights abuses in the Maldives.
On Monday, Nasheed issued a statement accusing Yameen of jailing all opposition
leaders and cracking down “on anyone who dares to oppose or criticise him”.
Responding to news that he had been granted asylum, the Maldives government
said “Nasheed was granted medical leave exceptionally by the appropriate
authorities in the Maldives after which he is expected to return to serve the
remainder of his sentence. Nasheed’s legal team had claimed he only wanted to
go to the UK because the medical treatment he needed was only available in the
UK.
“This latest development clearly demonstrates that the intention was to seek to
avoid serving his prison sentence, and thus again, the former president has
once again exhibited a distinct lack of commitment to the legal process and
continues to manipulate the process for political gain, believing that he
remains above the law”.
Advertisement
In a statement confirming his exile, Nasheed said: “In the past year, freedom
of the press, expression and assembly have all been lost. Given the slide
towards authoritarianism in the Maldives myself and other opposition
politicians feel we have no choice but to work from exile - for now.”
After Nasheed was forced from power, the United Nations, the US and human
rights groups have said Yameen’s government failed to follow due process and
that the case was politically motivated. Yameen, increasingly close
diplomatically to China, has proposed all-party talks to resolve the political
crisis but opposition parties insist their jailed leaders must first be
released.
Yameen has faced international criticism over the detention of 18 journalists
after they said a proposed defamation bill was aimed at suppressing freedom of
expression. It has also used the threat of jihadi terrorism to arrest many of
its critics.
========================================
17. 'THE OFFICIAL SILENCE ON THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN CHINA' - EDITORIAL, THE
TELEGRAPH
========================================
(The Telegraph - 22 May 2016
Reckoning with the past
- The official silence on the Cultural Revolution in China is a refusal to
acknowledge the violence that accompanied the event
History evokes nostalgia; it also produces fear and revulsion. The remembrance
of history can bring forth silence, especially if the past that is being
recollected is unpleasant and smells of violence. The Cultural Revolution in
China, which began 50 years ago with a party document denouncing the
"dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", is a pivotal episode in Chinese history
which the present political leadership in China wants to forget. There are good
reasons for this. The Cultural Revolution inaugurated a period of chaos and
bloodshed that lasted for nearly a decade. It was the brainchild of none other
than the "Great Helmsman", Mao Zedong, still an iconic figure in the official
narrative concerning China's history. Unwilling to tarnish the icon in any way,
the present leadership prefers to be silent on the Cultural Revolution. It is
aware that any criticism of that chapter in Chinese history will inevitably
lead to an unfavourable assessment of Mao, who, according to some historians,
"gloried in the chaos [and] loved the idea of civil war". The anniversary of
the Cultural Revolution thus went unremembered in China, and no one is held
retrospectively accountable for the violence and the killings.
Communists have been rather good at invoking this kind of party-induced
amnesia. For many years, communists refused to accept the horrors of Josef
Stalin's rule, the lies perpetrated by the Moscow trials of the 1930s, and the
role of Leon Trotsky in the making of the Russian Revolution. Facts were not
only suppressed but also falsified. Only after the collapse of communism in
Russia was the truth allowed to be openly discussed. Since China officially
remains under the red flag, it continues to silence and distort. Other
countries that have broken with communism, or were never under communist rule,
have not shied away from holding individuals responsible for killings and
violence in the past. In Cambodia, for example, the Khmer Rouge tribunal has
investigated crimes committed under Pol Pot's regime. In Bangladesh,
individuals who had carried out atrocities against those fighting to liberate
East Pakistan from the dominance of West Pakistan have been tried, condemned
and executed. In India, immediately after the Emergency, the Shah Commission
investigated the excesses of Indira Gandhi's totalitarianism.
History can be suppressed only in the very short run. However much the Chinese
political leadership wants to maintain a silence on the Cultural Revolution,
across the world there is a general awareness of the violence that accompanied
that episode. The world has also recognized the lies spread by the acolytes -
scholars and intellectuals - of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. History does
not forget, human beings are made to forget. But the past is also remembered
and reckoned with.
========================================
18. CULTURE AND POWER IN THE CHINESE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
by Jennifer Altehenger
========================================
(dissertation reviews - May 17, 2016)
A review of Reordering China: Culture and Power in the Chinese Communist
Revolution, by Xiaohong Xu.
Bu Dahua, one of the students who led the Red Guards in Qinghua University’s
High School, recalled in an interview an outing with some of his friends in
spring 1966. He was distressed because they felt they had failed to move the
revolution forward, at least for the time being: “I felt my body seemed to be
possessed by many revolutionary souls: there were Zou Rong who euologized
revolution; Chen Tianhua who didn’t hesitate to lay down his life for the
revolution; Lu Xun who grasped ‘his pen as his sword’; Lenin when he studied in
Kazan University; Mao Zedong who zealously expressed himself in Aiwan
Paviolion; and even Russian Decemberists…Ideal, illusion, fantasy, and reverie
were all swirling in my mind.” (p. 217) In that moment, the thought of this
pantheon of revolutionary heroes motivated Bu, yet also caused despair. Mao was
important, but so were many more heroes and heroines who collectively formed
one impossible yet desirable model to be emulated. To understand Bu and his
generation of Red Guard revolutionaries, this dissertation argues, one must
re-examine the longue durée of the Chinese Communist Revolution. We need, in
short, better theoretical frameworks. These should enable us to grasp
“revolution” through the people and their organizational structures. For
people, Xu contends, both “made revolution” and became part of a larger
development called “revolution.”
“The specter of the revolution,” Xu writes, “is returning to haunt China.” (p.
238) When this dissertation was completed in 2013, global media were feverishly
analyzing the transition to a new Politburo Standing Committee under Xi
Jinping. Selected revivals of revolutionary practices such as the mass line
have now, three years later, become a firm part of the way we see Xi; the man,
the leader, and increasingly the contested icon. For this, and for many other
reasons, Xu’s dissertation is a timely contribution to what we know and how we
think about the Chinese Communist revolution. As a historical sociologist, Xu
wears two hats. With his sociologist’s hat on, he offers a complex engagement
with existing theoretical and methodological frameworks that all attempt to
answer short but excruciatingly difficult questions: Why, how, and when do
revolutions develop, succeed and/or fail? From Theda Skocpol’s 1979 classic
work on France, Russia, and China to the extensive scholarship on social
movement and charismatic authority, he confidently and critically draws on a
wide range of theoretical literature to rethink China’s revolution and the role
of the Communist idea therein. With his historian’s hat on, he delves into a
substantial set of published and unpublished primary sources – from archival
documents to memoirs, telegrams, newspapers, and interviews – to show how and
why a diverse cast of historical agents created revolutionary change in certain
moments, bit-by-bit. Stitching together both hats, this thesis makes for a
compelling read.
The five chapters follow a thematic and roughly chronological order that begins
with the early Communist Movement in the late 1910s and ends with the formation
of the Red Guard movement in 1966. Chapter 1 opens with an introduction and a
detailed analysis of the existing scholarly literature on revolutions and
social movements globally. Xu argues that “revolutionaries like Mao did not
‘make’ the revolution… they ran into it, got involved in it and brought an
order in and out of a social revolution.” (p. 8) Social movements, as a concept
and historical phenomenon, are one of the crucial prisms through which Xu seeks
to understand twentieth-century China. His attention to social movements
explains his overall focus on protagonists, organizational structures, and
agency, and his attempt to alleviate some of the “confusion over the notion of
agency.” (p. 20) The dissertation therefore, “charts out how this dialectic of
organizing and rupture came about, what social and cultural circumstances
conditioned the rise of the revolutionary vanguard, how the vanguard theorized
social contradictions and its own role in bringing about historical change, and
what affected its success, routinization and further rupture.” (p. 9)
To do so, Xu’s more empirical chapters examine cultural repertoires, new ideas,
practices, social networks, interactions, and ideological power. Chapter 2
investigates how students and intellectuals organized into the Chinese
Communist Movement in the wake of May Fourth and specifically between 1920 and
1921. The first part is a cross-sectional analysis of 28 May Fourth
organizations, some of which merged into the Chinese Communist Movement and
some of which did not. The second part then compares the New Citizens Study
Society and the Young China Association. Members of the New Citizens Study
Society elected to join the Communist movement, while members of the Young
China Association could not come to an agreement over the matter and eventually
broke apart. Xu is looking to explain why some were more attracted to
Bolshevism than others and it was those societies with a distinct component of
self-cultivation that found important parallels and points of convergence
between their own practices and the Bolshevik call for discipline and
self-sacrifice.
Chapter 3 fast-forwards to the early 1940s and the period of the frail second
United Front. Here, Xu is interested in the role of “ideology and strategy in
the formation of Maoism” as a coherent program. More specifically, the chapter
proposes a “more interactional model, where actors – revolutionaries, in this
case – also respond to structural circumstances by retooling their strategies
of action, drawing both from their ideological resources and other cultural
idioms.” (p. 95) Mao and his comrades, Xu argues, devised a strategy of
“achieving unity through opposition” in the months before and after the Wannan
Incident of 1941. This allowed them at the same time to strengthen the vanguard
role of the Communist Party and to expand organizationally in ways that
required flexibility and adaptability.
The idea of “New Democracy” clearly shifts to the analytical foreground and it
is taken up in Chapter 4, though now Xu moves our attention away from Party
leadership strategies in the midst of war and towards the YMCA. As the “biggest
social service organization during this period,” the YMCA provided an
organizational structure, a space of civil society and social networks, and a
source of individual identification. More simply, the chapter asks how civic
organizations experienced “this radical change from revolutionary crisis to the
establishment of cultural hegemony by the revolutionary vanguard?” (p. 147)
Without effective democratic institutions, this chapter argues, even a vibrant
civil society will no longer function as social capital. Rather, it will become
a source of “social representation” for a regime that “claims democratic
legitimacy based on civil society organizations and their reconfigured
relations with each other in lieu of democratic institutions.” (pp. 149-150) In
the specific case of the YMCA, then, this transition happened with formation of
the All-China Youth Federation under the umbrella of New Democracy.
Finally, Chapter 5 gives a twist to one of the classic questions of sociology:
charisma and charismatic authority. Perhaps it is not surprising that the
chapter’s main focus is on the Red Guards and the Red Guard Movement. More
surprisingly and refreshingly, however, the chapter shows little interest for
the Mao Cult. Mao and his cult of personality feature, of course. But the Mao
Cult is but part of the much larger pantheon of revolutionary heroes and
heroines with which this review opened and which shaped the experiences of a
generation of Chinese citizens, the Mao Era’s baby boomers, born just as the
People’s Republic had been founded and educated during the prime of early
socialist construction. Xu here analyzes not the causes of revolution, but the
causes that de-stabilize revolutions, and asks why this generation in
particular was so receptive to Mao’s attempt to mobilize them. Moving away from
the “elite conflict theory” (p. 183), Xu identifies mnemonic education and
exemplary education as crucial factors. It was supposed to help create “docile
tools” of socialist construction. Yet learning of so many individuals who
created revolutions spurred many among this baby boomer generation to imitate
and seek a revolutionary identity of their own. Charisma could not be
routinized.
How we make sense of revolutions in general, and China’s revolution in
particular, has been among the hotly debated questions across and among
disciplines. In his theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich study, Xu
has found new angles that will fascinate those who wish to learn more about
China’s revolution in a domestic and comparative perspective. And it has much
to offer to those, if they exist, who thought there was little life left in the
study of the grand socialist revolutions. If the study of revolutions is an
evergreen, then Xu has proven how much can be gained from a judiciously
administered trim.
Jennifer Altehenger
Department of History
King’s College London
jennifer.altehenger[at]kcl.ac.uk
Dissertation Information
Yale University. 2013. 234 pp. Primary Advisor: Julia P. Adams and Philip S.
Gorski.
========================================
19. VENEZUELA AND THE SILENCE OF THE LEFT
by Pedro Lange-Churion
========================================
(CounterPunch - May 20, 2016)
Venezuela is nearing collapse It can turn violent soon. Last week Nicolás
Maduro decreed a state of emergency and suspended constitutional rights. He
fears “the Empire” is set to strike soon. This measure comes abruptly as the
opposition demands Venezuelan Electoral Panel to ratify the 1.8 million
signatures collected in just a few hours as a first step to constitutionally
call for a referendum to remove him from power. And he is looking for ways to
delay this process.
An article in Counterpunch written by Eric Draitser characterized the
referendum as a coup orchestrated by the opposition to oust Maduro and destroy
the legacy of Chávez’ revolution. It further argues that Venezuela’s economic
predicament—already a humanitarian crisis—is the product of a plot of the
Venezuelan right-wing elites that control the National Assembly and the U.S.
imperial interests, comparing the current crisis in Venezuela with the
overthrow of Allende in the seventies by Nixon, Kissinger, the CIA and the
Chilean elites.
What Draitser and others do not mention is that the referendum is a
constitutional right pursued by an opposition whose control of the National
Assembly (Venezuela’s congress) is legitimated by a landslide electoral
victory in December 2015. The article identifies the opposition with the
right-wing elites when in reality the opposition is a coalition of parties and
individuals that also include left and left-to-center ideological orientations.
The President of the Assembly, for instance, Henry Ramos Allup has been the
Vice-President of the Socialist International. Most importantly, the article
also conveniently omits Maduro’s coup to the National Assembly. On December 30,
2015 he abruptly appointed twelve Supreme Court Justices as a way of
invalidating any law passed by Venezuela’s elected legislative body, thus
undermining the will of the Venezuelans who elected the members of the National
Assembly.
The left acts as if all leftist governments must be unconditionally defended,
no matter how authoritarian and corrupted they become. In acting this way they
hark back to the Stalinist days of unconditional allegiance to the party, or to
the Cold War years when even timid critiques to the left—even within the
left–produced knee-jerk attacks and excommunications. The left has failed to
critique a “leftist” government whose policies have led to the current crisis
in Venezuela. It took Noam Chomsky ten years to realize that Chávez has become
a dangerous authoritarian ruler who betrayed the grassroots movement born out
of his initial emergence into the Venezuelan political scene. Slavoj Zizek is
careful to remind us that Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez are authoritarian
caudillos not be compared to Pablo Iglesias from Podemos or Alexis Tsipras from
Syiriza. But Zizek is reluctant to use his acumen to shed light on Venezuela’s
darkest hour. Venezuela was news while it was good news and while Chávez could
be used as a banner for the left and his antics provided comic relief. But as
soon as the country began to spiral towards ruination and Chavismo began to
resemble another Latin American authoritarian regime, better to turn a blind
eye.
The position of the left has been either to suspend a critical stance or not to
address Venezuela’s situation at all. The left media is quick to condemn the
coup to Dilma Rousseff orchestrated by the Brazilian opposition–as it should,
or Macri’s neoliberal initiatives in Argentina poised to undo the Peronista
policies that produced an undeniable upward mobility in Argentina. But when
Venezuela comes up the left intelligentsia draws a blank and changes the topic.
As if critiquing an authoritarian regime disguised under a leftist rhetoric
means condemning all the left. At this point, a good measure of self-criticism
would be constructive to a left in peril in Latin America. What leftist leaders
and thinkers should have said and didn’t say (with the exception of José Mujica
in Uruguay, who wrote a letter to Nicolás Maduro pleading to cease the brutal
repression of peaceful protests) was that Venezuela cannot be an example of a
successful leftist government. After all, Maduro can do more harm in Venezuela
than Mauricio Macri in Argentina. Macri attempted to name by decree two Supreme
Court Judges in mid December (2015) and days later Judge Alejo Ramos Padilla
issued an injunction blocking Marcri’s appointments. A few days later Maduro
appointed twelve Chavista judges to Venezuela’s Supreme Court. His decision, of
course, was challenged by the National Assembly, but to no avail.
The default position in the left is to blame Venezuela’s dismal situation on
American interventionism. To be sure, the U.S. did play a role in all this.
There was the attempted coup in 2002 led by a misguided opposition, with the
support of Bush’s government in the U.S. and Aznar’s government in Spain; it
didn’t last more than two days in power. But as abhorrent as this intervention
was, the U.S. did not have nearly as active a role as the hawkish U.S.
interventions in the seventies, the one in Chile being, perhaps, the most
infamous. American interventions have shifted focus to the Middle East. After
the failed coup, the U.S. left Venezuela pretty much to its own devices, with a
relative thawing of relations when Barack Obama came to power. In March 2015
Barack Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat, providing his
government with the tools to block assets in the U.S. belonging to Venezuelan
officials involved in corruption, implicated in drug trafficking and accused of
violation of human rights. But this declaration has had negligible impact in
Venezuela’s internal affairs. The truth is that the U.S has been relatively
indifferent to Venezuela’s problems since 2002. This indifference is not
motivated by a genuine respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty. It has simply been
more convenient and less costly to leave things as they are, as long as
Venezuela continues to provide the U.S. with 17 % of its oil consumption.
Ironically, despite Chavista anti-imperialist rhetoric, the U.S. has been and
continues to be Venezuela’s most important commercial partner. How different a
situation from that of Cuba, besieged for decades by an aggressive economic
embargo. The debacle of Venezuela, its social decomposition, the demise of its
middle class, the collapse of its economy, its scarcity of goods, its
corruption and drug trade, its health care crisis and its alarming public
safety record cannot be simply “dismissed” as a consequence of American
interventionism.
Many historians argue that Venezuela’s plight is the eternal recurrence of
countries cursed and blessed by oil riches. To prove their point they cite past
civil unrest like “El Caracazo” in February 1989, a week long wave of protests
and clashes that resulted in hundreds of casualties. True. But never has
Venezuela experienced a crisis of such proportions, never has the country been
in such a generalized humanitarian calamity, never has its public safety record
and its corruption been so dismal and unfettered. And as sound as these
structural arguments are, it is important to realize that to a large extent
this is a crisis mostly made in Venezuela.
Chavismo had a chance to do things differently, in ways which could have
averted this meltdown. Save the hiccup of 2002, Chavismo has been in power
uninterruptedly for seventeen years, holding the reins of all branches of civic
and military power. Chavismo has also enjoyed oil revenues unprecedented in the
history of the country. Much of this wealth was grotesquely mismanaged, fueling
extravagant subsidies that peaked in the countless and expensive elections
organized to barely disguise the government’s authoritarian inclinations behind
a veil of legitimacy. The acts of corruption perpetrated by private officials
and the military equals macro-economic cyphers: $300 billions disappeared in
the last decade as the coffers of banks in Andorra, Switzerland and other
fiscal paradises spill over with wealth stolen from Venezuelans. This cypher,
by the way, was not provided by the Venezuelan opposition, but by renowned
Chavistas who have been with the “revolution” from its beginnings. Jorge
Giordani, an old communist who served as Minister of Economic Planning, was the
first to blow the whistle and then other ministers joined, like Héctor Navarro
and Ana Elisa Osorio, all in Chávez’ cabinet from 1999 through 2013. But
nowhere does the left acknowledge these facts as contributing to the current
crisis in Venezuela.
In his unbounded paranoia, Chávez made sure to arm his militias (Círculos
Bolivarianos) with sophisticated weapons. Caracas boasts the highest murder
rate in the world. Twenty-five thousand Venezuelans are killed every year (an
undeclared war) and these militias are ready to disrupt peaceful protests with
violence, or work for the interests of emerging drug lords inside and outside
of government. Wary of perceived traitors to the revolution, Chávez reshuffled
his increasingly smaller inner circle of aides to key posts in the government.
Maduro followed his mentor. Anyone critical of Chávez’ policies could be
expelled from his inner circle; some were even imprisoned. Venezuelans remember
General Raúl Isaías Baduel, Chávez’ Minister of Defense, a die-hard Chavista
instrumental in restituting Chávez to power after the coup in 2002. As Chávez
attempted to centralize more power, Baduel criticized his authoritarian
tendencies. Baduel was arrested at gunpoint from his home and thrown in jail.
The case of judge María Lourdes Alfuni is better known internationally. In
2009, Chávez disagreed with one of her rulings and sentenced her to thirty
years in prison, a glaring violation of judiciary independence. Alfuni was
placed in a prison with convicts she had previously sentenced. Fearing for her
safety—inmates tried to burn her alive– human rights organizations lobbied for
her release and Noam Chomsky finally wrote an open letter demanding her release
and distancing himself from Chávez. She became ill with cancer and after
emergency surgery was granted house arrest. Evidence later emerged that during
her detention she was brutally raped by guards and officials from the Ministry
of Justice. For years Venezuelans witnessed the same names play different roles
in government, most of them deeply unqualified and many belonging to the
military. No wonder all areas of Venezuela’s government and society in general
have collapsed.
To assert that these ills are caused by American interventionism and by oil
wars in the international market robs Venezuelans of agency and absolves them
from the responsibility to reckon with the ways they shaped their current
history. There are many oil rich countries currently enduring the dip in oil
prices orchestrated by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, but not one of these
countries resembles Venezuela’s devastation. Such assertions ignore that Chávez
expropriated closed to seven thousand productive industries now in ruins,
forcing the country to import with less money many of the goods it previously
produced. Such assertions ignore that Chavismo ruined PDVSA–Venezuela’s oil
company–by appointing inept and corrupt managers who turned the company into a
platform to launder cash. Such assertions ignore that Chávez disregarded
warnings from economists urging him to curb spending, urging not to impose
price caps on products at the expense of producers reluctant to produce at a
loss; to these warnings Chávez arrogantly replied that oil would reach the
$200/barrel mark by 2015; it is merely $50 now and production costs almost
exceed revenues. Such assertions ignore that people are dying in hospitals
because medicines as basic as antibiotics cannot be found in Venezuela’s
pharmacies and hospitals and doctors have to rush through surgeries because
water and electricity might run out at any moment, as it does daily throughout
the country. There is a humanitarian crisis in the country’s health systems
(public and private), but Maduro refuses humanitarian aid stating it is hard to
find a country with a better healthcare system than Venezuela. Such assertions
ignore that Venezuela is the most catastrophic economy in the world with a 700%
inflation projected to reach 1200% as the country enters default in the third
quarter of 2016, with a byzantine currency exchange policy stubbornly kept in
place to facilitate embezzlement in the billions of dollars. Such assertions
ignore that both, Chávez and Maduro feigned not to see how the drug business
has permeated the highest spheres of power in the country, a reality now
undeniable: the First Lady’s nephews await trial in a New York City prison,
after been arrested in Honduras for trying to push 80o kg of cocaine into the
U.S., a cargo of cocaine that took off from the presidential ramp in Caracas’s
airport. The litany is long and can’t be blamed on U.S. intervention alone.
The left in Latin America has failed to criticize Chavismo, but the right has
cunningly jumped to the opportunity. Right-wing politicians, in their electoral
campaigns and in their attempts to impeach leftist leaders, love to use
Venezuela as a convenient example of a political model to be avoided at all
cost. Why hasn’t the left exercised a sensible measure of self-criticism and
offer a candid reflection on the Venezuelan case as a way of countering
right-wing opportunism?
In 2014, I attended the march celebrating Martin Luther King’s Day in Oakland.,
I met an old white American donning a cowboy hat and a t-shirt that flaunted a
portrait of a radiant Chavez with the PSUV logo (United Socialist Party of
Venezuela). I asked him if he had been to Venezuela, he said no. He told me he
was eighty-four years old. I told him I was Venezuelan and he mumbled with a
thick American accent: “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.” I asked him what
he thought of Chávez. He said: “He tells it like it is” and referred with
admiration to Chavez’ performance in 2006 at the United Nations, when he
compared Bush to the devil. To me that was one more display of demagoguery from
a populist leader with a penchant for histrionics. It troubled me then that
such performance would draw international support from people on the left. It
was almost too easy. People seemed to relish in a South American leader who
“tells is it like it is” (this is, by the way, what Trump supporters say of
their candidate: “Trump tells it like it is”). What troubles me even more, in
the face of Venezuela’s hopeless present, is that such uncritical sympathy for
Chávez cast a veil over the fact that Venezuela’s current ruination is in large
measure the consequence of his policies and his political solipsism.
Sympathizers still exonerate Chávez from responsibility: “Maduro is not
Chávez,” I tire of hearing. And it is true, Maduro lacks Chávez’ charisma and
political capital. But Maduro in a more substantial way is Chávez. In power for
just three years, Maduro reaps now what Chávez sowed for fourteen years. Chávez
was lucky and died just at the right moment. We shouldn’t forget that Chávez
appointed Maduro as his successor as he left for Cuba to die. And there you
have it: Maduro is Chávez’s most tangible legacy as everything dissolves into
violence and misery.
In the famous opening of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx
quotes Hegel’s affirmation, according to which historical events are first
tragedy and then farce. I believe that the chapter written by Chavismo in
Venezuela is simultaneously tragedy and farce.
Join the debate on Facebook
Pedro Lange-Chorion is a professor in the Latin American Studies Program at the
University of San Francisco.
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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/
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