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12/30/09 Resistance Happy New Year
I attended the modestly attended demo mentioned below and ran into Vandana Shiva and her sister who were also protesting. Salwa Judum are state-sponsored thugs. In addition to loot entering English from India another word is thug. Himanshu Kumar is a highly respected civic leader. vanvasi (forest dwellers), adivasi (indigenous), Chhattisgarh (a mineral rich state targeted by corporadoes), Dantewada, (a forest area of Chhattisgarh), padyatra (foot march-protest) satyagraha (non-violent civil disobedience) chetna (awakening of awareness, Operation Green Hunt (New Delhi's military campaign to eliminate Maoists, Naxalites, ultras, reds and whoever else standing in the way of land grabs and mineral acquisitions)
STOP WAR ON PEOPLE !!! STOP DISPLACEMENT OF VANVASIS !!!
END STATE VIOLENCE !!! RELEASE DETAINED CIVILIANS !!!
Rally at 6 pm, 26th December, IIT Flyover, Delhi.
A candle-lit procession of around 70 animated marchers carrying placards and candles took to the IIT flyover at 6 pm today on December 26 to demonstrate their solidarity with the people of Dantewada and especially Himanshu Kumar of the Gandhian organization Vanvasi Chetna Ashram who commenced an indefinite fast today. The crowd consisted of people from all over the country, including representatives of organizations from Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Orissa, and West Bengal, rallying together for a march and vigil. The crowd raised slogans that the state should address the wishes of Himanshu Kumar, which are:
1. Stop displacement of tribals from the region; create a terror free atmosphere to rehabilitate people who have fled to other places
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2. Immediate implementation of the Superme Court order dated 17/10/2008
3. Immediate release of VCA activists Kopa and Sukhnath
The crowd also raised slogans against Operation Green Hunt and Salwa Judum and asked the state to stop the war against adivasis. Many also protested the displacement of tribals by the collusion of state forces and corporate interests. The gathering was organized by Delhi Solidarity Group and Association for India's Development.
The vanvasi (forest) residents of Dantewada, Chhatisgarh, have faced increasing state repression for the last several years, with the state and police colluding with schemes to displace them for mining or forest exploitation projects, and intimidating the vanvasis into submission through beatings, rapes, detentions, custodial torture, and murders. This violence has intensified with the state creation of Salwa Judum paramilitary groups to combat the Maoists in the area. The Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA), a Gandhian group in the area has been implementing various initiatives in the area including a health programme, watershed development, water and sanitation program in villages and Salwa judum camps. Its members have also filed around 600 cases in court against police for gross misconduct and violence against people. In retaliation, the police demolished the ashram, intensified violence, prevented a recent attempt at padyatra and satyagraha by VCA, and are have been detaining VCA member Kopa Kunjam since December 10. His lawyer, Alban Toppo from Human Rights Law Network, was also detained for a day and testifies that he and Kopa were badly beaten in custody.
These are the words of Himanshu ji as he begins his fast:
In a country, where most Adivasi men, women and children suffer from chronic hunger and are often starved, hunger can hardly be a form of protest. I can only express solidarity with their sufferings. So as I decide to go on voluntary self purificatory fast as long as my strength permits. I am not protesting, but requesting all of us to look inwards and seek justice in our own eyes. The administration, organizations and individuals at all layers should ask themselves whether it is justified in repressing violently and detaining forcibly in camps and or forcing them to flee to jungles or to other states to save their lives and livelihood, without meeting their minimal requirement of resettlement back in their villages, a requirement recognized by the supreme court.
Is the desire to be resettled back in their own villages a crime?
Maoists should ask themselves whether resorting to violence can improve the conditions of adivasis without drawing them into the killings and sufferings of a civil war among our own people.
Violence breeds violence and spirals into a situation which goes totally out of control. This applies both to the government and to the Maoists irrespective of their intentions.
The large mining corporates should ask themselves whether profit and more profit is all that matters irrespective of the suffering theybring to the people. They should ask themselves how many people they have dispossessed and displaced without their consent in ourdemocracy.
Finally, this is the time for me to introspect through this fast on the right path, because my actions so far have not helped the Adivasiswith whom I share only a little their daily suffering.
Himanshu Kumar
Vanvasi Chetna Ashram
I carry a torch in one hand
And a bucket of water in the other:
With these things I am going to set fire to Heaven
And put out the flames of Hell
So that voyagers to God can rip the veils
And see the real goal...................
By Rabia (Rabi'a Al-'Adawiyya)
12/30/09 Ya Hussain!
Monday 28 December was the Shia holy day of Ashoora. It is the tenth day of the month of Muharram and is the most somber and sacred day in Shia Islam. Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar. Ashoora marks the martrydom-shaadat-of Imam Hussain (the son of Ali) and scores of his companions at Karbala in Iraq by rival Muslims. In the 20-plus Muslim countries, Shias are only in the majority in Iran, Iraq and tiny Qatar. 90% of Iran's 70 million people is Shia. They are significant minorities in Lebanon, actually the largest single group, and in Pakistan and India. Of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims Shias comprise about 15%. Pilgrimages to Karbala are considered important for all Shias. Debuda's teacher who I knew and learned from Ustad (master) Mushtaq Ali Khan, 1911-1989, was a Shia. He was respectful of traditions and eclectic. He accepted the Hindu Saraswati as the goddess of music and learning. He honored her every year by playing surbahar, a bass sitar, on her special day, Saraswati pooja, offering. Another great Indian musician who I know and lives in Delhi, is Ustad Asad Ali Khan, master of the rudra veena. He takes his Shia faith more seriously. Orthodox Shia musicians do not perform during the month of Muharram. Shias build shrines to venerate saints. They are also connected to Sufi mysticism. For some orthodox Sunnis these are more taboos and further proof of Shia kufr, heresy. After the death of the Prophet there was a political struggle for successorship. The Sunnis did not accept Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet. He was married to Fatima but he lost the political fight. I don't know the nuances of the theological rifts. Shia, comes from shiat-ali, partisans of Ali, who in 7th century broke from the Sunni fold and went in a separate direction. They insisted the khilafa, temporal and spiritual leader of Islam should be based on kinship to the Prophet. The Shia-Sunni split is the major rift in Islam with repercussions down to today. Just yesterday, 28 December, in Karachi, a Shia procession marking Ashoora was attacked and more than 40 were killed. In Pakistan, over the years, there have been ongoing attacks by Sunni fundamentalists who regard Shias as heretics. India has its share of Sunni-Shia clashes but it seems to be less than its neighbor. In Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the Shia were persecuted.
There is a Shia tendency to split into smaller groupings. I remember my friend Farooq Ali telling me once that Islam has 72 sects and 71 are Shia, the other being Sunni.
Shia Islam promotes a sense of victimhood and injustice. The Madhi, the missing Imam, the twelvth and last in a series starting with Ali, will return one day and restore order in the world and rectify never-forgotten historical wrongs. I have seen Ashoora processions where the faithful, men all, wearing black, flog themselves with chains or cut themselves with knives, to commemorate the death of Hussain. As the blood flows people chant, "Ya Hussain!" Oh, Hussain. There are wails of lamentation. To witness all this, much less participate, is very intense. No one dies or is seriously injured from the self flagellation. It looks worse than it is. In the procession there are taazia, colorful replicas of Hussain's tomb and, Zuljanah, a white riderless horse. Hussain had one. Shia women mourn separately.
Vali Nasr's book Shia Revival covers Shia Islam in detail.
12/28/09 Music in Punjab and Memories
Just back to Delhi from Jalandhar in Punjab state and the 134th Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan (music festival) where Debuda (my sitar teacher Debu Chaudhuri, da-is the Bengali suffix affixed to signify respect and elder brother) and Sandeep Das (of Silk Road fame) on tabla played raga Kaushi Kanhra followed by raga Shahana-Bahar. We went on in the cold under a tent at 1am and end at 2:45. I was on tanpura trying to keep warm most of the time. The audience of some 7-800 were largely attentive and appreciative with the usual people walking in and out. People sat on thin mattresses. There were some chairs on the side. There was ugly florescent lighting attached to the tent poles. At almost 75 Debuda continues to perform at a very high level of musicality. The virtuosity dims with age but the esthetic (ras) is impressive. I attended the Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan in 1966 as I was wandering around South Asia. It is always held in late December. I recall virtually nothing from it except that it was outside and cold. Little did I realize I would meet Debuda and become a student and devotee of Indian music just a few months after.
Traveling by train through Punjab on this trip passing through Ambala, Ludhiana and other towns and cities evokes memories of the great tragedy of the 1947 partition of India. Punjab was cut in two. Its historic capital and cultural center Lahore remained in Pakistan. This area -Punj-five, ab-water, land of the 5 rivers, ran red with blood as hundreds of thousands were killed in the Hindu-Muslim communal carnage following the British decision to divide India in 1947. Khushwant Singh in Train to Pakistan writes about partition movingly. A new edition of his book with unbearably painful photos by Margaret Bourke-White has been released. Eqbal Ahmad's BBC doc-Stories My Country Told Me and Deepa Mehta's feature film 1947 are some references. Of course there are lots of so-called serious studies. When I lived in Delhi I met many who had survived the journey from West Punjab-Pakistan-to India and East Punjab and Delhi. It all sounded so unbearably familiar and intersected with my own Armenian history. The unspeakable horrors, the tremendous sense of loss of what once was, the attempts to establish new roots but always in the background: the past and what the eyes have seen and the ears have heard. As the British were authoring chaos in the west of India, they engineered another partition in the east, the province of Bengal was divided with the Muslim-majority east going to Pakistan and the west to India. Unworkable? Improbable? Words fail. Creating Pakistan a state with two wings a thousand miles apart separated by a hostile India produced more death and destruction and ultimately the founding of Bangladesh in 1971. The repercussions of the British decision to divide India reverberate politically six decades later with Kashmir occupied and aflame and two countries with enormous military arsenals, including nukes, pointed at each other. The jihadi culture wrecking Pakistan today can be linked to unresolved Kashmir and the holy warriors-mujahideen-funded and supplied by Washington and Riyadh, trained by the Pakistani military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq and sent to Afghanistan.
Gandhi opposed partition. By 1945-46 he was marginalized politically by the Indian Congress Party. He could not prevent the political compromises and deals the politicians-Nehru for India, Jinnah for Pakistan and the British Viceroy Mountbatten made. The Brits in Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, Africa and elsewhere have much to answer for with their policies of divide and rule followed by divide and quit. There is plenty of blame to go around but Pox Britannica. I am compressing a lot of history here. Follow up if you are interested. Those interested in Debu Chaudhuri's superb sitar artistry get his three CDs issued by India Archives in New York. Each one is devoted to a specific raga- Lalit, Desh and Shudh Sarang and averages 70-minutes each. You won't be disappointed.
12/25/09 Amar bari, tomar bari, Naxal bari
In 1967 the Naxal movement begin in W. Bengal. There is a town in W. Bengal called Naxal Bari. A man named Charu Mazumdar, now dead, started it. I was in India at the time and I remember the slogan- Amar bari, tomar bari, Naxal bari. My house, your house is Naxal Bari. We are all one. Bari being Bengali for house. It was crushed by the government but never quite eliminated. It is now "enjoying" a huge upsurge in an India that is insanely unequal, slumdog billionaires, and plagued with rampant corruption. The word "loot' comes from here. In the early 1990s, the country was opened up to neoliberalism by Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister and now Prime Minister. India is constantly celebrated in the corporate U.S. press as a model to be emulated. Smart IT guys. Call centers. Bollywood. What goes on the countryside, where 60-70% of the population lives goes unnoticed and unremarked upon. 200,000 farmers, heavily in debt, have committed suicide in recent years. Per capita health spending in Incredible India, (a tourist slogan) is actually less than neighboring Bangladesh. One million babies die every year before they reach 28 days. Three-quarters of India's 1.2 billion population has an income-income?-of less than 20 rupees a day. That's less than 50 cents. Malnutrition, the world's highest, causes stunted growth in tens of millions of children. There is slow off camera death and suffering in rural areas. It is hard to comprehend all this but when you visit places like Jharkhand the Other India is in full and painful relief. The Naxals, Maoists, ultras, all terms used interchangeably, have noticed all of this and more, and are organizing over a large swath of the country. There is media hype of a "Red Corridor" stretching from Bihar and Jharkhand in the north, Orissa and W. Bengal in the east to Chattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh in the center. These parts of India are now added to the long-standing uprisings in the Northeast and Kashmir. The various revolts are for now uncoordinated and unlinked.
New Delhi, invoking exterminationist vocabulary refers to "Naxal-infested areas." It is estimated that of India's 600-plus districts there is some kind of insurgency in one-third of them. This may involve a random attack on a police station and then nothing for some time. Or on 18 December Maoists set ablaze oil tankers, torched a factory and a dozen cars in Jhargram, W. Bengal. The Home Minister, Chidambaram, mumbles about the need for development in the affected areas but can anyone take him seriously? A former leftist, the worst kind, he has embraced the new realities with religious-like fervor. He was once a lawyer for Enron and Vedanta, the latter shamelessly taking its name from Hindu philosophy, is one of the mega-corporations here. Huge resources are at stake-bauxite, iron ore, coal, manganese and forest products. And land for industrial use-Special Economic Zones. SEZs. Maquilas. Outlook magazine here writes: "Forcible acquisition and dispossession amounts to nothing less than violent internal colonisation." One official report describes what is going on as "the biggest grab of tribal lands since Columbus." The suited and booted business class is moving in, enabled by the state with a device called Memorandums of Understanding. MOUs are basically licenses for corporations to loot. The "natives," routinely dismissed as backward and primitive, are not taking this passively. There is resistance, some of it incoherent and haphazard nevertheless with few advantages people are fighting back. Lessons for the U.S? Is Tiger Woods career over? Will the Colts go undefeated? Will Obama's poll numbers rebound?
12/24/09 Pakur, Gumani and Sahibgan
I went with Satya Sivaraman, a friend who has been imparting basic paramedic skills to young people in eastern Jharkhand. They would not be augmenting existing state services as there are virtually none. We took a train from Howrah station in Kolkata. The journey took five hours. We arrived at night and were met at Pakur station by Probir Chatterjee, a doctor working in the area. The next day we met the young people who are being trained and others who are interested. No girls were present. We sat outside on the ground in an open field near a school and there was a wide and lively discussion about what was needed and how to proceed. The lingua franca was Hindi and Bengali.
To visit Pakur, Gumani and Sahibganj areas in eastern Jharkhand was to see poverty and suffering on a staggering scale. The population is mostly Muslim and indigenous Santhals. One in two has TB. Malnutrition is widespread. Children suffering from stunted growth. Electricity? Hardly any. Potable water? The same. Saw ghost hospitals and schools, that is, they are listed on the books as open and functioning but no one shows up but salaries are collected. Scam. Did visit one hospital which I can barely describe. One light bulb lit the ward - such as it was. Maybe it was better that it was difficult to see. The smells though were unmistakable. Seemed patients there had little chance to get better but who knows. This hospital reminded me of the much larger one I visited in Larkana, Sindh in Pakistan two years back. There is Maoist activity in much of Jharkhand but very little as of now in the areas we went to. Given conditions on the ground it was surprising to learn that.
Elections mean little here when there are no genuine alternatives and people's basic necessities are not being met. The corruption in Jharkhand, two ministers are in jail, and elsewhere is breathtaking. The upper castes and elites are looting the country in ways that would shame the British. Operation Green Hunt, the so-called war on Maoists and Naxalites, terms used interchangeably and sometimes they are called ultras, should be called Operation Mineral Hunt. The prize is land and forests with their resources.
The corporadoes are running rampant. Development and public-private partnerships are chanted like mantras. This is what democracy looks like?
12/6/09 Bodnath
Because of the strike walked with friends to the stupa at Bodnath. I last was here in 1966 and Bodnath was way outside of Kathmandu. The now 4 million populated city has greatly expanded and not in ways that are pleasant. Pollution and congestion are rife. The area around the stupa once open has suffered from dharma-laced commercial encroachment. The once majestic stupa is now boxed in by the likes of Lotus hotels and Buddha Citta Internet cafes. Profanity/capitalism and the sacred. One big happy
family?
Going on a 3-night trek to eastern Nepal, Namche Bazaar area- far from the maddening crowd-I think!
12/6/09 India Uprisings
Slumdog Imperialism-the Guns Turn Inward
No one knows for certain the strength of the Maoists in the rural areas of India. For obvious reasons they are highly secretive. Are they poised to topple the Indian government? No. Do they receive anything beyond moral support from their counterparts in Nepal? Most likely not. India has abt 600 districts. There is some kind of insurgent activity in about 200 of them. The significant news is that the uprisings have moved into the heartland of the country from the edges of Kashmir and the Northeast, where there has been resistance to Delhi control for decades, and that major resources are at stake. There are resource rich areas in the states of Orissa, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand which are being targeted by the corporations. This is the heart of the new revolt. And add parts of West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. The problem for the corporations is that the indigenous population which lives in those areas is not about to give up their land. There is resistance. The maoists are in these regions. New Delhi has announced Operation Green Hunt. A major counterinsurgency campaign which will lead to a vast increase in death and destruction. I am loathe to use the overused "turning point" but that's what seems to be in the offing. What is heartening.
It's easy for India to sell this war against its own people to its bosom friend in Washington by labeling all opposition as terrorist. India has been hugely successful in branding itself as the "world's largest democracy." Read Obama's welcoming of PM Singh just recently. It is hard to recognize the India Obama was lauding going on about its "pluralism" "values." The buzz words of partner, partnering, partnerships used over and over again. Then you have Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman chiming in with India adoration oped odes. Washington is aggressively recruiting India into a military relationship. Sell weapons. Replace Russian guns with those made in US. Point those guns at China - the ultimate enemy. Expand military intelligence and training excercises. And bring in Israel. The axis of DC-Tel Aviv-New Delhi. Jai Ho!
12/6/09 Hi from Kathmangdu
There was a bandh -strike- here today in protest of 5 peasants killed by police yesterday in western Nepal. There was a confrontation over land. This is a recurring theme here and in India Saw some modest Maoist rallies in the city today. Interesting how one guy on a motorbike breaking the ban on all transport was stopped and surrounded by a crowd. They explained to him the purpose of the strike, asked for his support and let him go. Reporters I just talked to tonight said the strike was successful nationwide.
Maoists still outside the govt. They are insisting that the pact they agreed to which would allow their army to be absorbed into the regular army be honored. Forces here no doubt backed by India are resisting. So the impasse continues. What is striking here and in India is the level of activism in contrast with US.
