After the enormous amount of tripe in the papers and blogosphere, the best thing I saw about the reservation brouhaha comes fromDilip D’Souza. Also see, How The Other Half Lives for “merit,” that thing that is supposed to be the arbiter of access to educational privileges. If you have been through the Indian educational system, with its requisite need for cram schools and extra coaching, “merit” seems like a bad joke that everyone agrees to go along with, well, only if they can pay the requisite tuition fees of course.

Reservation may or may not be the best policy to achieve social justice, but the debate around it is striking for its degraded tone.

Big news out of Nepal. After massive protests, the king was forced to reconvene parliament (the BBC has a summary analysis) in April. And yesterday, The Hindu reports:

The Nepal House of Representatives on Thursday passed a proclamation declaring itself the sovereign and supreme body of the country and massively cutting the king’s powers and privileges. It also declared the country a secular state and put the army under its control.

Hopefully this is a turning point for Nepal, which has bearing the brunt of poor governance for decades and a bloody rebellion in the last decade. However, the Asian Center for Human Rights points out that there are things to be concerned about, like, will the army be held responsible for human rights abuses.

….the SPA (Seven Party Alliance) government must not use the draconian preventive detention laws such as Public Offences Act and Public Safety Act, which have been consistently misused by the monarchy to suppress pro-democracy movements. One of the major failures of the 1990 pro-democracy movement was the failure of the democratic governments in Kathmandu to repeal these draconian laws. Before King Gyanendra took over absolute power, all the governments misused the Public Safety Act and Public Offences Act.

Other than the abysmal record of the government before the King dismissed the parliament, there is also the matter of the Maoists, and their human rights record, and whether it will be possible for them to enter the political mainstream, not only because of the difficulties of holding a fair election, but also will the world be willing to accept former rebels as the legitimate Government.

After seven weeks in India, its back to George Bush’s America. With its headlines about Bush vowing to overturn Roe v. Wade, and words like “freedom,” “truth” and “democracy” being hurled about like missiles. It occurs to me that no matter how bad things get in India it never feels quite this depressing. The Indian government would have to resign on charges much less serious than Abramoff, Katrina and of course the war.

I finally know I am home after reading our erstwhile neighbor, Joe Sacco’s documentary comic on the Rumsfeld case (Thank you Thom Powers). It makes for depressing reading, but its a fine piece of documentation, not the least because of what it has to say about the act of documenting atrocities.

Update: The link to the comic is a pdf download

We are midway through our time in Ahmedabad. It has been absorbing and exciting. We have met many interesting people and had some wonderful conversations.

A few days ago we went to Maninagar, where a group of formerly nomadic tribes have been living since 1960. There are Rajbhois who make ropes, Vaghris who work as laborors and Sansis who sell maps. There are about 191 families in this community, and none of the children go to school. The reason? The community has been bulldozed at least ten times in the past year. The disruption it has caused in their lives is incalculable, not only have the children lost their enrollment in school, even the social worker who came to give them lessons has stopped doing so. This is not the worst of what has happened to this community. Two children have died from exposure, and the week we visited, three members of the community had died because they did not have adequate shelter. They are living on the sides of a wall under a bridge, with a plastic sheet as the only form of protection from the elements.

Ahmedabad has decided it needs to be a “mega city” with shopping malls and multiplexes. Several communities have been uprooted to accommodate this ambition, not all of it legal, and none of it humane. See Roxy Gagdekar’s blog for some more details about what is happening in Maninagar.

The day we were in Maninagar, Ramsaroop Sansi, a very soft-spoken fifty year old man, offered us tea, and spoke without bitterness of the travails of this community– how their legal claims have been disregarded, and the uncertainty faced by them. When we got ready to leave, the people of this community, who have nothing, presented us with a map of India. When we refused, Ramsaroop said, “They make the rules, but we still sell their maps, please take this.”

Please write and tell the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to give the residents of Maninagar somewhere to live!
info@egovamc.com

President Musharraf will be in New York City for the UN summit. The President has been quoted regarding rape victims:

“This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.”

Pakistan does not have any laws regarding domestic violence, and has several Taliban like laws that are very oppressive to women.

There will be a rally in support of human rights in Pakistan, specifically women’s rights. The unprecedented demonstration, is organized by the Asian-American Network Against Abuse (ANAA) and Amnesty International USA´s NYC Women´s Action Team.

The rally will be this Saturday, September 17, from 12 noon to 3 pm, outside the Roosevelt Hotel at Madison Avenue and East 45th Street.

Trains: 7 to 5th Avenue; 4,5,6,S to 42d-Grand Central; E,V to Lexington (@53d St.); B,D,F,V to 42d St & walk.

Bus M1, M2, M3, M4, M42, M104.

For more information contact: Contact: Ijaz Syed (ANAA): syedi AT sbcglobal.net; 408-838-0952; Jeanne Bergman (AIUSA): wheedle AT earthlink.net; 212-979-7213; cell 917-714-5501.

Update: See Sepia Mutiny’s post on the rally.

Go to Amardeep’s blog for some well deserved outrage at the Bruce Sterling post in Wired, which pours misplaced sarcasm on India’s offer of help after Katrina and then goes on to quote Kipling’s racist poem, “Gunga Din!” Yes, its true. What is with these people? Ngugi has an essay on Z-mag about the constant comparison of Katrina to a “Third World” disaster:

The American citizen has been stewing in nationalism, manifest destiny and the myth of the democratic society that errors but never oppresses or marginalizes for so long that even a natural disaster cannot be seen and understood outside this lens. And the fact that most of the victims are predominantly poor and African American is not being understood as a creation of very specific domestic policies and conservative ideologies; it has to be filtered through the “Third World”. As if a disaster from that “part of the world” somehow managed to sneak through the porous Mexican borders.

He moves on to Bush’s speeches:

It is interesting therefore to look at President Bush’s remarks after touring New Orleans on September 2nd after four days of inaction. His first sentence was “ I’ve just completed a tour of some devastated country”. A detached statement but it gets worse ” a little later he says “I know the people of this part of the world are suffering…” and he goes on to talk about how progress is being made. Then he says “ The people in this part of the world have got to understand…” Shortly after this, he says “You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen” and again refers to his constituents as “good folks of this part of the world”. It is almost as if he is in a different country consoling its citizenry. He himself is so detached about what is happening in the very country he leads that he refers to it as “this part of the world”. As far as I know, no one in the mainstream media picked this up, they too are reporting on that “part of the world”.

Also, look at Kerim’s post on the language of Katrina.

Its always interesting to look at conspiracy theories after a catastrophe. My favorite after 9/11 was that it was Hindu-Jewish conspiracy! The Bangladesh blasts are no exception. The blog DeshCalling (via Global Voices)has a bunch of posts about India’s nefarious plans about its neighbors. One of its posts proclaims:

RAW – The Real Masterminds Behind Bangladesh Bomb Attacks?

Then it goes on to discuss, “India uses Nazi style propaganda to vilify Bangladesh.” It reports on a press meeting following a brouhaha caused by the Indian Ambassadors remarks that Islamists had carried out the bomb attack (I thought those folks had claimed responsibility, so why the outrage?), the article explains this breach of diplomatic etiquette:

India cannot accept Bangladesh’s independent existence and is now running a campaign saying Bangladesh is threat for them, he said, adding the country wants to see unrest in Bangladesh as in Nepal and Sri Lanka.

It sounds patently absurd. Bangladesh has a good record on some things (see previous posts here and here), I wonder what is really going on underneath these paranoid rantings.

Also see Sepia Mutiny’s post on the Bangladesh blasts.

In a bizarre twist to the insurgency in Northeastern India, the BBC reports:

Rebels in India’s north-eastern state of Tripura are making pornographic films to raise money for their separatist campaign.

This phenomenon seems to have been around for just a couple of years. It seems these films are dubbed in Bengali, Burmese, Thai and Hindi. I wonder if it has anything to do with horrible incidents like the murder of the two women in broad daylight in Bombay. Not to say that porn causes violence, but Northeastern women occupy a peculiar place in mainstream India, and I am sure porn made under coercive circumstances does nothing to help that.

Tribal women in the northeast, have been the target of abuse for a long time, and not only from the insurgents (BBC). Society in the northeast is much less sexist than the rest of India, and the abuse of women used to be rare. So these reports of violence by rebel outfits are very disturbing. The NLFT (National Liberation Front of Tripura) had started recruiting more women, when their reputation for sexual abuse got out of hand, but stopped when some of their recruits developed relationships and wanted to drop out and lead normal lives. So now they are back to oppressing them.

The rebels may have legitimate grievances, but once they make the bodies of innocent people their battleground, they lose any moral right to address those grievances. Why is that so difficult to understand?

The Hindu sunday magazine has an article by Ramachandra Guha on K. Kamaraj (1903-1975), the politician from Tamil Nadu. Kamaraj was instrumental in overseeing the prime ministership pass from Nehru to Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964) and Indira Gandhi (1966). He was a member of the ‘syndicate,’ a group of powerful regional Congress party leaders who had ambitions of being power brokers at the national level. Even though most history books remember him in the role of kingmaker, Kamaraj was much more than that, he seems to have been an able organizer and administrator and was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for thirteen years. He had a reputation for honesty (a rarity among politicians). One of the signs of his incorruptibility was the fact that he had never married, something that was often cited in the case of Vajpayee as well. I suppose the logic is that if you don’t have a family, why would you need to be corrupt? And being single is a sign of celibacy, which is saintly and good. Quite the opposite in the US, where if you are not married, it means you are gay which seems to be an anathema for most politicians, gay-friendly or otherwise, exceptions for folks like Barney Frank.

There is a very hagiographic website devoted to Kamaraj, which has some great photographs from his early life.

If you’ve been following the news on the tabling of the report on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, you probably know that Jagdish Tytler has had to resign from the cabinet, and Sajjan Kumar is in trouble. Manmohan Singh announced that investigations against these folks will be re-opened. With Tytler becoming a political liability for the Congress, one hopes for a certain symmetry, where Modi becomes a liability for the BJP. That remains to be seen. Hopefully, the Tytler resignation is a truly positive sign, and not another false beginning, even if its too little, too late (criminals like HKL Bhagat have been completely exonerated).

Its been interesting to read the papers on what prompted this development. The Telegraph reports that the CPI and CPM refused to support their coalition partners in parliament against a NDA/BJP motion to adjourn the house, unless something was done about the culprits by the central government. The Indian Express on the other hand:

Refuting suggestions that the Left parties had occupied the `Opposition space’, she said except for the BJP and Akali Dal, “not once did they (Left) obstruct the proceedings in both Houses or get them adjourned on this issue”.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, more in line with The Hindu report, which sort of falls in the middle of these two positions, and talks about the dissent within the Congress itself, which the other two papers don’t mention. Kind of interesting, given the conventional wisdom that the news has a left bias.