The Nanavati commission report was presented in parliament today. The outcome to say the very least, is very disappointing (see earlier post on it). The more powerful Congress leaders like Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler will go scot free, not only that, many lower ranked police and bureaucrats will go free as well. These people are responsible for nearly 3000 deaths in the anti-Sikh riots in 1984.

Rediff has a sampling of the recommendations of the commission, which makes for depressing reading. Sikh groups in India are understandably very disappointed. HS Phulka, the lawyer who has been fighting for justice for almost two decades, reflects what I fear is the consequence of this injustice (rediff):

“….After over 20 years of fight, we realised that this country is not governed by the rule of law.”

This is very disheartening. It sets a negative precedence for stopping political violence in the future. It undermines the recent directions given by the Supreme Court to the Gujarat police to apprehend the accused in the 2002 riots.

Update: The BBC has a story today on the protests that have met the Nanavati report. Unfortunately the victims voices are drowned under the shrill tones of BJP harridans like Sushma Swaraj, who are calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister. Kind of sickening, considering that the worst violence in India’s recent history, where the state was deeply complicit happened under the BJP’s watch, when folks like Swaraj were in power.

Also see Dilip D’Souza and Amardeep Singh on this travesty.

The strike at the Honda factory in Gurgaon is big on the news in India these days (The Hindu, BBC). Trouble has been simmering in the Honda factory for eight months, and finally things came to a head when workers demonstrated and were brutally beaten by the police. Part of the reason this is being discussed so avidly, is because the violence is being seen by people across the country via television. The images may be new, but the violence isn’t. I have actually seen the police doing traffic control in Varanasi by whipping the legs of the riksha-wallahs as they pass by. When I lived all the way across the Jamuna in East Delhi, I would see migrant labourers going to their shanty towns far away from the city on the back of a truck. When they passed the thana, the truck would stop and a few women would invariably get off to sexually service the policemen. It wasn’t something that I just heard about, I would actually see it from the window of the bus as I returned home.

Going back to the Gurgaon strike, The Telegraph has a timeline of how the events unfolded (on the left). The violence has gone beyond the the striking workers. Many of the workers were arrested, some had to go to hospital, their family members and co-workers didn’t know where they were and seem to have agitated which seems to have resulted in further violence (Photo below, from the Hindu). The lawyer who is working on behalf of the workers was arrested and beaten up by the police, and the lawyers will be striking tomorrow.

From a sampling of the papers, the narrative generally is: this is bad for India’s image, and this could discourage MNCs from making Gurgaon their home. There is much talk of how India’s labour laws need to be “flexible.” Which seems to be a thinly disguised word for a subdued and docile workforce (Singapore seems to be everybody’s dream). Nobody can deny that India’s archaic and contradictory labor laws need to be overhauled. However, the need for democratic protections for the workforce are very coyly suggested somewhere deep in these articles, if at all. Very few have remarked on how disturbing it is, that an arm of a democratically elected government would brutally attack an unarmed citizenry, on behalf of a corporate entity. This has also proved to be a great boon to the political parties, the Left as well as the BJP, who are calling for further strikes, the dismissal of the Haryana government etc. which is just hypocritical, they can hardly be said to be the friends of the working class or the poor.

Kerim blogged about the attack by the police on filmmaker Vinod Raja, in Orissa, for filming a peaceful protest. There was an attack on the Indian People’s Tribunal on Communalism earlier this month, by Hindutva thugs for recording testimonials. On our last trip to India, we met a professor from Utkal University who said that she receives phone calls and people have actually turned up at her house to threaten her. Her crime? she was an organizer of a seminar after the Gujrat violence, and teaches Women’s Studies, something the local Hindutva folks find objectionable. All the news out of Orissa makes it sound more and more like Mississipi in the Civil Rights era. A quick look at the Wikipedia entry for Orissa says its one of the poorest states, with one of the lowest rates of literacy and health care. Orissa has a substantial population of Adivasis and Dalits, generally the most marginalized and exploited sections of Indian society. A lot of the rural population is landless. In response, the the Maoist Guerilla movements have been growing in the countryside. Its an unfortunate situation for a place that has so much going for it.

Filmmaker Rakesh Sharma was detained and harassed by the police in New York City on May 13. His crime? he was filming New York City streets while being brown and wearing that hirsute badge of suspicion, a full grown beard. Ironically, he was here to screen his documentary on mass murder, Final Solution.

Sharma has filed a formal complaint. There is also a petition on his behalf that you can sign.

The Terrorism Research Center has put the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on its list of foreign terrorists. The Times of India reports:

The 38 shortlisted to give the Sangh company include jihadi biggies like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizbul Mujahideen which have been declared Foreign Terrorist Organisations by the US.

This listing has been around since September of last year, so its nothing new. The RSS is not alone:

The RSS might find some solace from an interesting inclusion—the Osho cult is also on the list. It is the first time that the Oshoites, known for their controversial views, have been accused of terrorism.

I had thought the RSS was more fascist than terrorist. Second, aren’t terrorists non-State actors? and the RSS has state support, more so during the BJP reign, but very palpably present.

After their success with disrupting women’s participation at public sports events, the religious right in Pakistan is at it again, via the BBC:

Last week the six-party religious alliance that constitutes one-fifth of the country’s parliament, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) introduced a bill in parliament seeking a complete ban on women in advertising.

The article goes on to say that the MMA has not been too successful politically and so is shifting their attention to women, or rather wiping them out from public life. As Mahasweta Devi says, “For everything a woman must pay the price.” When one looks at the rate of selective abortions and female infanticide in India, or the targeting of women with sexual violence in Gujrat in 2002, its hard to conclude that it is otherwise.

The easy answers one gets is that the oppression of women has to do with religion (usually Islam), or poverty. But then how does one explain the odd facts of the gender gap in education in South Asia? Largely Muslim Bangladesh is poorer than India or Pakistan, yet they have better gender parity when it comes to education, not only that, their net primary enrollment is higher than India or Pakistan. Unicef has more of these statistics if you like looking at numbers.

Here is a 30 sec clip from the protest at Narendra Modi’s teleconference at Madison Square Garden. Its part of a conversation I had with a photographer called Stan.

Eventually it might make its way into a bigger piece, but for now its on my videoblg. Its 4.4 mb, feedback regarding how easy it was to view and download would be appreciated.

President Musharraf is set to discuss Kashmir with Manmohan Singh. But have they factored in the claims of the US to Kashmir? According to TOI:

…(a) secret document reveals that Hari Singh, equally apprehensive of joining either India or Pakistan, covertly ceded Kashmir to the US. According to Brown, when the map of Kashmir is reversed it becomes, uncannily, congruent with the hilly state of Kentucky in the southern US.

The Brown in this article is the Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame. Brown employed “spectragraphic analysis” and Kabbalistic numerology to come up with his conclusions. Brown claims the CIA has nothing do with these revelations. Perhaps all this was fore ordained after Jesus went to Kashmir. Now that the US is encouraging an arms race in the subcontinent, they may as well go the next step.

Having grown up with the “Punjab Problem,” with its rise of Bhindranwale, the reports of people killed in “encounters” and roadblocks and all cars being searched after 10 pm on the streets of Delhi, its hard to get a grasp of the conflict. The Hindu has a thumbnail sketch of the history of the conflict, in a very readable article by Ramachandra Guha. However, it doesn’t have much to say about the immense responsibility Indira Gandhi bears for the sorry state of affairs.

It was damp and cold as I made my way to Madison Square Garden. A crowd had already gathered. It was not a very big crowd, but they were quite vocal. They had arranged for a very good sound system, so every chant and insult could be heard loud and clear (complements to the sound engineer). Among the anti-Modi and anti-Hindutva signs were some anti-Indian Army in Kashmir signs, which was confusing, I thought that the protest had been organized to protest Modi being feted by the Tri-State area Indians. It turned out that the Kashmir folks had been piggybacking on the anti-Modi protest. They were politely banished to the other side of Seventh Avenue.

A knot of policemen were setting up barriers and sort of standing around, looking rather bemused. All of them were white (Irish perhaps?, where were the Black and Latino cops?) The cops didn’t really have that much to do, I saw a lot of them trying to figure who this Modi fellow was being insulted with signs like, “US Visa Rejected.” The passersby hurried by in a typical New York rush, some holding up their fingers in a peace sign, without slowing down. There were some who paused to read signs that said, “Hitler’s plan: exterminate all Jews. Modi’s plan: exterminate all Muslims, Christians and Minorities.” There were a couple of tourists coming out of Penn Station who paused to take photographs. I hope they are having a wonderful holiday.

I was having a pretty good time too, I ran into friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and made some new friends. Among them a photographer, Stan, who told me of a conversation he had with a participant going into the Garden. Stan asked him if it was true that two thousand people had been killed, the man very matter of factly answered, “sometimes people needed to be disciplined and taught a lesson.” Who were these people who approved of Modi”disciplining some people”? Most of them seemed like our neighborhood grocer, and rather rattled by the fellow shouting “Shame, shame” at them while holding his “Visa Rejected” poster. What are they thinking? Why don’t they know any better? They looked like they had been herded by the more affluent Indians, who were the organizers of the show. Unlike the folks who had been bussed in, most of these people weren’t wearing a tilak, and were barking orders in their walkie-talkies, and generally looking self satisfied. I spoke to a woman in a leather jacket, I asked her what she thought of the proceedings, which she had been watching with an eagle eye, she answered with great unsmiling certainty, “Modi will be the next great leader.” While she was chatting up the better heeled delegates, a man draped in a saffron shawl stood on top of the steps, not speaking to anyone and standing very still. He seemed to be committing every protestor’s face to memory. I watched him, fascinated at his concentration, till I was disturbed by a hubub behind me. Two marginal looking white people were holding a “Indian Army Out of Kashmir” poster, and yelling that the folks inside the garden were Nazis. Nobody knew who they were, where they had come from and what they were doing there. When they got into an altercation with a protester, the police intervened, the fellow and his female companion moved along, the man shouting, “You are taking away our rights of free speech bit by bit. Think about it, its for our kids, I ask you, do you want our kids to have no rights?” the cop said, “Yes,” and gently moved him along. At that point a very large man in a trench coat and hat told me to clear the sidewalk. he was the detective in charge. He was the spitting image of Orson Welles in “A Touch of Evil.” Star struck, I spent enormous amounts of video tape on this charismatic character.

On my way home, I shared a bus ride with some middle aged Gujarati people who had gone to the event, they seemed like nice people. It was chilling to think that they were unmoved by the brutal killing of so many people, and in fact they had gone to fete a leader who should be held accountable for what happened on his watch.