Dissing Ideologies ----

http://www.msnbc.com/news/764085.asp

A Secret Army’s Vow

In clandestine meetings with NEWSWEEK, Pakistani extremists say attacks in Indian-held Kashmir will continue

By Zahid Hussain and Ron Moreau

NEWSWEEK

June 17 issue — The Pakistani guerrilla commander is thin, soft-spoken and ever so polite. So when Pakistani military officers invited him to an emergency meeting two weeks ago, he showed up as requested, even though he suspected that he might not like what he heard. The guerrilla, whom we’ll call Atif, directs several hundred fighters who operate deep in Indian-held Kashmir. He was one of some two dozen Kashmiri commanders invited to the meeting, held at a Pakistani Army base 25 miles from the front lines.

THE MOOD GREW TENSE, Atif says, as soon as a major general from the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency began speaking. “We don’t have a choice, given the tremendous pressure on Pakistan,” the ISI man said, almost apologetically. “So you are ordered to stop immediately all cross-border operations.” Several of the guerrilla commanders jumped to their feet, thundering that Pakistan shouldn’t cave to Indian threats. They denounced President Pervez Musharraf by name, Atif recalls. “After ditching the Taliban, Musharraf has now betrayed the Kashmiri cause,” shouted one commander. “How can we accept this?” Anger swept the room, and all the commanders stalked out without accepting the general’s invitation to join him for a meal.

Musharraf seems to be getting serious, at last, about preventing cross-border attacks on Indian soldiers and civilians. The reason is simple. Kashmiri militants, with their spectacular suicide attacks on the Indian Parliament in December and an Indian Army base on May 14, have brought the world closer to nuclear war than perhaps at any time in 40 years. India and Pakistan have a million troops on their common border, and much of the world is worried. A procession of top-level diplomats has passed through (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will make his appearance this week). They’ve all pressed Musharraf, in particular, to stop the brinkmanship.

But even if Musharraf is sincere about halting incursions, can he enforce his will? “There could be renegades from these militant groups who can’t really be stopped regardless of the tremendous obstacles they face,” says Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani Army lieutenant general. Many of the commanders who stormed out of the recent meeting with the ISI general said they would soon meet with their fighters to discuss the infiltration ban. A commander we’ll call Irfan, of the radical Harkat ul-Mujahedin group, claims that hundreds of his men have been waiting impatiently for orders to infiltrate into Indian-held territory. (NEWSWEEK met clandestinely with the guerrillas, and none wanted their names used.) “Our volunteers are becoming increasingly upset over the long delay,” says Irfan.

Newsweek.MSNBC.com

Commanders like Atif and Irfan are sizing up their chances of defying the ban, and seem to like the odds. First, they know how to work covertly. Even though their offices have been closed and their bank accounts frozen, they continue to get funding, they say. Nor is acquiring weapons a problem. “What do we need to fight? Not much,” says another commander. “Hand grenades and Kalashnikovs are available everywhere.” They also know the lay of the land better than anyone. “Our men manage to sneak past the Indians, so how can the Pakistanis stop us?” says Irfan.

Atif claims there are between 1,200 and 1,500 Pakistani militants already inside Kashmir. “Many of our men are stuck across the line,” says Irfan. As a result, he believes, some of these men may step up attacks on their own. “If they can’t come home, they’ve got nothing to lose.” And the militants inside Pakistan could eventually target Musharraf. If the president “keeps pressuring the militants while India maintains this aggressive posture, then Musharraf could be finished,” says General Masood. As it is, presidential security has been tightened. Musharraf’s movements are kept secret and his travel route frequently changed at the last minute. The Kashmiri commanders have few such worries. “We will continue to fight,” says Atif. “God always creates ways for us.”

Dissing Ideologies June 08, 2002

Clerics urge Islamabad to turn to Koran for economic advice

From Stephen Farrell in Islamabad







A LONG way from shellbursts in mountain gorges, Pakistan is waging another battle crucial to the country’s existence.

In Pakistan’s Supreme Court yesterday Islamabad’s finest lawyers jostled with Islamic fundamentalists in a test case to decide if Pakistan’s 21st-century economy should be run according to a 7th-century sacred text, the Koran.

At issue is whether interest should be banned as un-Islamic, the demand of religious parties seeking to Islamise the country’s financial system. The outcome, if it goes against the Government, would be to ban interest rates, wiping out all attempts to rehabilitate an economy stricken by decades of corruption, mismanagement and misrule.

President Musharraf’s Government is seeking to overturn a judgment handed down by the Federal Shariat Court, a lower court dealing with religious law, in December 1991, declaring all forms of interest-based banking unIslamic. In June last year the Shariat Appellate Bench upheld the order and gave the Government one year to eliminate all interest-based banking by June 30.

With the religious parties yet to argue their case, economic analysts say that Pakistan will face serious problems attracting future investment or securing loans if the Government loses, or cannot find a compromise such as disguising interest as “profit” and “loss”.

Inevitably the proceedings required the reading of the sacred verses deemed relevant. Equally inevitably, heavily bearded clerics and religious leaders in the packed public gallery found fault with their opponents.

When Raja Akram, the unfortunate counsel for the state-owned United Bank Limited, read out excerpts from the Koran, his opponents jumped up in their seats protesting that his pronunciation of Arabic was deficient to the point of illegality.

After much discussion one judge pronounced that failure to read Arabic correctly was not a sin and restored order by the carrot-and-stick approach of threatening to clear the court and invoking the Prophet Muhammad’s injunctions to calm and tolerance. Grumbling, the religious parties fell quiet, although Mr Akram complained that during the tea break he was told that he would go to Hell.

One speaker also held up proceedings by protesting that the judicial bench were insufficiently sworn in because they had not taken an oath accepting that the Prophet Muhammad was the last, the Seal, of the prophets.

Once the case was finally under way, learned argument raged back and forth over whether the Koranic injunctions applied only to demanding interest from the poor and oppressed, or to all transactions. In his opening address, expected to continue into next week, Mr Akram argued that Pakistan was not created to be a theocratic state and claimed that interest-based transactions were permissible, as long as they were not exploitative.

He also complained on behalf of the bank that with so many sects interpreting Islam in their own way, it would be impossible to implement so many different versions of Islamic law.

The dispute centres on interpretations of interest, usury and the meaning of the Arabic word riba (increase), defined by the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions as “the taking of interest on capital investment, which is prohibited in Islam”.

Muhammad Ziauddin, an economics specialist at Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, said no economy had ever sustained conversion to an interest-free system, but with $36 billion (£25 billion) of foreign debt, most of it interest-bearing loans, Pakistan was especially vulnerable.

“The impact of the Government losing on this issue would be massive, it would be total upheaval,” he said. “They would have to convert their entire banking and financial system to the Islamic mode. Interest would be out.

“The chickens are coming home to roost. This whole thing was started by the military itself because they started to use Islam as a strategy to serve their own ends in Kashmir and Afghanistan. They let the genie out of the bottle and now they are facing the repercussions from the religions parties they themselves nurtured.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-320120,00.html

The Perfect Murder A Good Voice Silenced: Kashmir`s Loss Is Also Mine

By Pamela Constable

Sunday, June 9, 2002; Page B02

KABUL, Afghanistan

Two weeks ago, I was in a dingy government office in northern Afghanistan, interviewing a police official. A small TV set flickered in the corner, but I barely noticed it until I suddenly glimpsed a familiar, grizzled face frozen on the screen. Underneath was a one-word caption: Assassinated.

It was Abdul Ghani Lone, a70-year-old lawyer and politician from India`s Kashmir Valley. He had been gunned down in Srinagar, the region`s major city, just after delivering a speech at a memorial service for another slain political leader.

Sick with sadness and rage, I sank down in front of the TV and touched the face on the screen. Lone had been my friend, a man I admired greatly for his candor and courage. I had no idea who had killed him, but I immediately knew why: The stakes in Kashmir had simply become too high to tolerate an honest, moderate voice.

Tens of thousands of people have died violently in the Kashmir Valley, a corner of India whose natural beauty has been savaged by avicious guerrilla war for the past 13 years, a place where fading posters of scenic lakes and mountain crags were long ago eclipsed by news photos of kerchiefed women wailing over corpses.

During numerous visits to Kashmir over the past four years, I have written about dozens of these deaths, always struggling to achieve that fraudulent balance between outrage and impartiality. Sometimes I saw the mutilated bodies of young Kashmiri guerrilla suspects dumped by roadsides, sometimes the charred bodies of young Indian soldiers torn to shreds by grenade blasts.

Always, the killings were fresh fodder for the propaganda war being waged by India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri separatist movement, whose competing claims to the divided border region are rooted in the chaotic, never-clarified partition of Hindu-dominated India that created Muslim Pakistan more than half a century ago.

Always, facts were hard to come by and blame was easily diffused in the murky fog of a protracted proxy war in which all sides were guilty of intransigence, cruelty and cynicism -- and virtually no one ever told the truth.

But when I learned that Lone had been assassinated on May 21, I felt as if an unforgivable line had been crossed -- as if the forces of extremism were sending the ultimate, nihilistic message from the murk. I felt a sense of despair far deeper and sharper than anything I had experienced while covering scores of more anonymous deaths in Kashmir.

For years, Lone had been one of the few voices of consistent reason in a conflict dominated by radical posturing, narrow self-interest and gratuitous violence. A one-time state legislator and lifelong Muslim separatist who was a senior leader of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference, he harbored equal mistrust of India`s and Pakistan`s designs on Kashmir.

He defended the Kashmiri armed insurgency, but only as a necessary, limited evil in the absence of dialogue and democracy. And when Islamic fundamentalist fighters from Pakistan began gaining influence over the guerrilla movement several years ago, he was the only prominent separatist who spoke out against them.

Since 1998, Lone and I had met periodically in his barren Srinagar office for long conversations, closer to history lectures, laced with his mournful aphorisms and wry wit. I ate with his family, I traveled with him, I was invited to his son`s wedding. I called him ``Lone Sahib,`` a term of respect. He called me ``daughter,`` which made me feel embarrassed but never compromised.

Our conversations helped me understand the tortured history of Kashmir, the fatalistic pride and bitterness of the valley`s Muslim majority, the alienation and frustration that drove thousands of young Kashmiri men to take up arms in the early 1990s against the far more powerful military forces of the Indian state.

``Kashmir is like a well with a poisoned dog inside it,`` Lone told me in 1999. ``India keeps removing buckets and buckets of water, but it has never removed the dog. As long as the Kashmir issue is not resolved, the poison will remain.``

But Lone never allowed himself to be poisoned. Despite his abiding suspicion of India`s central government, which he viewed as an occupying colonial power, he never gave up hoping for negotiation and democratic rule in Kashmir. Although convinced he had been cheated out of his state assembly seat by Indian officials in 1987, he recently expressed support for upcoming state elections.

Despite his movement`s longtime dependence on Pakistan, and the separatist myth that most Kashmiri Muslims yearned to be part of the neighboring state, Lone was increasingly critical of Pakistan`s self-interested patronage. Two years ago, during a rare trip to Islamabad for his son`s wedding, he pointedly said it was time for Kashmir`s Islamic ``guest fighters`` to go home.

``Our biggest danger now is sabotage from extremists on both sides,`` he told me then. ``Both the Pakistani [intelligence services] and the Indian army want to continue this war. There are many vested interests, and we must not fall into their trap. Kashmir should be left to manage its own problems.``

But the guerrilla attacks intensified, hostility between India and Pakistan mounted, and now the neighboring rivals -- both possessing nuclear arsenals -- proclaim themselves ready for war. Hundreds of thousands of troops stare each other down across the border, and Pakistani officials have made veiled threats to use nuclear weapons if India attacks.

Against this backdrop of near-total polarization, the slaying of Lone made tragic sense. Just as Kashmir seemed about to boil over into the decisive regional conflict of Islamic extremists` dreams, the senior separatist leader was disavowing their radical agenda and backing Indian elections. He had to be silenced.

Lone`s assassination, by masked gunmen who posed as police and then escaped, made me think instantly of Neelam Tiruchelvam, a moderate Sri Lankan politician from the Tamil ethnic minority, who had been respected for his efforts to find neutral ground and a negotiated solution to the protracted civil war with the Sinhalese majority.

In July 1999, Tiruchelvam, 55, was killed by a suicide bomber, probably from the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Like Lone`s, his reasonable demands for negotiation and limited political autonomy for an ethnic-minority region posed a far greater threat than any armed foe to extremists` visions of cataclysmic confrontation.

To those genuinely concerned about solving the Kashmir conflict, Lone`s audacious slaying seemed to deal a blow to the prospects for peace. Indian newspaper editorials mourned the ``death of moderation,`` the ``redundancy of reason`` and the demise of a dove in a ``season of hawks.``

To those more concerned with spin, the unsolved crime was another opportunity for easy finger-pointing. Many Indians blamed Pakistan, suggesting that its intelligence agencies had decided to eliminate a persuasive, anti-Pakistan voice. Some Pakistani guerrilla groups blamed India, suggesting that its agents had used Lone to tar them as terrorists.

Given the treacherous history of the Kashmir conflict, neither scenario was out of the question. But to me, it hardly mattered who had pulled the trigger. Lone Sahib was gone. There would be no more edifying chats in his office, no more Kashmiri proverbs and no more embarrassing moments when a grizzled old politician, with sly but irresistible charm, greeted me fondly as ``daughter.``

I will always miss him.

Pamela Constable, who is currently based in Kabul, has been The Post`s South Asia bureau chief for three years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15805-2002Jun8.html

Lighting The Nuclear Fire ----

http://www.msnbc.com/news/764085.asp

A Secret Army’s Vow

In clandestine meetings with NEWSWEEK, Pakistani extremists say attacks in Indian-held Kashmir will continue

By Zahid Hussain and Ron Moreau

NEWSWEEK

June 17 issue — The Pakistani guerrilla commander is thin, soft-spoken and ever so polite. So when Pakistani military officers invited him to an emergency meeting two weeks ago, he showed up as requested, even though he suspected that he might not like what he heard. The guerrilla, whom we’ll call Atif, directs several hundred fighters who operate deep in Indian-held Kashmir. He was one of some two dozen Kashmiri commanders invited to the meeting, held at a Pakistani Army base 25 miles from the front lines.

THE MOOD GREW TENSE, Atif says, as soon as a major general from the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency began speaking. “We don’t have a choice, given the tremendous pressure on Pakistan,” the ISI man said, almost apologetically. “So you are ordered to stop immediately all cross-border operations.” Several of the guerrilla commanders jumped to their feet, thundering that Pakistan shouldn’t cave to Indian threats. They denounced President Pervez Musharraf by name, Atif recalls. “After ditching the Taliban, Musharraf has now betrayed the Kashmiri cause,” shouted one commander. “How can we accept this?” Anger swept the room, and all the commanders stalked out without accepting the general’s invitation to join him for a meal.

Musharraf seems to be getting serious, at last, about preventing cross-border attacks on Indian soldiers and civilians. The reason is simple. Kashmiri militants, with their spectacular suicide attacks on the Indian Parliament in December and an Indian Army base on May 14, have brought the world closer to nuclear war than perhaps at any time in 40 years. India and Pakistan have a million troops on their common border, and much of the world is worried. A procession of top-level diplomats has passed through (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will make his appearance this week). They’ve all pressed Musharraf, in particular, to stop the brinkmanship.

But even if Musharraf is sincere about halting incursions, can he enforce his will? “There could be renegades from these militant groups who can’t really be stopped regardless of the tremendous obstacles they face,” says Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani Army lieutenant general. Many of the commanders who stormed out of the recent meeting with the ISI general said they would soon meet with their fighters to discuss the infiltration ban. A commander we’ll call Irfan, of the radical Harkat ul-Mujahedin group, claims that hundreds of his men have been waiting impatiently for orders to infiltrate into Indian-held territory. (NEWSWEEK met clandestinely with the guerrillas, and none wanted their names used.) “Our volunteers are becoming increasingly upset over the long delay,” says Irfan.

Newsweek.MSNBC.com

Commanders like Atif and Irfan are sizing up their chances of defying the ban, and seem to like the odds. First, they know how to work covertly. Even though their offices have been closed and their bank accounts frozen, they continue to get funding, they say. Nor is acquiring weapons a problem. “What do we need to fight? Not much,” says another commander. “Hand grenades and Kalashnikovs are available everywhere.” They also know the lay of the land better than anyone. “Our men manage to sneak past the Indians, so how can the Pakistanis stop us?” says Irfan.

Atif claims there are between 1,200 and 1,500 Pakistani militants already inside Kashmir. “Many of our men are stuck across the line,” says Irfan. As a result, he believes, some of these men may step up attacks on their own. “If they can’t come home, they’ve got nothing to lose.” And the militants inside Pakistan could eventually target Musharraf. If the president “keeps pressuring the militants while India maintains this aggressive posture, then Musharraf could be finished,” says General Masood. As it is, presidential security has been tightened. Musharraf’s movements are kept secret and his travel route frequently changed at the last minute. The Kashmiri commanders have few such worries. “We will continue to fight,” says Atif. “God always creates ways for us.”

Dissing Ideologies 11. 06. 2002

MINORITISM: A promoter to Muslim separatism

by R.Upadhyay.

The Gujarat tragedy has once again brought the age old minoritism into focus. There may be multiple causes like social, political, economic and religious behind this problem, but the dangerous game being played by the political class since Independence has caused great harm to the unity and strength of the country. Even though the concept of minoritism is against the spirit of the pluralistic order of Indian society the over powering and dominant political masters of this country are using it as a political tool for fulfillment of their personal ambitions.

The framers of the Indian constitution classified the people of this country between minority and majority on the basis of religion and incorporated certain special privileges and rights to safeguard the interests of the former. The intention was good, but they did not realize that the politicians from both the communities would used it as a hand maid to further their own communal politics and aggravate social tensions. What has happened now is that the constitutional attempt has now become an obstacle to integration!

The concept of minoritism was initially used by the British for their colonial interests but the post-Independence political leadership used it for their vote bank politics. While the conspiracy to play the divisive policy of divide and rule was hatched by the then rulers by granting the status of separate electorate to Muslims in 1909, the post-colonial leadership of the country carried forward this ill-intentioned British legacy for their self seeking political interests. In stead of uniting the people in the wake of partition of the country, the issue was ironically legitimized to work as an extension of the communal award granted to the Indian people by the British.

While promoting a powerful force among Indian Muslims to fight for their share of political power, the British also patronised a section of Indian leaders to counter the forceful nationalist group in the country. This latter group developed a crooked version of secularism by granting special privileges to minority. This privilege to the second largest religious majority of the country helped the anti-majority forces to replay the same divisive game of the British. Such combination of religion and politics not only sidelined the ethical values of Indian society but it generated a national anger among the majority against the vast majority of Muslim minority, who were responsible for partition of the country. The situation gradually turned into a fertile ground for consolidation of majoritarian forces which in turn added further fears in the minds of the minority as the so called secularists created the bogey of insecurity of the minorities.

Indian constitution is loud and clear that there is no discrimination on Indian citizens on account of their faith as all of them are enjoying the rights of full citizenship. Rather minorities in India are accorded more protection with constitutional, legislative, and statutory guarantees along with various national and international obligations. But despite such protection, our experience of last 55 years suggests that the gap of communal mistrust between Hindus and Muslims is gradually widening. Why is this so and what could be done?

It is ironical that the Muslims kept themselves isolated even from other religious minorities in India. They were never found to be aggressively agitated on the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 or the incidents relating to anti Christian agitation in the country. This shows the extreme religious exclusiveness inculcated into them by their leaders.

Let me quote Rafiq Zakaria a noted Muslim scholar, who admitted in his book The Widening Divide,`` a deep study of the last hundred years of British rule has, however, convinced me that at every crucial moment, when unity might have been preserved, it is Muslims, who betrayed; but Hindus cannot escape the blame.``

The term minority has a subjective definition; but no attempt was ever made to define it precisely in the context of the pluralistic order of Indian society. The general interpretation that a minority community means a community, which is numerically less than 50% of the total population of the country may not give justice to inter or intra-religious minority. Hindus in Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Kashmir, Lakshadweep and Punjab states are in minority but they do not have any privilege of being minority there. This would equally apply to many of the castes in different states in India!

Is there no lasting solution to this problem of Muslim minority in India? The answer to this most baffling question lies with Muslim intelligentsia as also the majority community.

Many consider the two nation theory as the main reason behind the widening divide between the two major religious communities in India. Rafiq Zakaria, a noted Muslim scholar remarked in his book The Widening Divide(Penguin Books 1996, page xvii):-`` It is now universally except in Pakistan admitted that two nation theory did great harm to inter-communal harmony.``

The two nation theory has done great harm more to the Muslims in India. At best the theory should have been seen as a tool for partition then and nothing beyond. It needs to be buried deep and never to be resurrected. There is no doubt that a historical wrong has been done to the people of India and the communal division has affected India more than Pakistan..

Humanity may demand that majority must be considerate to allay the fear of insecurity from the minds of the minority. But for this, minority is also expected to create an atmosphere of goodwill with the majority. The secular fabric of the nation can be protected only when religious leaders belonging to both minority and majority draw a line between religion, personal and political life.

Protection does not and should not mean pampering. Some would argue that the security of minority lies with the goodwill of the majority which is the key to create such an atmosphere. Rafiq Zakaria, expressed similar view, which is rather uncommon.. He said in his book entitled The Widening Divide (Penguin Books 1996), ``I believe placed as Indian Muslims are, their well being and security lie in the goodwill of the majority, not in resorting to agitation and violence.`` A similar view expressed by the RSS chief received severe criticism from many quarters.

Conclusion: Fringe groups are present in all communities and the Muslim community is no exception. What is needed is that the Muslim intellectuals should take the lead in resolving the minority problem by letting their brethren to join the mainstream and not display the hypocrisy of trying to act as saviour of the community by actually widening the divide. As said before and we maintain that the two nation theory should be buried once and for all. Those who chose to stay in India are Indians first and Muslims next. There should be nothing like Indian Muslims or Muslim Indians. There is a need to look at the special privileges, whether such provisions are meant to uplift them economically and yet get integrated with the mainstream or whether these privileges perpetuate the division of majority and minority.

I am Ashamed and I Apologize 11. 06. 2002

MINORITISM: A promoter to Muslim separatism

by R.Upadhyay.

The Gujarat tragedy has once again brought the age old minoritism into focus. There may be multiple causes like social, political, economic and religious behind this problem, but the dangerous game being played by the political class since Independence has caused great harm to the unity and strength of the country. Even though the concept of minoritism is against the spirit of the pluralistic order of Indian society the over powering and dominant political masters of this country are using it as a political tool for fulfillment of their personal ambitions.

The framers of the Indian constitution classified the people of this country between minority and majority on the basis of religion and incorporated certain special privileges and rights to safeguard the interests of the former. The intention was good, but they did not realize that the politicians from both the communities would used it as a hand maid to further their own communal politics and aggravate social tensions. What has happened now is that the constitutional attempt has now become an obstacle to integration!

The concept of minoritism was initially used by the British for their colonial interests but the post-Independence political leadership used it for their vote bank politics. While the conspiracy to play the divisive policy of divide and rule was hatched by the then rulers by granting the status of separate electorate to Muslims in 1909, the post-colonial leadership of the country carried forward this ill-intentioned British legacy for their self seeking political interests. In stead of uniting the people in the wake of partition of the country, the issue was ironically legitimized to work as an extension of the communal award granted to the Indian people by the British.

While promoting a powerful force among Indian Muslims to fight for their share of political power, the British also patronised a section of Indian leaders to counter the forceful nationalist group in the country. This latter group developed a crooked version of secularism by granting special privileges to minority. This privilege to the second largest religious majority of the country helped the anti-majority forces to replay the same divisive game of the British. Such combination of religion and politics not only sidelined the ethical values of Indian society but it generated a national anger among the majority against the vast majority of Muslim minority, who were responsible for partition of the country. The situation gradually turned into a fertile ground for consolidation of majoritarian forces which in turn added further fears in the minds of the minority as the so called secularists created the bogey of insecurity of the minorities.

Indian constitution is loud and clear that there is no discrimination on Indian citizens on account of their faith as all of them are enjoying the rights of full citizenship. Rather minorities in India are accorded more protection with constitutional, legislative, and statutory guarantees along with various national and international obligations. But despite such protection, our experience of last 55 years suggests that the gap of communal mistrust between Hindus and Muslims is gradually widening. Why is this so and what could be done?

It is ironical that the Muslims kept themselves isolated even from other religious minorities in India. They were never found to be aggressively agitated on the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 or the incidents relating to anti Christian agitation in the country. This shows the extreme religious exclusiveness inculcated into them by their leaders.

Let me quote Rafiq Zakaria a noted Muslim scholar, who admitted in his book The Widening Divide,`` a deep study of the last hundred years of British rule has, however, convinced me that at every crucial moment, when unity might have been preserved, it is Muslims, who betrayed; but Hindus cannot escape the blame.``

The term minority has a subjective definition; but no attempt was ever made to define it precisely in the context of the pluralistic order of Indian society. The general interpretation that a minority community means a community, which is numerically less than 50% of the total population of the country may not give justice to inter or intra-religious minority. Hindus in Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Kashmir, Lakshadweep and Punjab states are in minority but they do not have any privilege of being minority there. This would equally apply to many of the castes in different states in India!

Is there no lasting solution to this problem of Muslim minority in India? The answer to this most baffling question lies with Muslim intelligentsia as also the majority community.

Many consider the two nation theory as the main reason behind the widening divide between the two major religious communities in India. Rafiq Zakaria, a noted Muslim scholar remarked in his book The Widening Divide(Penguin Books 1996, page xvii):-`` It is now universally except in Pakistan admitted that two nation theory did great harm to inter-communal harmony.``

The two nation theory has done great harm more to the Muslims in India. At best the theory should have been seen as a tool for partition then and nothing beyond. It needs to be buried deep and never to be resurrected. There is no doubt that a historical wrong has been done to the people of India and the communal division has affected India more than Pakistan..

Humanity may demand that majority must be considerate to allay the fear of insecurity from the minds of the minority. But for this, minority is also expected to create an atmosphere of goodwill with the majority. The secular fabric of the nation can be protected only when religious leaders belonging to both minority and majority draw a line between religion, personal and political life.

Protection does not and should not mean pampering. Some would argue that the security of minority lies with the goodwill of the majority which is the key to create such an atmosphere. Rafiq Zakaria, expressed similar view, which is rather uncommon.. He said in his book entitled The Widening Divide (Penguin Books 1996), ``I believe placed as Indian Muslims are, their well being and security lie in the goodwill of the majority, not in resorting to agitation and violence.`` A similar view expressed by the RSS chief received severe criticism from many quarters.

Conclusion: Fringe groups are present in all communities and the Muslim community is no exception. What is needed is that the Muslim intellectuals should take the lead in resolving the minority problem by letting their brethren to join the mainstream and not display the hypocrisy of trying to act as saviour of the community by actually widening the divide. As said before and we maintain that the two nation theory should be buried once and for all. Those who chose to stay in India are Indians first and Muslims next. There should be nothing like Indian Muslims or Muslim Indians. There is a need to look at the special privileges, whether such provisions are meant to uplift them economically and yet get integrated with the mainstream or whether these privileges perpetuate the division of majority and minority.

The Perfect Murder MINORITISM: A promoter to Muslim separatism

by R.Upadhyay.

The Gujarat tragedy has once again brought the age old minoritism into focus. There may be multiple causes like social, political, economic and religious behind this problem, but the dangerous game being played by the political class since Independence has caused great harm to the unity and strength of the country. Even though the concept of minoritism is against the spirit of the pluralistic order of Indian society the over powering and dominant political masters of this country are using it as a political tool for fulfillment of their personal ambitions.

The framers of the Indian constitution classified the people of this country between minority and majority on the basis of religion and incorporated certain special privileges and rights to safeguard the interests of the former. The intention was good, but they did not realize that the politicians from both the communities would used it as a hand maid to further their own communal politics and aggravate social tensions. What has happened now is that the constitutional attempt has now become an obstacle to integration!

The concept of minoritism was initially used by the British for their colonial interests but the post-Independence political leadership used it for their vote bank politics. While the conspiracy to play the divisive policy of divide and rule was hatched by the then rulers by granting the status of separate electorate to Muslims in 1909, the post-colonial leadership of the country carried forward this ill-intentioned British legacy for their self seeking political interests. In stead of uniting the people in the wake of partition of the country, the issue was ironically legitimized to work as an extension of the communal award granted to the Indian people by the British.

While promoting a powerful force among Indian Muslims to fight for their share of political power, the British also patronised a section of Indian leaders to counter the forceful nationalist group in the country. This latter group developed a crooked version of secularism by granting special privileges to minority. This privilege to the second largest religious majority of the country helped the anti-majority forces to replay the same divisive game of the British. Such combination of religion and politics not only sidelined the ethical values of Indian society but it generated a national anger among the majority against the vast majority of Muslim minority, who were responsible for partition of the country. The situation gradually turned into a fertile ground for consolidation of majoritarian forces which in turn added further fears in the minds of the minority as the so called secularists created the bogey of insecurity of the minorities.

Indian constitution is loud and clear that there is no discrimination on Indian citizens on account of their faith as all of them are enjoying the rights of full citizenship. Rather minorities in India are accorded more protection with constitutional, legislative, and statutory guarantees along with various national and international obligations. But despite such protection, our experience of last 55 years suggests that the gap of communal mistrust between Hindus and Muslims is gradually widening. Why is this so and what could be done?

It is ironical that the Muslims kept themselves isolated even from other religious minorities in India. They were never found to be aggressively agitated on the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 or the incidents relating to anti Christian agitation in the country. This shows the extreme religious exclusiveness inculcated into them by their leaders.

Let me quote Rafiq Zakaria a noted Muslim scholar, who admitted in his book The Widening Divide,`` a deep study of the last hundred years of British rule has, however, convinced me that at every crucial moment, when unity might have been preserved, it is Muslims, who betrayed; but Hindus cannot escape the blame.``

The term minority has a subjective definition; but no attempt was ever made to define it precisely in the context of the pluralistic order of Indian society. The general interpretation that a minority community means a community, which is numerically less than 50% of the total population of the country may not give justice to inter or intra-religious minority. Hindus in Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Kashmir, Lakshadweep and Punjab states are in minority but they do not have any privilege of being minority there. This would equally apply to many of the castes in different states in India!

Is there no lasting solution to this problem of Muslim minority in India? The answer to this most baffling question lies with Muslim intelligentsia as also the majority community.

Many consider the two nation theory as the main reason behind the widening divide between the two major religious communities in India. Rafiq Zakaria, a noted Muslim scholar remarked in his book The Widening Divide(Penguin Books 1996, page xvii):-`` It is now universally except in Pakistan admitted that two nation theory did great harm to inter-communal harmony.``

The two nation theory has done great harm more to the Muslims in India. At best the theory should have been seen as a tool for partition then and nothing beyond. It needs to be buried deep and never to be resurrected. There is no doubt that a historical wrong has been done to the people of India and the communal division has affected India more than Pakistan..

Humanity may demand that majority must be considerate to allay the fear of insecurity from the minds of the minority. But for this, minority is also expected to create an atmosphere of goodwill with the majority. The secular fabric of the nation can be protected only when religious leaders belonging to both minority and majority draw a line between religion, personal and political life.

Protection does not and should not mean pampering. Some would argue that the security of minority lies with the goodwill of the majority which is the key to create such an atmosphere. Rafiq Zakaria, expressed similar view, which is rather uncommon.. He said in his book entitled The Widening Divide (Penguin Books 1996), ``I believe placed as Indian Muslims are, their well being and security lie in the goodwill of the majority, not in resorting to agitation and violence.`` A similar view expressed by the RSS chief received severe criticism from many quarters.

Conclusion: Fringe groups are present in all communities and the Muslim community is no exception. What is needed is that the Muslim intellectuals should take the lead in resolving the minority problem by letting their brethren to join the mainstream and not display the hypocrisy of trying to act as saviour of the community by actually widening the divide. As said before and we maintain that the two nation theory should be buried once and for all. Those who chose to stay in India are Indians first and Muslims next. There should be nothing like Indian Muslims or Muslim Indians. There is a need to look at the special privileges, whether such provisions are meant to uplift them economically and yet get integrated with the mainstream or whether these privileges perpetuate the division of majority and minority.

Dissing Ideologies Which way now for India?

The Kashmir conflict is not just between two nations, it is a battle for the soul of one of them. The world`s largest democracy is a hi-tech economic power - but it is also a stronghold of zealots and fundamentalism. The secular dream is under threat...

Luke Harding in New Delhi

Sunday June 9, 2002

The Observer

The front cover shows a group of Indian soldiers creeping gingerly through the undergrowth. Two of the troops are advancing with their rifles raised, while another sits on the ground clutching a rocket-launcher. The headline of the newspaper Organiser, published by the rabid ideological wing of India`s ruling Hindu nationalist party, is unequivocal. It reads: `Inching Towards a Decisive War on Terrorism`. India is in a vengeful mood.

Two weeks ago India`s 76-year-old Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called for a `decisive battle` against the enemy. Pakistan`s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf responded with a bellicose speech of his own, and carried out three tests of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

The world has watched the unfolding nuclear drama on the subcontinent with rising panic. Russia`s President Vladimir Putin, who last week failed to bring both sides together at a gloomy summit in Almaty, has compared the stand off to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Britain and America have told their nationals to get out of India and Pakistan immediately.

In Delhi, meanwhile, the mood is surprisingly laid-back. The bar at Delhi`s only English pub, with its green banquette seats and warm mugs of lager (`Mug beer, Sir?`), is full every night. The Indian papers seem more preoccupied with the World Cup - and a political scandal in the state of Maharashtra - than with the fact that millions of people might soon be vaporised.

How did we get here? What is going on? And why is the world`s largest democracy - which has already fought three wars with Pakistan - about to embark on a fourth?

This was not what India was supposed to be about. India, as envisaged by its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was above all a secular, plural nation. This was one of its proudest boasts. It was a place where India`s minority 150 million Muslims were equal citizens, not, as the Organiser frequently implies, promiscuous Fifth Columnists for Pakistan busy trying to outbreed their Hindu neighbours.

Now, it appears that many Hindus take the greatest pride in having the `Hindu bomb`. In some quarters, the nuclear tests in 1998 were treated with the jubilation normally reserved for a cricketing triumph.

And where do these sentiments fit in with the notion of India as a growing economic power, a commercial success story, distinct from the neighbouring `rogue, failed` state (as many Indians are wont to view Pakistan), a place where the computer is king, and the progressive liberal city of Bangalore has become India`s answer to Silicon Valley? The simple answer is that India is various. And the struggle for Kashmir is as much about competing visions of India itself.

In terms of the Kashmir stand-off, historians will have little trouble identifying the most recent spark - the attack last month by militants on an Indian army camp near the dusty cantonment town of Jammu. The militants almost certainly came from Pakistan - creeping across the no-man`s-land of yellowing grass and dense forest that divides the two countries here. They boarded a bus, bought 60p tickets, and shortly afterwards shot dead the driver and six passengers. They then stormed the Kaluchak army camp, and ran amok inside a residential compound, shooting army personnel, women and children.

The deaths of 31 people - however appalling and gruesome - do not always provoke war. But for India the attack was part of a pattern - the latest in a series of provocative incidents apparently sponsored by Pakistan`s military government and its shadowy intelligence service, the ISI. Over the past 12 years, virtually ignored by the outside world, India has been fighting its own dirty war in the serene valleys and snow-covered mountains of Kashmir. The Muslim Kashmiris had hoped their revolt would bring them independence. Instead it has brought the vast might of the Indian state crashing down on their heads. Some 50,000 people - militants, civilians, and soldiers - have died. Many have perished because of India`s brutal and uncompromising counter-insurgency.

And yet in recent years most of the militants have not come from the Kashmir valley at all. These young bearded jihadis have emerged from a series of covert training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir - the thin slice of territory between the towns of Muzaffarabad and Mirpur. Some have links with the ousted Taliban; others are illiterate youngsters persuaded of the justness of their cause by crude village mullahs. Their mission has been to wreak havoc on India. They have done so spectacularly: blowing up the assembly building in Jammu and Kashmir`s summer capital, Srinagar, last October, in an attack which sent body parts flying over a half-mile area. Last December they staged their most audacious hit yet. A group of three militants stormed India`s acropolis-like parliament building in the centre of New Delhi. They shot dead several policemen before Indian snipers finally picked them off.

It was a deeply symbolic target. Pakistani observers thought they smelt a rat and hinted that the attack had been stage-managed to defame Islamabad. Either way the parliament raid marked a turning point in India`s turbulent relations with Pakistan - and the beginning of the slow march to war. Vajpayee, the ailing leader of a Hindu fundamentalist party, briefly contemplated an immediate attack on Pakistan. In the end, though, he postponed any military decision and appealed to the international community to get tough with Musharraf, comparing India`s plight to that of America after 11 September.

Under pressure Musharraf announced last January that Pakistan would not allow itself to be used as a base for terrorists. He quietly gave orders to the militant groups, via their handlers in the ISI, to lay low. He locked up several thousand Islamist extremists. But for Musharraf to give up on Kashmir completely would have been to invite the same abrupt demise suffered by Pakistan`s last military dictator General Zia ul-Haq, whose plane mysteriously crashed in 1988. In March Musharraf released most of the extremists from jail, before endorsing his illegal rule in a spurious referendum. `Cross-border terrorism` - as India dubs this phenomenon of infiltration - resumed. And someone came up with a malevolent plan to strike at the Indian army`s weakest point: its women and children. Musharraf has now given private assurances to London and Washington that infiltration has stopped. He has also pointed out that many of Pakistan`s militant groups are beyond his control. But India remains sceptical - and is poised to strike unilaterally if it concludes that international diplomacy has failed. Western observers fear that Pakistan could then respond `disproportionately` and - if its conventional army crumbles - nuke Delhi.

This frightening scenario is largely a product of a world turned upside down by the 9/11 attacks and the precedent set by America`s war in Afghanistan. India appears to be planning its own analogous battle. Defence officials have hinted the army wants to carry out `surgical strikes` against `terrorist` training camps deep inside Pakistan Kashmir. Some reports suggest these strikes could happen soon - possibly even this week.

But the origins of this probable conflict also have a lot to do with the demise of India as a secular state - and the decline of its once-mighty Congress Party. Fifteen years ago New Delhi`s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was on the nutty fringes of Indian political life. It was a bit like Britain`s UK Independence Party. It had a handful of seats and little popular support. In less than a decade it had grabbed power, riding into government on a wave of Hindu revivalist sentiment following the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque by Hindu extremists in the somnolent northern town of Ayodhya. In May 1998 Vajpayee consolidated his patriotic agenda by carrying out five nuclear tests in the white rolling deserts of Rajasthan. Pakistan, which had acquired most of its nuclear technology from its key ally China, as well as North Korea, promptly responded with tests of its own. Suddenly, the region looked very dangerous indeed.

Recently, though, the BJP has suffered a series of election defeats in a number of key Indian states, with strong signs that India`s voters are beginning to tire of its relentlessly chauvinist politics. There are also signs that the wave of patriotic enthusiasm generated by the tests might be evaporating. The ruling coalition is likely to lose India`s next election in 2004, though some think that unity through war could revive the BJP`s fortunes. In February, meanwhile, something hap pened that would convulse the country still further. A Muslim mob in the western town of Godhra set light to a train carrying Hindu activists back from a pilgrimage to Ayodhya. Some 58 people died, many of them women. In the retaliatory riots that followed Hindu gangs in the state of Gujarat chopped up and burned more than 2,000 Muslims. They raped then killed hundreds of women. The state`s ruling BJP politicians have been accused of encouraging, even organising the pogrom. Gujarat`s chief minister Narendra Modi gave orders to the local police force to do nothing. Muslims surrounded by murdering mobs armed with tridents were told simply: `We have no instructions to save you.`

As in the Hollywood comedy Wag The Dog, where a US president declares war on a previously obscure country to distract from domestic scandal, the threat of a war with Pakistan has banished the embarrassment of Gujarat from the headlines. But the episode remains shameful and depressing. Pakistan, meanwhile, a state devised in the 1930s by a group of Muslim intellectuals at Cambridge, was meant to be a democracy, not a military dictatorship. In time both nations have been subverted by religious fundamentalism. The Hindu zealots in Gujarat and the bearded militants of Muzaffarabad have a lot in common.

But the dangerous mess on the subcontinent is also in part the legacy of British colonialism. If history had turned out a little differently, for example, Dr Karan Singh must sometimes reflect that he might still be the ruler of an extremely large empire. As the only son of the maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, his fate had seemed assured. After his father`s death he would have inherited a sprawling, artificial kingdom created by India`s ingenious British Victorian rulers. His influence would extend to Gilgit, in the shadow of the mighty Karakoram mountain range, through to the fertile Kashmir Valley, and up to the snow-wrapped highlands of Ladakh, and down to Jammu, the home of his Dogra Hindu ancestors. The dispute between India and Pakistan is over Singh`s vanished and divided empire. `Pakistan has pushed out to the brink of a nuclear conflict. We may all get blown up. And all for this fatal attraction - Kashmir, Kashmir, Kashmir,` Singh told The Observer yesterday from his home in Delhi. `We are really lurching on the brink of total disaster. Is it worth it?` Singh regards the militants who cross into Indian-Kashmir as merely the most recent manifestation of a conflict that goes back to the turbulent period before independence in 1947. Singh`s father, the Hindu ruler of a predominantly Muslim kingdom, had to decide whether to join the newly created states of India or Pakistan.

Surrounded by flunkeys, and insulated from the machinations in New Delhi, Hari Singh dithered. He had managed to fall out with everybody - Nehru`s Congress Party, the Muslim League led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the British, and Kashmir`s own powerful political leader Sheikh Abdullah. Pakistani tribesmen, meanwhile, began advancing down the mountainous road towards Srinagar. Faced with the enemy on his doorstep, the maharajah threw a party or durbar at his riverside summer palace and ordered his servants to light thousands of candles. `He was blithely unaware of the disaster approaching,` Karan Singh, a former Congress Minister now in the running to be the next President of India, said. `I don`t think Papa really had an adequate grasp of the great historical forces that had been unleashed with the freedom movement in India and Partition. One of the weaknesses of feudalism is that you are cut off from ground realities.`

The maharajah, who had been holding out for independence for Kashmir, reluctantly acceded to India. In the early hours of 26 October, 1947, he fled Srinagar taking several suitcases of jewels with him. His son - then a 16-year-old schoolboy at Doon, India`s equivalent of Eton - was loaded in darkness into a station wagon. `I was in a wheelchair. I had a hip problem,` he recalled. Looking back, could he have done anything to prevent the disaster? `I was only 16 in a feudal household with Papa the undisputed ruler of all he surveyed, or so he thought. I don`t think I could have played any role,` he said. Arriving down in the plains at his palace in Jammu, having eluded the Pakistani tribesmen, Hari Singh famously declared: `We have lost Kashmir.` India, meanwhile, airlifted several battalions of troops into Srinagar and battled the invaders to a halt. There was a ceasefire. The front line - which gave Pakistan control of remote, mountainous northern Kashmir and a western strip including Muzaffarabad and Mirpur - became formalised into a line of control.

Yesterday, more than half a century later, Indian and Pakistani troops were still trying to kill each other across it. As the historian John Keay has noted: `Like a fuse-box, Kashmir was soon discovered to lie at a point where the delicate and internal wiring of two new and complex polities met a number of high-voltage external polarities. Both India and Pakistan regard Kashmir as essential to their concept of themselves - India as a secular state open to people of all faiths, and Pakistan as a homeland for the subcontinent`s Muslims. The K in Pakistan stands for Kashmir; and even small Pakistani children are aware of its struggle. The notion that India has cheated Pakistan out of Kashmir has persisted through long periods of army rule, unstable civilian governments and numerous coups. It has prompted two previous wars between India and Pakistan - in 1947-8 and 1965. And it lies at the heart of their latest, unresolved nuclear confrontation. `Pakistan will have to grow out of this obsession,` Singh says. Intriguingly, he attributes little blame for the imbroglio to the architect of Partition, India`s last viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was a frequent visitor to Srinagar (where he outraged local sensibilities by sunbathing nude.)

`He and Edwina came to visit us. Mountbatten used to call me Tiger. They were friendly with the Nehrus. I don`t think Lord Louis was pro-Pakistan, I think he was pro-India,` he said. `I can`t believe he was colluding with Pakistan. The British interest was to prevent a fully fledged war between India and Pakistan.` But Singh claims that British Army officers stationed in Gilgit - of strategic importance because of its proximity to Russia - encouraged their Muslim officers to mutiny, leading to Kashmir`s Partition.

With India and Pakistan close to war again, there is little sign of fresh thinking over Kashmir, one of colonialism`s most intractable legacies. Singh believes the answer may lie in an EU-style solution. Pakistani tourists could be invited to visit. The valley, with its apple orchards and ghostly ski-resort at Gulmarg, could be transformed into a holiday destination again.

In the meantime, though, the guns boom, turning the border villages on both sides of the line of control into places of terror. From Jammu the Pakistan border is only a 20-minute drive - past a canal full of small boys taking a dip and tractor carts transporting locals to their new refugee camps.

Most villagers have now dug their own bunkers where they retreat when the mortars start to fall. But these flimsy hideouts will not offer much protection in the event of a nuclear war. With an 1,800-mile border, a shared history and a virtually identical language, India and Pakistan cannot avoid each other. At some point they will have to learn the language of tolerance. They will have to start talking. The alternatives are obvious to everybody: death, horror, and destruction.

http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,730182,00.html

Dissing Ideologies June 9, 2002, 12:41AM

India`s citizens worry little about Armageddon

Nation that`s never entered nuclear war can`t imagine one

By CLAUDIA KOLKER

Copyright 2002 Special to the Chronicle

NEW DELHI -- It`s a slow day at the temple. Surendra Sharma, a Hindu priest who prays on behalf of worried devotees, has only fielded one request. A couple wants their daughter cured of measles.

No one has bothered asking for a prayer against nuclear war.

In recent weeks, India`s standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir region has gripped many in the West, with at least one world leader, Russia President Vladimir Putin, comparing it to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Yet most Indians themselves are bustling through their days with seeming nonchalance.

The Hindustan Times, a major English-language newspaper here, split its front page the other day between high-level threats from Indian and Pakistani leaders and news of higher gasoline prices. The energy story was given more importance on the page.

There have been few signs of people plotting escapes or arranging extra visits to priests or psychologists.

``I`ve never heard anybody talk about a bomb here,`` Sharma says, his fingers idly draped over the cup of scarlet powder that he uses to give benedictions. ``Nobody`s scared. Most people who come here come to pray for the well-being of their families.``

Adds temple visitor Arun Sharma, who`s no relation to the priest: ``There`s no possibility of a nuclear war at all, because no one on either side will think of destroying an entire generation.``

He says he`s not worried even about nuclear accidents.

Though the prospect has Western countries urging their expatriates home, ``we are not afraid,`` says Sharma. ``Not in the least.``

One magazine, however, described a potential nuclear strike on New Delhi. A single bomb, the report said, would kill 2 million of the city`s 7 million residents in seconds. Three million more would perish in five hours. The city`s temperature would approximate that of the sun. All buildings and life forms within five miles would be erased.

The coolness of a billion people in the face of possible disaster tells much about India`s reality. Indians have not known the carnage that a major conflict like World War II or Vietnam can bring. Most may be even less able to envision a nuclear holocaust. But in a land tormented by flood, plague, and famine, anxiety also has become a part of life.

Certainly some in the West have talked about the possible nightmare. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers mustered along their common border in Kashmir, India and Pakistan`s aggressive talk in recent weeks could easily devolve into a war, say Western analysts. Even if the leaders themselves act responsibly, they add, both countries lack mechanisms to keep their nuclear bombs from extremists or accidental firing.

Rhetoric from the two governments waxes and wanes daily, but the United States is maintaining its call for its 60,000 expatriates to come home at once. Secretary of State Colin Powell has deemed the situation on the subcontinent still ``extremely dangerous.`` In Britain, the country`s former colonial ruler, officials are reportedly planning for 150,000 war refugees.

In New Delhi, however, sociologist Imdiaz Ahmad spends a recent morning calmly writing in his office. Beyond his garden, filled with lime and orange trees, the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University lies quiet.

Ahmad, a Muslim, says he doesn`t know anyone fretting about nuclear war. The subject didn`t even come up last Friday at his mosque.

In Ahmad`s view, the border standoff amounts to nothing more than a political ploy. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he theorizes, needs something to overshadow a recent, flawed referendum that kept him in power. And Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is trying to distract from the recent horrifying massacre of Muslims in the state of Gujarat. Kashmir, the Himalayan valley state that both sides have claimed since their partition in 1947, provides the perfect foil, he says.

``From day one, stable, enlightened intellectuals have believed there will be no war,`` Ahmad says. ``If you go and conduct a survey of the average Indian, I`m sure that 60 to 70 percent will say this is a rhetorical war, and a warmongering motivated by domestic issues.``

Many Indians agree, says Anirudh Deshpande, a historian who writes on military issues. He too, doubts the nations will engage in any war exceeding border skirmishes. ``India is not prepared for it,`` Deshpande says.

But, he adds, India`s complacency about nuclear war flows from deep delusion. Though Pakistan and India have been in conflict for five decades, neither has experienced a total war.

``War is, to most people here, a very armchair sort of enterprise,`` Deshpande says. ``Americans have participated in two world wars. They have the experience of casualties on a large, world scale. That is why they are so afraid of body bags.``

Most Indians also misunderstand what a nuclear bomb can do, Deshpande says. Since 1998, the government has celebrated nuclear test blasts as if they were moon landings. The Department of Atomic Energy, he says, furthers the conceit, never reporting accidents.

In contrast to generations of Americans, most Indians have not seen a TV drama imagining a nuclear winter, or a public service ad describing how to protect themselves in event of a nuclear explosion. Many people, Deshpande says, are unclear about exactly what a nuclear bomb is.

``You have no idea of how many kinds of nuclear bombs there are,`` says 22-year-old priest Sharma. ``If it`s the sort that poisons the air, it will affect everyone. If it`s the kind that spews fire, it will burn everything down. But the temple will remain intact.``

For some Indians, the bomb mainly inspires jingoistic fantasies. Kanewar Singh, 76, indulges cheerfully. Visiting with friends inside a tiny clothing store, Singh says that India should nuke Pakistan at once.

``What is there to be afraid of? One day we all have to die,`` he says. ``We have such a big population. If the first 10 million Indians die, we`ll still finish the Pakistanis off. It`s worth it.``

If he seems extreme, he`s not entirely alone. A recent survey indicated that 82 percent of Indians believe that Pakistan would go nuclear in a conflict, yet 74 percent think India should attack.

The New Delhi municipal government hardly seems more pragmatic. The Hindustan Times reported last week that the city has no plan for nuclear attack, and lacks protective bunkers even for the country`s leaders.

Some who grasp the enormity of nuclear disaster say they are not especially preoccupied with it right now. Historian Deshpande admits he`s lost sleep over the prospect of a mishap. But, he says, ``I have been losing sleep over this for three or four years now.``

In Deshpande`s opinion, the region`s nuclear risk isn`t much higher now than usual; only in the case of outright war would it increase.

Accidents, he adds, can occur in any place where nuclear arms are stored.

What could Indians do in case of a strike? Since the Kashmir standoff started in December, prize-winning author Arundhati Roy has voiced her dread of nuclear war in interviews and peace rallies. But, she asks in a recent opinion piece, ``where shall we go? If I go away, and everything and everyone -- every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved -- is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love? And who will love me back?``

But activism, even worry, seem luxuries here. Many Indians simply cannot afford them, says Yogesh Arora, a clothing vendor in a Delhi market. Every day, he says, an average Indian may lose a child to illness, see a home swept off in floods, or fail to pry his food from starved or thirsty fields. The bomb ranks low upon the list of worries.

``Americans try to protect themselves from everything,`` Arora says, as the green and purple tunics that he sells float like veils around him. ``We don`t have time to worry; we have to make a living. We`re going to die, tomorrow or today. And the more you try to protect yourself, the weaker you become.``

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/world/1444515

Houston Chronicle

Lighting The Nuclear Fire June 9, 2002, 12:41AM

India`s citizens worry little about Armageddon

Nation that`s never entered nuclear war can`t imagine one

By CLAUDIA KOLKER

Copyright 2002 Special to the Chronicle

NEW DELHI -- It`s a slow day at the temple. Surendra Sharma, a Hindu priest who prays on behalf of worried devotees, has only fielded one request. A couple wants their daughter cured of measles.

No one has bothered asking for a prayer against nuclear war.

In recent weeks, India`s standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir region has gripped many in the West, with at least one world leader, Russia President Vladimir Putin, comparing it to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Yet most Indians themselves are bustling through their days with seeming nonchalance.

The Hindustan Times, a major English-language newspaper here, split its front page the other day between high-level threats from Indian and Pakistani leaders and news of higher gasoline prices. The energy story was given more importance on the page.

There have been few signs of people plotting escapes or arranging extra visits to priests or psychologists.

``I`ve never heard anybody talk about a bomb here,`` Sharma says, his fingers idly draped over the cup of scarlet powder that he uses to give benedictions. ``Nobody`s scared. Most people who come here come to pray for the well-being of their families.``

Adds temple visitor Arun Sharma, who`s no relation to the priest: ``There`s no possibility of a nuclear war at all, because no one on either side will think of destroying an entire generation.``

He says he`s not worried even about nuclear accidents.

Though the prospect has Western countries urging their expatriates home, ``we are not afraid,`` says Sharma. ``Not in the least.``

One magazine, however, described a potential nuclear strike on New Delhi. A single bomb, the report said, would kill 2 million of the city`s 7 million residents in seconds. Three million more would perish in five hours. The city`s temperature would approximate that of the sun. All buildings and life forms within five miles would be erased.

The coolness of a billion people in the face of possible disaster tells much about India`s reality. Indians have not known the carnage that a major conflict like World War II or Vietnam can bring. Most may be even less able to envision a nuclear holocaust. But in a land tormented by flood, plague, and famine, anxiety also has become a part of life.

Certainly some in the West have talked about the possible nightmare. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers mustered along their common border in Kashmir, India and Pakistan`s aggressive talk in recent weeks could easily devolve into a war, say Western analysts. Even if the leaders themselves act responsibly, they add, both countries lack mechanisms to keep their nuclear bombs from extremists or accidental firing.

Rhetoric from the two governments waxes and wanes daily, but the United States is maintaining its call for its 60,000 expatriates to come home at once. Secretary of State Colin Powell has deemed the situation on the subcontinent still ``extremely dangerous.`` In Britain, the country`s former colonial ruler, officials are reportedly planning for 150,000 war refugees.

In New Delhi, however, sociologist Imdiaz Ahmad spends a recent morning calmly writing in his office. Beyond his garden, filled with lime and orange trees, the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University lies quiet.

Ahmad, a Muslim, says he doesn`t know anyone fretting about nuclear war. The subject didn`t even come up last Friday at his mosque.

In Ahmad`s view, the border standoff amounts to nothing more than a political ploy. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he theorizes, needs something to overshadow a recent, flawed referendum that kept him in power. And Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is trying to distract from the recent horrifying massacre of Muslims in the state of Gujarat. Kashmir, the Himalayan valley state that both sides have claimed since their partition in 1947, provides the perfect foil, he says.

``From day one, stable, enlightened intellectuals have believed there will be no war,`` Ahmad says. ``If you go and conduct a survey of the average Indian, I`m sure that 60 to 70 percent will say this is a rhetorical war, and a warmongering motivated by domestic issues.``

Many Indians agree, says Anirudh Deshpande, a historian who writes on military issues. He too, doubts the nations will engage in any war exceeding border skirmishes. ``India is not prepared for it,`` Deshpande says.

But, he adds, India`s complacency about nuclear war flows from deep delusion. Though Pakistan and India have been in conflict for five decades, neither has experienced a total war.

``War is, to most people here, a very armchair sort of enterprise,`` Deshpande says. ``Americans have participated in two world wars. They have the experience of casualties on a large, world scale. That is why they are so afraid of body bags.``

Most Indians also misunderstand what a nuclear bomb can do, Deshpande says. Since 1998, the government has celebrated nuclear test blasts as if they were moon landings. The Department of Atomic Energy, he says, furthers the conceit, never reporting accidents.

In contrast to generations of Americans, most Indians have not seen a TV drama imagining a nuclear winter, or a public service ad describing how to protect themselves in event of a nuclear explosion. Many people, Deshpande says, are unclear about exactly what a nuclear bomb is.

``You have no idea of how many kinds of nuclear bombs there are,`` says 22-year-old priest Sharma. ``If it`s the sort that poisons the air, it will affect everyone. If it`s the kind that spews fire, it will burn everything down. But the temple will remain intact.``

For some Indians, the bomb mainly inspires jingoistic fantasies. Kanewar Singh, 76, indulges cheerfully. Visiting with friends inside a tiny clothing store, Singh says that India should nuke Pakistan at once.

``What is there to be afraid of? One day we all have to die,`` he says. ``We have such a big population. If the first 10 million Indians die, we`ll still finish the Pakistanis off. It`s worth it.``

If he seems extreme, he`s not entirely alone. A recent survey indicated that 82 percent of Indians believe that Pakistan would go nuclear in a conflict, yet 74 percent think India should attack.

The New Delhi municipal government hardly seems more pragmatic. The Hindustan Times reported last week that the city has no plan for nuclear attack, and lacks protective bunkers even for the country`s leaders.

Some who grasp the enormity of nuclear disaster say they are not especially preoccupied with it right now. Historian Deshpande admits he`s lost sleep over the prospect of a mishap. But, he says, ``I have been losing sleep over this for three or four years now.``

In Deshpande`s opinion, the region`s nuclear risk isn`t much higher now than usual; only in the case of outright war would it increase.

Accidents, he adds, can occur in any place where nuclear arms are stored.

What could Indians do in case of a strike? Since the Kashmir standoff started in December, prize-winning author Arundhati Roy has voiced her dread of nuclear war in interviews and peace rallies. But, she asks in a recent opinion piece, ``where shall we go? If I go away, and everything and everyone -- every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved -- is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love? And who will love me back?``

But activism, even worry, seem luxuries here. Many Indians simply cannot afford them, says Yogesh Arora, a clothing vendor in a Delhi market. Every day, he says, an average Indian may lose a child to illness, see a home swept off in floods, or fail to pry his food from starved or thirsty fields. The bomb ranks low upon the list of worries.

``Americans try to protect themselves from everything,`` Arora says, as the green and purple tunics that he sells float like veils around him. ``We don`t have time to worry; we have to make a living. We`re going to die, tomorrow or today. And the more you try to protect yourself, the weaker you become.``

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/world/1444515

Houston Chronicle

Let’s talk about Bollywood The Bollywood Connection

INDIA`S FILMS MIXING MELODRAMA AND MUSIC REACH ACROSS THE BORDERS TO SILICON VALLEY

By Lisa Tsering

Special to the Mercury News

You won`t find Bollywood on any map.

Bollywood is India`s huge, Hindi-language film industry, which produces more than 1,000 films a year. The word is a masala mix of Bombay and Hollywood, just as the films are a spicy blend of melodrama, romance, fights, patriotism and gorgeously choreographed musical numbers.

These days, the West has started to wake up to India`s film industry. ``Lagaan,`` a masala masterpiece about love, taxes and cricket, was nominated early this year for an Academy Award for best foreign film. (It was re-released May 31 in Bay Area theaters.)

Last year`s ``Moulin Rouge`` featured a glorious closing number based on the Hindi film song ``Chamma Chamma.`` Mira Nair`s current art-house hit, ``Monsoon Wedding,`` borrows liberally from the Bollywood songbook. In addition, ``Bombay Dreams,`` Andrew Lloyd Webber`s long-awaited stage collaboration with acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapur (``Elizabeth``) and Indian pop maestro A.R. Rahman, is scheduled to open June 19 in London.

In the Bay Area, with its large population of Indians and Indo-Americans, the roots of Bollywood run deep. As if to confirm its appeal here, 28-year-old screen superstar Hrithik Roshan -- dubbed by GQ as ``the most famous person you`ve never heard of`` -- will make his first Bay Area appearance tonight in ``Heartthrobs,`` a live, all-Bollywood dance spectacular, featuring five other Indian film stars (Karisma Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Aaftab Shivdasani and Raageshwari) at the Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland.

Roshan became a star overnight with the 2000 release of ``Kaho Na Pyar Hai`` (``Tell Me You Love Me``). Described in a magazine story as ``a lithe, virile and very Indian version of Elvis Presley,`` he often co-stars with Kareena Kapoor, whose older sister Karisma is also a well-known actress and dancer.

Indeed, to be a star in India, you`ve got to be able to dance -- really dance -- to a heavenly mix of sitar, earthy Punjabi Bhangra folk music, tabla and shamelessly shrill violins behind lusty vocals, lip-synced by the actors.

Local moviegoers flock to see their stars at Fremont`s Naz 8 Cinemas, the nation`s first and biggest multiplex movie theater dedicated to Bollywood films. They also can go to the six-screen Indian Movie Center in Sunnyvale, which tends toward South Indian and edgier independent films produced by the Indian diaspora.

Not surprisingly, the Bollywood influence can be traced in the other direction as well. A whole genre of Bollywood films is popping up with story lines and characters straight out of Milpitas, and audiences in India can`t get enough.

``Silicon Valley is home to so many Indians,`` says Asha ``Revathy`` Menon, a director whose debut feature film, ``Mitr: My Friend`` (2001), focused on the culture conflicts of Indians settled in the valley.

``Just think -- in one out of 100 families in India, there`s at least one son, daughter or brother working here. Indians are definitely interested in the stories of immigrants settled in America,`` Menon said.

Dev Anand, a matinee idol-turned-director, sets a portion of his next film, ``Love at Times Square,`` in a high-tech firm here and even makes a cameo as an archetypal Silicon Valley millionaire.

For Indians in Silicon Valley, most of Bollywood`s lusciously garish movies offer a sense of familiarity that`s as soothing as kheer, the sweet, creamy rice pudding. The basic story line: Boy meets girl from a different religion or social class. They bicker and then fall madly in love. They profess their passion in a song, which may be sung in a Swiss meadow, a Rajasthani palace, atop a glacier, in front of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Of course, boy and girl face complications: arranged marriage, mistaken identity or an ex-boyfriend, an automobile accident, a death in the family or threats by hired goons. Optional ingredients include a temple scene, an elaborate wedding with a cast of hundreds, a techno-disco club number or India`s national anthem. Three hours and six songs later, the lovers work things out.

Bollywood movies usually show a tidied-up picture of India. Director Yash Chopra, king of Bollywood romances, says his films are successful in the United States ``because they show a side of Indian culture that makes people proud to be Indian.``

According to Menon, the reason Indian-Americans prefer India-lite on-screen is simple: They`re caught in a time warp.

``They keep a picture of the India they left long back,`` she said. ``There are very big, important changes in India, but their perceptions have stagnated. They remember only the time that they left India.``

All this might make you think Bollywood movies are strictly for Indians and Indian-Americans. But the films` curvy heroines and he-man heroes are worshiped in Russia, China, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel and Britain, too.

And the films` mainstream influence -- including recognition at major film festivals -- and the advent of high-quality, subtitled DVDs have raised the profile further. Now Bollywood and its stars are making a place for themselves in America, too.



San Jose Mercury

The Perfect Murder FAYAZ KABIL/REUTERS



http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0607/p06s01-wosc.html

Christian Science Monitor

Amid din, Kashmiri voice lost

Heavy mortar shelling continued yesterday as India and Pakistan continued war rhetoric.

By V.K. Shashikumar | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

SRINAGAR – A black funeral shroud hangs lightly over the grave of Abdul Ghani Lone, the slain separatist leader who has turned into a cult hero here.

Mr. Lone was a moderate member of the 23-party Kashmiri Muslim separatist alliance, The All Party Hurriyet Conference (APHC). But his assassination on May 21 has elevated him, like many others, to a martyr`s status.

Some here believe he was killed because he criticized jihadi terrorist groups in Kashmir. Ironically, he now lies buried among those who would have wanted him dead. Spiritual leaders, moderate separatists, die-hard pro-Pakistan separatists, and militants from groups like Harkat-ul-Ansar and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen are all buried here. The ``Kashmir cause,`` it seems, attains unification in death.

But those still alive and championing it are as different as chalk from cheese. There are those who want autonomy within the framework of a genuinely federal Indian Union; while others promote the cause of azadi, or independence. Still others want to be united with Pakistan or India.

A simmering political angst nurtures Kashmiri Muslims` alienation from India. The distance between New Delhi and Srinagar has grown over the past five months, and Kashmiris say they feel that they are pawns in the India–Pakistan hostility.

``We want peace,`` says a Kashmiri youth sitting on the steps leading to the graveyard. ``Nobody wants war, deaths, and violence. The only way out is for India, Pakistan, and Kashmiris to look for a permanent solution.``

The mood on the street is a mix of suspicion, distrust, and anger at the political situation.

During the last 13 years, Kashmiris say, they have learned to be cynically dismissive of New Delhi while harboring a deep distrust toward the Indian security forces, who they say have consistently harassed them.

India officially admits that 33,000 have died in the Kashmir conflict, while Kashmiris claim it`s twice that number. A number of human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Commission of India, report widespread violations by Indian security forces, including hundreds of custodial deaths and the rape of young girls and women.

The human-rights violations by Indian forces have hardened the anti-India sentiment in the Kashmir valley.

``Resolving the Kashmir tragedy cannot just mean that New Delhi transfers power to the state of Jammu and Kashmir,`` says a prominent pro-autonomy leader, Mehbooba Mufti. Ms. Mufti, president of People`s Democratic Party, says New Delhi will have to leave the political process to the will of the people here. ``New Delhi cannot dictate terms in Jammu and Kashmir. It will have to give the people the democratic right to vote in a free and fair elections.``

The common refrain in the Kashmir valley is that the Indian government will never organize ``free and fair`` elections. They point to the 1987 elections here – widely seen to be rigged for the National Conference Party – which were generally believed to have sparked a violent rebellion against Indian rule.

This confidence, however, is not shared by a majority of Kashmiri Muslims, who call for holding elections under the watchful eyes of independent monitors.

The mood here flies in the face of a recent opinion poll commissioned by the Kashmir Friends Society, which is active in nongovernmental conflict resolution initiatives in Kashmir. The results showed that 61 percent of Kashmiris (in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir) want to remain with India. The Muslims in the Kashmir valley have rejected the results of the opinion poll as ``contrived,`` while others questioned the methodology used.

Regardless of the poll`s findings, many in Kashmir demand that New Delhi has the right to tackle the problem of terrorism in Indian Kashmir, but they say it`s unacceptable that Kashmiri Muslims continue to be threatened by the Indian security forces.

``We look at the Kashmir problem in two dimensions – external and internal,`` says Mufti. ``The external dimension that relates to Pakistan`s support to cross-border terrorism in Kashmir and India is something that has actively engaged New Delhi. But what is more important is the internal dimension of the Kashmir tragedy. How can New Delhi ignore the trauma, pain, and suffering of the Kashmiri people? How can the daily killings, custodial deaths, and rapes be ignored?``

Social workers in Indian Kashmir say New Delhi`s first priority should be helping Kashmiri people. ``The human tragedy in Kashmir is often forgotten by New Delhi,`` says Zahoor Ahmed Tak, chairman of an orphanage. Mr. Tak says the Jammu and Kashmir state government`s own estimates reveal that there are more than 100,000 orphans here.

``Violence in Kashmir has ripped apart the Kashmiri society – crime rates have gone up, cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome have shot up dramatically, drug addiction is on the rise, the suicide graph is increasing every year, and family life has been disrupted,`` says Bashir Dabla, a leading sociologist at Kashmir University.

It is, therefore, not surprising that many here have challenged the Indian government to hold a referendum or plebiscite. The 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution called on India to hold a plebiscite in the region. It also required Pakistan withdraw its troops from the area of Kashmir it controlled, which it has not done.

The ruling National Conference, headed by Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, has rejected this contention. He says the separatists (grouped under the umbrella organization APHC) should give up their ideal goal of a separate Kashmir and instead run for office under the current Indian Constitution.

``Let [the separatists] prove their representative character in the elections,`` says Omar Abdullah, India`s Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister.

Mr. Abdullah admits that some sections of the Kashmiri society are disillusioned with various processes of governance and democracy and it is the responsibility of the political parties and the state government to reverse this.

Mufti says that the conflict in Kashmir has mostly affected the Muslims in the Kashmir Valley.

``It is understandable that the Kashmiri Hindus and Sikhs in Jammu and the Kashmiri Buddhists in Ladakh would want to remain part of India,`` says Mufti, whose party stands for an autonomous status for Indian administered Kashmir.

``But the fear psychosis in the valley is tremendous because the Kashmiri Muslims have been the worst affected by militancy and counter-militancy operations,`` she says.

Dissing Ideologies Here`s a new book on Bombay (Mumbai) by British scribe Justine Hardy

BOLLYWOOD BOY

It`s not often that it takes one year to get one interview. But that`s how long it took British scribe Justine Hardy to track down Hindi cinema`s latest golden boy Hrithik Roshan.

During that yearlong chase in Mumbai (which Hardy calls by its old name, Bombay), the 31-year-old journalist and documentary filmmaker discovered glitz, glamour and also the gory underbelly of Bombay and Bollywood.

Her book ``Bollywood Boy,`` published by Penguin, then, is about Roshan, the Bollywood Boy. But also about Bollywood, ``the celluloid city that hides its alchemy among the alleys that smell of rotting flesh and star jasmine.``

It`s a sniggering saga, sometimes salivating, sometimes solemn, but never servile, never fan-like.

The chapters take you through the contours of a typical Hindi film. They are named - Infatuation, Flirtation (Meet our Hero), Turmoil (Bring on the Baddies), Adulation (Meet a Heroine) up till the Happy Ever After ending.

It`s about Hardy`s deliberation on Bombay. ``She has a woman`s body in recline, her hips, buttocks and breasts rising above a belly of water,`` she writes about the island metropolis that is capital to the Hindi film.

``Those breasts are surmounted by nipples of wealth, the higher reaches where the smooth rich folk live behind tall walls. And on the curves that swoop down to her belly the shore meets land that has been pulled back from the sea...

``This is the body of Bombay, and Bombay is a city of bodies.``

It`s also about the discovery of the new flesh trade. In the high city societal circuits, amid dark discos and sunlit cafes, middle class colonies and make belief sets.

``...skin pressing on skin, offering itself up from Malabar Hill to Back Bay, from Kemp`s Corner to the salt-singed arch of the Gateway of India...,`` writes Hardy.

As she traverses through the repackaged air of Bombay pubs and discotheques, where the perfume ``mingles with Malboro Light smoke,`` Hardy discovers the new India. Of black spayed-on Capri pants, silk shirts knotted under cantilevered Wonder-Bra cleavages and oodles of hair gel falling over big-priced beers.

She also bumps into stardom. Like in the first sighting of Roshan with another top star, Salman Khan. Khan is part of what Hardy calls the ``testosterone triumvirate, three good Muslim boys who hold the Hindi film industry in thrall.``

Enthralled is what Hardy feels when she first sees Roshan: ``Then the green-eyed boy lifted his head, turned and looked straight at me. I am looking into film-star eyes. I am in the movies.``

But make no mistake. This book is not a star-struck romp across Indian tinsel town.

Rather it`s a rippling tale from the author whose earlier work includes ``Scoop-wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily,`` which was short listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Award in 1999 and ``Goat: A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill.``

Rippling with sardonic wit it discovers sensuous dancers-turned-sex-workers; forks out ageing choreographer-turned-personal trainers with sagging breasts and too much make up and generally plucks out the grey hairs amid the imported hair dyed manes.

From Kamathipura, the reddest of Bombay`s red light districts to the sets of ``Snip,`` a post-modern, dark, fusion comedy in half-English, half-Hindi - Hardy does the whole Bollywood jig.

She sees venereal disease clinics offering Rs. 500 abortions beside glossy film posters ``offering up a few hours of escape from the poverty and humiliation of Bombay`s back streets``.

And also some shooting on the location with ``Snip`` - ``So there`s this fat man, a huge black afro-wig and a dildo, and they are bouncing up and down on this big bed...together...``

The search for Hrithik carries on as he continues his meteoric rise through the celluloid firmament. And a million unanswered calls and false leads later, during which Hardy constantly bumps into ageing actors and failed and failing directors, Hrithik is reached.

``He looked straight at me. I was staring into the face of a beautiful boy behind a mask of film makeup,`` recalls Hardy.

``I was staring into those eyes. Everyone describes them as green. They are not. They are soft hazel melting to dark brown, flecked with light, wide open and vulnerable.``

Then Roshan, acclaimed as the sexiest dancer in Bollywood, tells Hardy he isn`t really that nimble. ``I am going to get caught soon... everyone is going to see soon that I am just not so hot at all, that maybe I am just a really ordinary dancer.``

And then it`s all over. The interview, the book, and it`s time again to ``bring on the dancing girls. Swell the music over an alpine slope, just one more time, one more wiggle, a final twirl. A lingering gaze. Lips to neck. Just a boy.

``Welcome to Bollywood.``

I am Ashamed and I Apologize Savior or Devourer

BJP ruled Gujarat States Naked Glory

By Ram Puniyani ( *)

In the worst ever communal flare up Gujarat has lost over 2000 of its citizens, over 3000 crores worth of social wealth, most of it belonging to Muslims, and has witnessed the decimation of religious places, Dargahs and Masjids. It is not nor for the first time that we have not seen state playing partisan role before but here the matters are qualitatively different. The demand that state administration should be transparent has been fulfilled in the wrong direction, the participation, compliance and encouragement of state personnel in supporting the rioters was transparent and no alibis were used in breaking the laws, in twisting the meanings of the clauses as the state apparatus was a mighty tool in the hands of the pogrom conductors coming from the stable of Sangh Parivar.



To begin with one of the civil servants, Harsh Mander was so aghast with the role of his peers and colleagues from the administrative services that he could not overcome his disgust and resigned from the administrative servive. Then Super Cop Julio Reibero was equally shamed by his colleagues in the Khakis who were supposed to be manning the riot control but in fact it was difficult to distinguish the rioters from the ones who are supposed to control the riots. One also recalls many a ministers operating from the police control rooms and directing the anti-minority operations. Most of the human rights reports like Human Rights watch, stated that State officials of Gujarat, were directly involved in the killings of hundreds of Muslims since February 27 and are now engineering a massive cover-up of the state`s role in the violence. One of the researchers from South Asia watch pointed out that what happened in Gujarat was not a spontaneous uprising, it was a carefully orchestrated attack against Muslims. And that the attacks were planned in advance and organized with extensive participation of the police and state government officials.

The 75-page report from the Human Rights watch documents some of the attacks against the Muslims and concludes that the police were directly implicated in nearly all the attacks against Muslims. The standard response was `We have no orders to save you`: While in some cases they were passive observers in other instances the police officials led the charge of murderous mobs, aiming and firing at Muslims who got in the way. At times under the pretext of offering assistance, some police officers led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. And the phone calls made to the police and other support agencies failed to get the necessary assistance.

The acme of the degeneration of the duties of the state has been reached. When Hitler was on rampage against the Jews, other weaker sections of society, and against those who were opposed to his policies it was state, which implemented the programme of annihilation of the Jews and other. Probably the hairs breadth difference still lies between what we witnessed in Gujarat and what happened in Hitlers Germany. Here though the Sangh Parivar is controlling the state apparatus it itself is not the state apparatus. The trajectory of communal violence has come a long way since they first began in the last decade of 19th Century. These riots provoked by the communal politics (Muslim and Hindu both), came up in response to the rise of Secular Indian National Congress (INC). British had a two-pronged strategy as far as the communal politics was concerned. At the political level they did promote the communal outfits of Muslims and Hindus both, to pursue their policy of Divide and Rule. At the level of communal violence they were fairly neutral. After independence before seeing the role of state in Communal violence as such we must remember that due to the Partition tragedy most of the Muslim communal elements had left for Pakistan and Muslim Leagues impact became very weak. Right since the beginning the Hindu Communalists, in addition to having their own outfits (Hindu Mahasabha and RSS) had also infiltrated in the INC. Also the trained swayamsevaks of RSS started entering all the wings of state machinery right from the beginning. It is not only that Ayodhya district magistrate Nayyar was alone in helping RSS in making a dispute of Babri Mosque. such characters were in all the walks of administrative machinery, media and the armed forces.

In most of the riots, which have pained us since the first Jabalpur riot of 1962, one sees a common pattern. While the bureaucracy soft peddles the offence of wings of RSS police plays the partisan role. While the administrative machine is sympathetic, to the Hindu sentiments (read Hindu Communal politics), the communalization of police has been blatant. There are instances (Meerut-Malyan, 1987) where the Provincial Armed Constabulary lined up around 300 Muslims besides the canal and shot them so that the bodies gets disposed off in the canal. There are instances (Bhagalpur 1989) where the police along with the rioters killed 180 Muslims, buried them in a paddy field on which cauliflower was grown. Most of the inquiry commission reports have shown the partisan role of police in the riots. The Shrikrishna Commission also indicted the police especially its Addl. Commission R.D. Tyagi for his shooting of the innocents in the Suleman Bakery.

One also recalls the communal virus seeping in the various state sponsored institutions, right under the nose of the Government which is supposed to be protector of Secular values as per the constitution. After the demolition of Babri Mosque, students of Lal bahadur Shastri Academy, the future administrators etc. celebrated the event with unusual gusto.

So the rot is set all around. And its qualitative transformation in the Gujarat is a dangerous portent for the values, which emerged from the Indian Freedom struggle and got enshrined in the India Constitution. Where did the things go wrong? Why the infiltration of RSS swayamsevaks in state machinery could not be checked? Why did the Nation adopt a complacent attitude towards the proliferation of communal virus in the police stations and other offices? Did most of us think this outdated ideology will die its natural death and does not deserve to be fought in a proactive way? We need to answer all these if we want to restore the democratic ethos and secular values in our political and social life.

Communalization of state apparatus has taken place due to multiple factors. The silent infiltration of the swayamsevaks has been intensified whenever the RSS progeny BJP comes to power. And in Gujarat the uninterrupted rule of BJP has totally communalized all the state institutions and even the civil society. The BJP-Bajarang Dal volunteers have a thick as thiefs liaison with police. This is supplanted by the role of media, which has been doing this persistently, and in this language medias role is very dangerous. During Mumbai riots one could see that for most of the police constables and other police officials the Saamana, a Shiv Sena newspaper is the gospel truth, it is the one, which shapes their opinion. And surely different versions of this communal rag must be circulating in all the parts of the country putting the fuel to the communal fire. We need to take stock of all this if we are serious in combating these lethal bacteria, which has entered our body politic.

What needs to be done to stem the rot, the polity is seriously ill. A serious effort and careful nurturing of values is more than called for to promote the plural democracy which celebrates differences as what matters at political level is not ones religion but ones citizenship, which is supreme and non-negotiable.

( *)(The writer works for EKTA, Committee for Communal Amity, Mumbai)





http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/news/articles/ram-may2.htm

I am Ashamed and I Apologize Savior or Devourer

BJP ruled Gujarat States Naked Glory

By Ram Puniyani ( *)

In the worst ever communal flare up Gujarat has lost over 2000 of its citizens, over 3000 crores worth of social wealth, most of it belonging to Muslims, and has witnessed the decimation of religious places, Dargahs and Masjids. It is not nor for the first time that we have not seen state playing partisan role before but here the matters are qualitatively different. The demand that state administration should be transparent has been fulfilled in the wrong direction, the participation, compliance and encouragement of state personnel in supporting the rioters was transparent and no alibis were used in breaking the laws, in twisting the meanings of the clauses as the state apparatus was a mighty tool in the hands of the pogrom conductors coming from the stable of Sangh Parivar.



To begin with one of the civil servants, Harsh Mander was so aghast with the role of his peers and colleagues from the administrative services that he could not overcome his disgust and resigned from the administrative servive. Then Super Cop Julio Reibero was equally shamed by his colleagues in the Khakis who were supposed to be manning the riot control but in fact it was difficult to distinguish the rioters from the ones who are supposed to control the riots. One also recalls many a ministers operating from the police control rooms and directing the anti-minority operations. Most of the human rights reports like Human Rights watch, stated that State officials of Gujarat, were directly involved in the killings of hundreds of Muslims since February 27 and are now engineering a massive cover-up of the state`s role in the violence. One of the researchers from South Asia watch pointed out that what happened in Gujarat was not a spontaneous uprising, it was a carefully orchestrated attack against Muslims. And that the attacks were planned in advance and organized with extensive participation of the police and state government officials.

The 75-page report from the Human Rights watch documents some of the attacks against the Muslims and concludes that the police were directly implicated in nearly all the attacks against Muslims. The standard response was `We have no orders to save you`: While in some cases they were passive observers in other instances the police officials led the charge of murderous mobs, aiming and firing at Muslims who got in the way. At times under the pretext of offering assistance, some police officers led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. And the phone calls made to the police and other support agencies failed to get the necessary assistance.

The acme of the degeneration of the duties of the state has been reached. When Hitler was on rampage against the Jews, other weaker sections of society, and against those who were opposed to his policies it was state, which implemented the programme of annihilation of the Jews and other. Probably the hairs breadth difference still lies between what we witnessed in Gujarat and what happened in Hitlers Germany. Here though the Sangh Parivar is controlling the state apparatus it itself is not the state apparatus. The trajectory of communal violence has come a long way since they first began in the last decade of 19th Century. These riots provoked by the communal politics (Muslim and Hindu both), came up in response to the rise of Secular Indian National Congress (INC). British had a two-pronged strategy as far as the communal politics was concerned. At the political level they did promote the communal outfits of Muslims and Hindus both, to pursue their policy of Divide and Rule. At the level of communal violence they were fairly neutral. After independence before seeing the role of state in Communal violence as such we must remember that due to the Partition tragedy most of the Muslim communal elements had left for Pakistan and Muslim Leagues impact became very weak. Right since the beginning the Hindu Communalists, in addition to having their own outfits (Hindu Mahasabha and RSS) had also infiltrated in the INC. Also the trained swayamsevaks of RSS started entering all the wings of state machinery right from the beginning. It is not only that Ayodhya district magistrate Nayyar was alone in helping RSS in making a dispute of Babri Mosque. such characters were in all the walks of administrative machinery, media and the armed forces.

In most of the riots, which have pained us since the first Jabalpur riot of 1962, one sees a common pattern. While the bureaucracy soft peddles the offence of wings of RSS police plays the partisan role. While the administrative machine is sympathetic, to the Hindu sentiments (read Hindu Communal politics), the communalization of police has been blatant. There are instances (Meerut-Malyan, 1987) where the Provincial Armed Constabulary lined up around 300 Muslims besides the canal and shot them so that the bodies gets disposed off in the canal. There are instances (Bhagalpur 1989) where the police along with the rioters killed 180 Muslims, buried them in a paddy field on which cauliflower was grown. Most of the inquiry commission reports have shown the partisan role of police in the riots. The Shrikrishna Commission also indicted the police especially its Addl. Commission R.D. Tyagi for his shooting of the innocents in the Suleman Bakery.

One also recalls the communal virus seeping in the various state sponsored institutions, right under the nose of the Government which is supposed to be protector of Secular values as per the constitution. After the demolition of Babri Mosque, students of Lal bahadur Shastri Academy, the future administrators etc. celebrated the event with unusual gusto.

So the rot is set all around. And its qualitative transformation in the Gujarat is a dangerous portent for the values, which emerged from the Indian Freedom struggle and got enshrined in the India Constitution. Where did the things go wrong? Why the infiltration of RSS swayamsevaks in state machinery could not be checked? Why did the Nation adopt a complacent attitude towards the proliferation of communal virus in the police stations and other offices? Did most of us think this outdated ideology will die its natural death and does not deserve to be fought in a proactive way? We need to answer all these if we want to restore the democratic ethos and secular values in our political and social life.

Communalization of state apparatus has taken place due to multiple factors. The silent infiltration of the swayamsevaks has been intensified whenever the RSS progeny BJP comes to power. And in Gujarat the uninterrupted rule of BJP has totally communalized all the state institutions and even the civil society. The BJP-Bajarang Dal volunteers have a thick as thiefs liaison with police. This is supplanted by the role of media, which has been doing this persistently, and in this language medias role is very dangerous. During Mumbai riots one could see that for most of the police constables and other police officials the Saamana, a Shiv Sena newspaper is the gospel truth, it is the one, which shapes their opinion. And surely different versions of this communal rag must be circulating in all the parts of the country putting the fuel to the communal fire. We need to take stock of all this if we are serious in combating these lethal bacteria, which has entered our body politic.

What needs to be done to stem the rot, the polity is seriously ill. A serious effort and careful nurturing of values is more than called for to promote the plural democracy which celebrates differences as what matters at political level is not ones religion but ones citizenship, which is supreme and non-negotiable.

( *)(The writer works for EKTA, Committee for Communal Amity, Mumbai)





http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/news/articles/ram-may2.htm

I am Ashamed and I Apologize Letter from Ahmedabad

The contradictions of modern Gujarat

Writing this letter takes me back to when I first came to Ahmedabad five years ago and fell in love with the city. Gujarat, the fourth most urbanised and second most industrialised state of India, contributes 6.6 percent of national production and 11 percent of the national industrial output. The average quality of life in the villages of Gujarat is much better than what I had experienced in the tribal belt of Bihar in eastern India, where I had worked earlier. I was told that the mercantile Gujarati community assimilates outsiders like water absorbs sugar. In less than a year, I too was assimilated and acquired the true Gujarati spirit.

Trouble, however, was on its way. In 1999, the monsoon failed for two consecutive years and many parts of Gujarat suffered acute drought. Kutch, Saurastra and north Gujarat faced severe shortages of drinking and irrigation water. Government and voluntary agencies reached out to the people in distress and helped them emerge from the crisis. But there was more in store. In the cold winter of January 2001, a devastating earthquake killed thousands of people and left many more homeless. Once again, voluntary agencies and government assistance poured in to help people in distress. The Gujarati spirit survived.

The question now, however, is whether Gujarat will survive the present crisis – of division of the people along communal lines. This is a crisis that has divided society so deeply that one newspaper headline said that the only person who could feel safe in a beard is Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat. Gujarat is not an isolated event in the cyclical history of violence that has gripped South Asia and the world in different forms. Whether it is ethnic violence in Sri Lanka, fundamentalism and its fallout in Pakistan, the assault on minorities in Bangladesh or the Maoist insurgency in Nepal – violence seems to be the order of the day. However, what is most surprising about Gujarat is the changing perception of violence and its acceptance by Gujaratis. How can a predominantly vegetarian community that espoused the values of non-violence values and nurtured both Jainism and Gandhism for years justify killings on the grounds of religion? How could a society in which killing animals and non-vegetarianism are seen as dreadful acts even today tolerate such extrodinary brutality? Does only lack of monsoon showers or the rumble of seismic tremors arouse compassion for people in need? Let me point out some of the contradictions of modern Gujarat that exist side by side.

The Godhra incident was first reported on one of the 24-hour TV news channels in the mid-morning of 27 February 2002. The news initially came in bits and pieces, and even till evening one could not gauge the gravity of the situation from television. However, that evening I visited the market on CG Road in Ahmedabad and could sense that something was appallingly wrong. Gujarat is known for its peaceful nightlife and it is common to see women and men on the road even at midnight. But on that particular evening the streets were deserted. The shops were closed and there was a perceptible tension in the air. Later I learnt that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had announced a Gujarat Bandh for 28 February.

At that moment, I could forsee what was going to unfold in the coming days. What followed from 28 February onwards is a nightmare without respite. The televised ‘riots’ showed the ugly face of Gujarat to the world – attacks on innocent lives and property and the rest of the rampage of the rioting mob. Today, thousands of people are still living in relief camps in major urban and rural clusters after their houses were burnt and their basic means of livelihood destroyed, leaving them at the mercy of others.

What makes the recent riots different from Gujarat’s earlier disturbances is the participation of dalits, adivasis and middle and upper-middle class Hindus in the riots. Much of this can be accounted for by the history, sociology and realpolitik of Gujarat today. The partial success of industrialisation in many areas of Gujarat created pockets of development, the fruits of which are visible in Gujarat’s golden corridor stretching between Mumbai and Mehsana. The bulk of this land falls in the agriculturally and industrially developed northern and central parts of the state that are under the communal cloud today. The KHAM (khatriya, harijan, adivasi and Muslim combine) politics of Gujarat, a legacy of the Congress regime, partly transferred power from the erstwhile Brahmin-Baniya-Patel combine to the more prosperous strata of lower castes and adivasis. This transfer was not without its problems, as the riots that rocked Gujarat in 1981 and 1985 demonstrated. However, politicians took note of this division of Hindus along caste lines and crafted a common Hindutva strategy to unite the majority community against Muslims. The dalit identity gave way, in the face of urbanisation and sanskritisation in Gujarat, making the state a breeding ground for communal hatred. The loss of identity assisted this assimilation process by building up an aversion to Muslims. The post-Babri Masjid riots in 1992 accelerated this process and changed the social geography of urban Gujarat, creating increasingly sharp distinctions along communal lines.

After 1990, India underwent globalisation and experienced dramatic increases in middle class incomes, primarily fuelled by the industrial and financial sectors. The Fifth Pay Commission hiked government salaries, creating the necessary surplus liquidity for the market to expand. Places like CG Road underwent a remarkable transformation, with large departmental stores and neon lights. In the last three years alone, four multiplex theatres have come up in Ahmedabad screening new Hindi and English movies. However, these new up-market amenities are the exclusive priviledge of the affluent. The general public’s access is regulated in various ways, including economic restrictions. A cinema ticket that costs more than INR 100 is beyond the reach for the majority of Gujaratis. Lower-middle and middle class citizens can only gave in envy, unable to enter these islands of sparkling capitalism. The recent riots included televised images of people from the middle and lower-middle classes looting these stores, bridging the yawning gap between the aspiration and the reality. The phenomenon is important and cries for sociological analysis.

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