Gautam Rishi's

Amrinder Singh is set to regain Punjab

2012-01-24T23:26:00.000-08:00

India Today ORG opinion poll

By Mail Today Reporter
Punjab is set to repeat history by voting out the incumbent government in the upcoming polls.
Projections by the INDIA TODAY ORG opinion poll, conducted in the first week of January, show the Congress is heading for a comfortable majority by securing 69 seats in the 117-member House.
Fifty-nine is the half-way mark in the Punjab assembly. Led from the front by an aggressive former CM Captain Amarinder Singh, the Congress is expected to add two per cent to its vote share that results in a gain of 25 additional seats to its current tally of 44.
The ruling Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP (SAD-BJP) combine faces the prospect of seven per cent swing away from the alliance.
This, the poll indicates, could result in a drop of as many as 27 seats from its current tally of 67. The alliance will thus be arrested at 40, 19 short of the half-way mark.
Significantly, the Congress is not the only beneficiary of the seven per cent vote swing away from the SAD-BJP combine.
While the state's main opposition party is attracting only two of the seven per cent erosion in the ruling alliance, it seems the 'others' in the fray have more to gain in terms of vote percentage.
However, the Congress remains the main beneficiary in terms of seats, going well past the half-way mark by a gain of only two per cent.
The main factors contributing to the SAD-BJP alliance's decline is not just the traditional anti-incumbency factor, which remains evident in 61 per cent of the respondents polled in the survey rating the ruling alliance's performance as 'average' or 'poor'.
Adding to anti-incumbency, a constant in Punjab politics, are political factors such as a split in the Akali votes by the departure of Manpreet Singh Badal and a visible popular discomfort with the prospect of current CM Parkash Singh Badal's son Sukhbir as CM.
Only 14.3 per cent of the voters surveyed favour Sukhbir as CM, while 28.6 per cent still want his father back in the saddle. But Amarinder is the most popular choice for CM, with 32 per cent voters favouring his candidature.
Forty-four per cent believe only the Congress can best serve Punjabi interests. The Captain, however, has no reason to be complacent as his party is encumbered because of the negative impulses towards the central government and the scams that have hit the UPA in the past one year.
There is resentment against the UPA, perceived as it is as either unwilling or too incompetent to tackle corruption. Anna Hazare's campaign has just added to the Congress's woes.
Manpreet is the untested weapon expected to damage the Akalis in their stronghold in southwestern Punjab, the region popularly referred to as Malwa.
The survey shows Manpreet's People's Party of Punjab has contributed to the erosion of SAD's base in its traditional pocketborough.
In the eventual analysis of poll projections, the Congress seems to have a clear advantage despite internal fights. The Captain, it appears, is all set to be honoured by the voters once again - only the second CM to achieve such a feat after Pratap Singh Kairon.

INDIA TODAY-ORG OPINION POLL: THE METHODOLOGY
The INDIA TODAY-ORG opinion poll was conducted in 20 randomly selected representative assembly constituencies across Punjab.
A total of 4,012 voters were interviewed by means of a structured questionnaire. The sample was proportionately allocated to urban and rural areas.
Similarly, a quota size was fixed to obtain a suitable proportion of SC voters. The survey was carried out between January 3 and 10.
The findings are subject to a margin of error of 3 per cent. The projection of votes and seats was done by measuring the shift in votes for each party/alliance (by eliciting answers on voting intention and recording how the same voters voted the last time) and extrapolating this shift onto the actual votes polled in the last election.

Congmen project Preneet as 'next CM'

By VIKAS KAHOL
A section of Congress leaders in Punjab are projecting Preneet Kaur, the MoS for external affairs and wife of PPCC chief Amarinder Singh, as the CM candidate.
With party chief Sonia Gandhi campaigning in the state, some leaders expect her to name the CM nominee and allay 'speculation' that Preneet would be given the top post if the Congress won the assembly poll.
Another group wants Sonia to declare Amarinder as the the next CM and strengthen his hands.
Several Congressmen call Amarinder the party’s lucky mascot, under whose leadership the party managed to win the 2002 elections.
Preneet, on her part, is not contesting the polls but her son, Raninder, is a Congress nominee from the Samana constituency.
A faction in the party is speculating that Raninder would vacate the seat (if he won) to pave the way for his mother’s active entry into state politics.
But Preneet and Raninder dismissed all such talk. 'I am contesting the elections under the leadership of my father Amarinder. I pledge to serve the people of the constituency, if I win,' Raninder said.
Some others in the Congress claimed that it was not the party’s tradition to announce the CM nominee’s name before the elections.
The assertion was countered by Amarinder’s loyalists. 'In several states, including Haryana and New Delhi, the Congress had declared the CM candidate before the elections.'
According to former CM and senior party leader Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, Sonia will not declare the CM candidate for Punjab.
'The AICC president can entrust the responsibility of leading the state to anyone within the party. This is also the party’s tradition,' she said.
Reacting to the speculation that a segment of the party was projecting Preneet as the 'next CM' and thereby causing confusion within the Congress, Bhattal said everyone in the political arena aspired to become CM.
'But it is Sonia Gandhi’s final call,' she said.

Sonia Gandhi accuses Punjab government of neglecting poor

By VIKAS KAHOL
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi kickstarted her poll campaign in Punjab’s Doaba belt on Thursday by lashing out at the ruling SAD-BJP alliance.
At a rally in Kapurthala, she alleged that the state did not allow the welfare schemes launched by the UPA to reach the poor. 'In this government, those in the corridors of power were benefited. The poor were pushed to the margins,' Sonia said.
Calling the SAD-BJP government as 'the biggest block in the development of Punjab', she claimed: 'Whatever little is happening here is being done with the funds sent by the UPA.'
Sonia, who was forced to cancel her scheduled visit to Moga in the Malwa region because of bad weather, added: 'Of the Rs5,000 crore earmarked for the NREGA scheme in Punjab, this state government could spend only Rs526 crore. This is a matter of shame for those running the government.'
Attempting to strike a chord with the electorate, she started her rally by invoking the name of the first Sikh guru, Nanak Dev, and said she bowed to the sacredness and holiness of the land.
Sonia claimed the Congress was not contesting elections to gain power.
'Our fight is not for power but for an ideology which underlines (the need) to work for the poor and bring the state in a progressive mode,' she said.
She also alleged that the SAD-BJP alliance committed atrocities on women, did not protect the interests of farmers, was involved in the PDS scam and was in debt.
'The government in the state even failed to disburse salaries to its employees... How do they claim a government exists here? There is no government worth its name in Punjab,' the Congress president said.
Quoting the statistics of the last five years, she said the number of poor had increased manifold in the state.
According to Sonia, who noted that Punjab had made rapid progress under the Congress’s leadership, PM Manmohan Singh was eager to set up a refinery in the state.

With Gaddafi gone, who will run the new Libya?

2011-10-22T00:29:00.000-07:00

In their fight to topple Gaddafi, Libya’s rebels were united in a common cause, but with his death the revolution enters a defining stage.

We could see children playing in the streets as William Hague’s heavily protected six-vehicle convoy hurtled through central Tripoli for a meeting with Mustafa Jalil, chairman of Libya’s National Transitional Council. But the air of normality on show in Tripoli earlier this week was at least partly deceptive. For the past month, Libya has been in limbo. None of the really big issues could be resolved until Sirte fell, and Gaddafi was killed or captured.

Now, at last, “national liberation” can be declared, and a transitional government formed. But many have been dreading this moment, because they see it as the moment of truth. Consider this: all recent Western interventions, from Afghanistan to Iraq, started suspiciously well. Regime change was the easy bit. Only afterwards did trouble start – and this may yet prove to be the case in Libya.

The militiamen who have been fighting in Sirte will be drifting back to Tripoli. There they will come into contact with the heavily armed militias that already control the streets. These soldiers, many of whom were shopkeepers or unemployed before the revolution, do not represent anything like a unified army. Berbers from the western mountains control Tripoli’s central square, while the port is dominated by Misratan rebels, the same force that is claiming the credit for killing Gaddafi. Yet another group of rebels control the airport.

Heavily armed and intoxicated by their famous victory, all these militias – who have already marked out their own territories – represent different regions and in some cases rival ideologies. Already, street fights are breaking out spontaneously in Tripoli, and there is a real danger that as time passes, these encounters could turn into battles.

Each of these rebel bands is heavily armed, proud of its new status, and confident that it represents the real power in post-Gaddafi Libya. Their attitude to chairman Jalil, the scrupulous and well-educated former judge who impressed William Hague in an hour-long meeting last Monday, can border on the contemptuous. I am told by reliable sources that some of the rebels have already made it known that they will not serve under him for long.

At stake is the Gaddafi legacy – above all, more than £100 billion in the Libyan sovereign wealth fund treated for so long as a private bank account by Saif Gaddafi, who was courted and wooed by Western bankers and politicians for a slice of the action. Who will control that money now? Who will take over the luxurious urban and rural retreats that were lived in by members of the extended Gaddafi family? Who will run the state monopolies and enjoy the lucrative commission payments for government contracts? Who will form the new political elite?

These questions could be safely left unresolved while the liberation war was being fought and the biggest militia leaders were away at the front. The rebels were united by a common cause – the destruction of the most notorious and brutal Arab leader since Saddam Hussein. That will now change. The NTC has long promised that the fall of Sirte – the last seaport to remain loyal to Gaddafi – would mark the moment when the revolution would be placed on a formal footing and a transitional government declared.

According to Jalil’s schedule, this government will prepare the way for elections in eight months’ time. It looks promising on paper, but everything may yet turn out far more complex in practice. The problems facing the new administration are massive. Gaddafi’s military barracks have been emptied of their weapons, which are, as a result, available on the black market at rock bottom prices – the price of a Kalashnikov has plunged from $4,000 to $800 over the last few months.

The new army chief, Suleiman Mahmoud, formerly Gaddafi’s commander in the Tobruk region, is concerned about the proliferation of weapons on the streets, and is studying ways of stripping the militias of their guns. One plan is to buy back the weapons, a scheme that failed in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 – the Afghan warriors pocketed the money and bought cheaper rifles or machine guns on the black market.

Another plan is to provide grants for militiamen to return to civilian life and start new businesses. Some of the rebels can certainly be absorbed into a new national army. But all of this is very difficult. Worryingly, Mahmoud enjoys little or none of the popular legitimacy of the militia commanders.

The problem is not just confined to Libya. Already the armaments stockpiled by Gaddafi are pouring into neighbouring countries through Libya’s porous and unpoliced borders, a potent menace in a region already destabilised by popular revolutions and the rise of al-Qaeda through the Maghreb.

The biggest nightmare, however, concerns Gaddafi’s anti-aircraft missiles. The late Libyan leader is believed to have stockpiled some 20,000 of these so-called Man Portable Air Defence Systems, known colloquially as Manpads. These formed a burning subject for discussion between Mr Hague and chairman Jalil – and no wonder. Each of these weapons, which can fit into a car boot, can down a commercial airliner. Indeed, missiles like these have been used in attacks on some 40 aircraft over the past four decades, causing more than 800 deaths.

Already, US security sources are warning that some have left the country, to be put to lethal use elsewhere. I have been told that barely 600 are so far accounted for, leaving more than 19,000 at large. There are fears that they could end up being used in the Middle East, perhaps even in London.

So it is essential that Gaddafi’s forces are brought into the new transitional government. If the weapon-rich tribes loyal to Gaddafi are excluded or victimised, they could continue guerrilla operations. They may well form lethal coalitions of convenience with the terrorist groups already operating in the area, particularly in the vast southern Libyan desert.

The NTC leaders are aware of this and are determined to embrace all but the most murderous Gaddafi supporters. Yet at ground level, the signs are troubling indeed, with reports of a fresh wave of reprisal killings over the past few days.

So the killing of Gaddafi has not brought the Libyan revolution to an end. In the words of one Tripoli-based Western diplomat: “The question now is: who owns the revolution?” Britain and France have our own narrative. We believe and hope that Gaddafi’s overthrow is an essential moment in the advance of democracy and freedom, not just in Libya but throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

This vision, shared by many Libyans who simply want security and the rule of law, is possible. With its immense oil wealth, Libya has every prospect of becoming a secure, well-ordered, prosperous Mediterranean state.

But there are other agendas. The militias are certain to demand, as a reward for their role in the overthrow of Gaddafi, a share in Libyan wealth and power. Then there are the foreign actors whose motives remain sinister or mysterious. China is seeking contracts from the new government and access to Libyan mineral resources – and is unscrupulous about how it achieves them. Most of all, the motives of the Qataris, who funded and supplied weapons to the rebels in the early days of the liberation struggle, remain troubling. What will they ask for? Will they throw their weight behind the strong Islamic elements among the rebels, who will also be disappointed if they do not play a strong role in the new Libyan state?

There was never any doubt, once Nato entered the fray, that Gaddafi would at some stage be defeated. The great question was what would happen once he went. Revolutions notoriously devour their own – and we have now entered the defining stage. Elections are scheduled for the early summer of next year. If they do indeed take place peacefully and fairly, then David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will be able to claim, tentatively, that their joint Libyan intervention has been a true success.

Soil to soul

2011-10-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

Son of the soil Jagjit Singh not only became a ghazal legend but also did a lot for other genres of music

S. D. Sharma

Bade shauq se sunn raha tha zamana, hum hi so gaye dastan kehte kehte...

With five decades of musical excellence, Jagjit Singh, the maestro who enraptured the world with his incredible contribution to film and ghazal singing, Punjabi folk, devotional, and popular music, would have regaled music lovers for more times to come but destiny willed otherwise.

Very few maestros have elicited the love and affection of music lovers the world over as Jagjit Singh, who continued to be in the limelight since his childhood days at Sriganganagar.

Jagjit Singh was born in Sriganganagar, Rajasthan. His father, Amar Singh Dhiman, a government employee, was a native of Dalla Behrampur in Punjab, and his mother, Bachchan Kaur, hailed from Ottallan village, Samrala. Out of his four sisters, only Inderjit Kaur is alive, while his elder brother Jaswant Singh and younger brother Kartar Singh are settled in Jaipur and Delhi, respectively.

He studied at Khalsa High School and later at Khalsa College, Ganganagar, topping in inter-science in college before joining DAV College, Jalandhar.

His father had engaged Pandit Shagun Chand Joshi and Ustad Jamal Khan for grooming Jagjit, but his music skills blossomed during his formative years at DAV, Jalandhar, and later at Kurukshetra University. He moved to Bollywood in 1965 and the rest is history.

"Some persons are born to lead and so was Jagjit, affectionately called Jeeti in our family," says his elder brother Jaswant Singh (75). "As a school student, Jagjit was crowned Bul Bul-e-Rajashan and he maintained his tradition of excellence in music till the end," adds Jaswant.

"Ours is a God-fearing family. Once our Satguru visited us and observed that his real name, Jagmohan, did not match his pratibhashali persona and renamed him Jagjit Singh, saying he was bound to win the world," recalls Jaswant, a former senior education officer.

Jagjit Singh was a complete artiste with a perfect understanding of the deepest emotions inherent in poetry, song or blank verse and believed that poetry lay at the heart of a ghazal, a film song or any other composition. "Jagjit Singh was completely involved in the production of his over 50 albums and film songs, and he left nothing to chance," says Nida Fazli, a popular film lyricist. "The film industry has lost a gem of a person and the loss is certainly irreparable."

Unable to come to terms with the tragedy, Hans Raj Hans, the rajgayak of Punjab, who was with Chitra at Lilavati Hospital a little before Jagjit Singh’s demise, termed it as "a great loss." Recalling his close association with the maestro while being a judge for reality show Mohe Rang Lay on Pragya channel for three months and other projects, he describes him as an institution in himself. "During the past 50 years, I have never come across a maestro with such a profound depth of knowledge of music, a soulful voice with khairaj so prominent. I am indebted to the babbar sher of Punjab, who had taken music, particularly the ghazal, to such a spectacular level on the world stage. Such pioneers of music are born once in a span of centuries," feels Hans, a prominent sufi, folk and playback singer.

A foremost disciple of Jagjit Singh and eminent ghazal singer, Vinod Sehgal, who spent 24 years with his guru, is a custodian of his legacy. A simple person from Ambala, Vinod could sing in 58 films and serials under the blessed tutelage of Jagjit Singh and looked upon him as his godfather. Says Vinod, "I was the only disciple who shared the stage with Jagjitji and Chitraji during the tours in the UK, the USA and other countries. Guruji immortalised my voice in serials like Mirza Ghalib, Kahkashan, Ravan and others," says the shattered disciple.

Equally admiring of the gayaki and human values of the legendary Jagjit Singh, Dolly Guleria, acclaimed folk and ghazal singer, remembers their family association with him and enjoying of his ghazal concerts at Delhi. "He was very disciplined and serious, but humorous during leisure time. He always addressed me as a ‘moti with bareek voice," shares Dolly. He did a lot for promoting saaf-suthri Punjabi gayaki, she adds.

"Jagjit Singh always rued the fact that while the musical arts in Punjab had been at the top, with legends like Bade Gulam Ali Khan, K. L. Saigal and others reigning supreme, somehow the film industry in Punjab had not come of age," recalls Neena Tiwana, a former Punjabi actress and wife of thespian Harpal Tiwana. Jagjit had scored music for her two hit films Laung da Lishakara and Deeva Bale Saari Raat, and certain plays. "A founder trustee of the Harpal Tiwana Foundation, Jagjit Singh was to perform on October 13 at the opening ceremony of the Rs 14.3-crore foundation a Patiala," says Neena with a tinge of sadness.

His childhood friend and close family associate, Ashok Bhalla, a Ludhiana businessman, who was witness to the rise of the maestro from a mediocre background, remembers that Jagjit fought the adversities of life with courage and conviction. Recalling the sudden death of his only son Vivek on July 28, 1994, he says, "Jagjit accepted it as the will of WaheGuru and continued to serve humanity with his melody, leanings towards devotional music, while Chitra chose to abandon it. Despite attaining celebrity status Jagjit remained the same old guy for us, cracking jokes and sharing our joys and sorrows alike."

The Sangeet Natak Akademi chairperson and an old associate of Jagjit Singh, Kamal Tewari, prominent vocalist and flautist Ravinder Singh, who had performed with him on many occasions, call it an "irreparable loss." "The maestro has left behind an eternal treasure of music to be relished for centuries to come," they feel.

Pandit Yashpaul, an Agra gharana stalwart, and Vijay Vashisht of All India Radio were his old associates from DAV College, Jalandhar.

Caught on Camera

2011-04-16T01:22:00.000-07:00

'84 Witness pressurised to save Sajjan Kumar
Senior Congress Leader HS Hanspal caught on camera mediating on behalf of SajjanFor more than 26 years, the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots have been fighting a long and lonely battle for justice. Justice is not only being delayed but virtually denied by powerful Congress leaders - ironically even by those whose job is to protect the interests of the minorities.
Former member of Parliament Sajjan Kumar has been accused of instigating mobs to kill innocent Sikhs in 1984 in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination. However, Harinder Baweja, Editor, investigations, has exposed the ugly, uncomfortable truth about him.
A special investigation by Headlines Today has found that Nirpreet Kaur, a key witness against Sajjan Kumar, was being pressurised by H.S. Hanspal, a senior member of the Minorities Commission.
Hanspal, a prominent Congressman, who was the chief whip for the party in the Rajya Sabha in the early 80s, can be seen, sitting in his office, speaking to Nirpreet Kaur, who saw Sajjan Kumar come to Raj Nagar locality in Delhi Cantt during the riots and say, "Ek bhi sardar zinda nahi bachna chaheye (Not a single sardar should remain alive)."
In the meeting in his office, he tells Nirpreet to sit down "aamne saamne (face-to-face)" with the person she was to soon testify against. Headlines Today accompanied Nirpreet to Hanspal's office. The Minorities Commission member was a bit wary of a stranger but that doesn't stop him from trying to persuade Nirpreet to have a meeting with Sajjan Kumar.

Hanspal (in Punjabi): Compensation wali gal karni heh yaan doosri gal karni heh (You want to talk about compensation or the other thing?)
Nirpreet: Tussi unha nu puchho, ko o ki chande neh (You ask him (Sajjan Kumar) what he wants.
A little later...
Hanspal (gesturing towards the Headlines Today reporter): Can we talk for two minutes?
koi nahi, enna nu patta hai sab kuchh kyon ki mein kuchh witness toh chuppana nahi chandi jo vi hoyega enha de samne hoyega. (Never mind, he knows everything because I don't want to hide anything from the witnesses).
A little later...
Nirpreet: Dekho, marya taan hai unha ne. Uthe aa ke meri gal khadi ho jaandi heh. Chalo, thwade kehan the, mein case vapas vi ley laine haan, par o kuchh taan karan, public apology. Kuchh mehsoos taan karan (See, he has murdered.. that is where I get stuck. Even if I withdraw the case because you are telling me to, he should also do something, some public apology. He should also feel that he has done a wrong).
Hanspal: Amne saamne baith ke gal kar lo (Sit in front of each other and talk).
Nirpreet: O court vich aande ne, hasde khedde, mera haur man sarda heh. Unha nu bilkul vi sharma nahi heh ki assi enna vada kam keet heh. (He (Sajjan) comes to court smiling and it makes me feel worse. He has no shame; no realization that he has done such a big crime.
Hanspal: Baith ke gal karan ge.
Hanspal is not speaking about compensation, as his job profile demands. He continues to exert pressure on Nirpreet. He wants her to sit face-to-face with Sajjan Kumar and he keeps telling her, not once but three times, to call Ahulwalia, a common friend.
Hanspal: Should I call Ahluwalia?
Nirpreet: Hearings are on in the court. I'll call him.
Hanspal is keen on an early meeting and once again says he could call Ahluwalia.
Nirpreet: Can you give me his number?
Hanspal: Shall I call Ahluwalia? I have his number.
Nirpreet: Yes please call.
Hanspal: Tussi mainu shaam nu das deyo (Let me know by the evening). Kal ya parso beh jao (Sit down tomorrow or the day after).
Nirpreet has not just given graphic details of how her father, Nirmal Singh, was killed, but has now also testified in court on what exactly happened that morning in 1984, when Sajjan Kumar came to the Raj Bagh locality, where she stayed with her parents.
Nirpreet Kaur says, "The mob caught hold of my father. Balwan Khokhar and Mahendra Yadav were there. They sprinkled kerosene over him and started looking for a match box and a policeman told them, 'doob maro, tum se ek sardar bhi nahi jalta' and then the policeman gave them a match box to set my father on fire. My father jumped into a nearby nullah to save himself, but the mob came back and Khokhar hit my father with a rod."
The next morning, on November 2, Nirpreet saw Congress leader Sajjan Kumar standing in a police jeep and addressing a mob. "I saw a mob and heard the noise of slogans. Our vehicle stopped there and I saw that in the police vehicle Sajjan Kumar was standing and was addressing the mob, saying 'Ek bhi sardar jinda nahi bachna chahiye, jo ghar sardaron ka bacha hai, use bhi jala do. In sardaron ko maron, inhone hamari maan ko mara heh, ye saanp ke bachche hain"
This is the testimony, Sajjan Kumar and his mediators wanted to stop. Nirpreet's startling claim is that she was offered as much as Rs three crore to turn hostile.
Headlines Today tried to contact senior Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, but he refused to comment.
Says Nirpreet, "I was offered Rs three crore to change my testimony. Hanspal kept telling me to not mention Sajjan Kumar's name."
Headlines Today Bureau

Sikh bodies seek action against Sajjan Kumar, Hanspal
Various Sikh bodies are demanding action against Congress leader Sajjan Kumar and Minorities Commission member H.S. Hanspal in the 1984 riots case in the wake of an expose. The action has been sought after Headlines Today had exposed how efforts were being made to influence a key witness to not name Sajjan Kumar in the anti-Sikh riots case.
The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee and the Akali Dal have both called for strong action against Hanspal, whom Headlines Today cameras caught trying to influence a 1984 riots witness.
While the SGPC has demanded that Hanspal be immediately removed, the Akali Dal has petitioned President Pratibha Patil demanding custodial detention of Sajjan Kumar and Congress leader Jagdish Tytler. It has also said all 1984 riot witnesses should be given protection.
Meanwhile, a large number of people from the Sikh community protested in front of Sajjan Kumar's residence on Friday.
A special investigation has found that Nirpreet Kaur, a key witness against Sajjan Kumar, was being pressurised by Hanspal.
Hanspal, a prominent Congressman, who was the chief whip for the party in the Rajya Sabha in the early 80s, can be seen, sitting in his office, speaking to Nirpreet Kaur, who saw Sajjan Kumar come to Raj Nagar locality in Delhi Cantt during the riots and say, "Ek bhi sardar zinda nahi bachna chahiye (Not a single sardar should remain alive)."
In the meeting in his office, he tells Nirpreet to sit down 'aamne saamne' (face-to-face) with the person she was to soon testify against. Headlines Today accompanied Nirpreet to Hanspal's office. The Minorities Commission member was a bit wary of a stranger but that doesn't stop him from trying to persuade Nirpreet to have a meeting with Sajjan Kumar.
Nirpreet had said, "I was offered Rs three crore to change my testimony. Hanspal kept telling me to not mention Sajjan Kumar's name."

Earthquake and tsunami 'Japan's worst crisis since second world war'

2011-03-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

Prime minister Naoto Kan speaks as Japanese struggle to avert nuclear disaster and police say death toll could top 10,000

Japan is facing its biggest crisis since the second world war, the prime minister Naoto Kan has said, as the country battled to avert a nuclear disaster after the devastasting earthquake and tsunami.
Police have warned that the death toll could rise to 10,000 in one prefecture alone and national broadcaster NHK reported that more than 1,100 people were now confirmed dead. Most are thought to have drowned.
Authorities were fighting to keep temperatures down in multiple reactors at two plants in Fukushima prefecture, warning that a partial meltdown was possible in one and that there was a risk of a second hydrogen explosion in another.
Neither would necessarily breach the reactor's containment vessel, and authorities played down the likelihood of a substantial release of radiation. As many as 190 people had already been exposed, a Japanese official told Reuters, with 22 confirmed to have suffered contamination.
"The earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear incident have been the biggest crisis Japan has encountered in the 65 years since the end of world war two," Kan told a news conference.
"We're under scrutiny on whether we, the Japanese people, can overcome this crisis."
Friday's 8.9 magnitude earthquake - the worst in Japan's recorded history and the fifth worst worldwide in the last century - caused a tsunami up to 10 metres high.
As aftershocks continued to shake the north-east region, the Japanese meteorological agency warned that there was a 70% possibility of a magnitude seven or greater tremor in the next three days.
There was some relief for the battered coast as the agency lifted the tsunami warning, although it said aftershocks could cause further waves.
Tokyo has doubled the number of troops in its rescue and relief team to 100,000, but damage to roads and bridges has hampered their efforts.
Survivors in the disaster zone huddled in public shelters for a third night in near freezing temperatures. About 300,000 people have been displaced or evacuated due to the tsunami and radiation fears.
At least 10,000 people were feared killed by the earthquake in Miyagi prefecture alone, its police chief told NHK. The broadcaster said 550 people were confirmed dead there, 335 in Iwate and 285 in Fukushima.
With phone services still down in many areas, survivors made their way to civic centres to check boards with names of others known to have survived and those who had died.
Etsuko Oyama, who was rescued by a neighbour after the wave swept her 400 metres from her home, struggled to hold back tears as she spoke to NHK.
"I grabbed my daughter's hand but I lost my grip when I was swept away by the debris and water," she said.
"I managed to survive but my daughter was washed away ... I hope she is still alive somewhere." There were welcome moments of celebration as survivors were reunited, but no good news was unalloyed by grief.
Japanese troops rescued a 60-year-old man found 10 miles out to sea on the roof of his home. But Hiromitsu Shinkawa said his wife had been swept away when the tsunami hit as they returned home to gather possessions after the quake.
International relief teams from countries including China, the US and the UK are arriving to help Japanese troops. Almost 70 countries have offered anything from sending nuclear experts and sniffer dog squads to shipping in food and blankets.
Donors included the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. "I know $50,000 is not a lot of money for a country like Japan, but it is a show of appreciation from the Kandahar people," mayor Ghulam Haidar Hamidi told Reuters.
News agency Kyodo reported that more than 20,000 buildings nationwide were either destroyed or badly damaged. Some 2 million households were without power, and 1.4 million without drinking water, Japan's ministry of health, labour and welfare said - although electricity was restored to some parts of Sendai city.
Power generation has fallen sharply due to the closure of nuclear plants and officials have ordered rolling three-hour blackouts across Tokyo and the surrounding area from tomorrow. Demand is substantially higher during the week than at weekends.
"We have to avoid at all costs a sudden power shortage whose scale could have devastating consequences for the economy and people's lives," Kan told a press conference.
NHK reported that the blackouts could last until the end of next month.
The nuclear crisis has prompted many to reassess the use of nuclear power in other parts of the world.
Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, said he had asked British regulators to study the Japanese situation to "learn any lessons" for UK power stations.

No politics, no crime, no liquor in this unique Punjab village

2011-02-16T05:38:00.000-08:00

Balwant Garg

FARIDKOT: In Punjab where the political rivalry at village level is at its pinnacle as most of people are divided between Akali-Congress camps, the use of alcohol and other drugs is raging in the rural areas and so is the crime graph-with high land disputes and other wrongs, Gajjan Singh Wala is a distinct and unique village in Faridkot district of Punjab. Rising above the political straitjackets, the residents of this village have a unique spirit of friendliness and this is reason that they never cast a vote to choose a sarpanch. The election of the sarpanch is always an amicable selection of a resident in the village for the post.

Not only the sarpanch election but the election for the members of cooperative societies in this village never seen any campaigning or voting but the members are elected cordially. Rather than calling it 'election', the residents of this village prefer to call it 'selection', an agreeable 'selection, so there was never a need for residents of this village to have an electoral contest for the sarpanch post but they agree on a amicable name, said Karamjit Kaur, the village sarpanch who herself was 'selected' for the post, three year back, without any electoral voting.

Not only this political amicability to its credit, this village is known as a no-crime land. The name of a resident of this village never finds any mention in any police station's record in the last three decades, as this is a crime free village. Last time it was in 1970s that there was a murder in this village and the accused man got life imprisonment. But this case was a big lesson for the residents of this village and their next generations, so now not even a tiff is heard about in this village, said Jaswinder Singh, a resident of this village.

In the last 30 years there is no criminal case against any resident of this village having about 375 residents. Even in civil disputes about the division of land or any other property disagreement, the resident of this village have no need to go to the legal courts but an agreeably settlement is reached in the village under the guidance of panchayat members and sarpanch, said Jaswinder Singh. Faridkot SSP, Surmeet Singh Randhawa said the image of Kothe Gajjan Singh Wala is very clean in police record and there was no crime reporting from this village in the last 30 years. With such an affable and agreeable atmosphere, 375 residents of this small village are endowed with a particular cherished thing in this region -there is no liquor vend in this village. The liquor consumption is most of the time restricted to the marriage parties or any other celebration functions, Sukhdev Singh, the husband of village sarpanch said.

This small village have a primary school and the education standard in this government school is known to be so good that even the students of the adjoining villages prefer to get enrollment here for quality teaching. With high literacy rate, about 85% residents are qualified and over one dozen youths of this village are settled in foreign countries, tells Jagdev Singh, a former sarpanch. Agriculture is the main occupation and most of the farmers prefer to do the menial farm job themselves with the migrant labour. In assembly or parliament elections, the Akali and Congress leaders visit this village to seek their votes. But rising above their political affiliation, the residents of Gajjan Singh Wala wholeheartedly welcome every party leader but when it is voting, is always as per their personal choice, said Sukhdev Singh.

Still No Country For Good Men

2011-01-06T23:30:00.000-08:00

The Binayak Sen story has been about sending out a message, not facts or justice. Tehelka Correspondent KUNAL MAJUMDER & ANIL MISHRA pick out the shocking holes in the case

ON 24 DECEMBER 2010, Dr Binayak Sen — a man who has now become a cause célèbre across the country — was sentenced to life imprisonment by a sessions court in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, for “conspiracy to commit sedition”. Sen had worked for 30 years with the tribal poor in the state both as a doctor and a human rights activist. According to the Chhattisgarh state, however, Sen is a dangerous Maoist leader who is a serious threat to national security.

There was a spontaneous surge of outrage in civil society and the media over this scandalous miscarriage of justice. But there was little that could be done. The State had timed itself well. It was a day before Christmas. The high court and Supreme Court were on vacation; most lawyers were away. It would be at least two weeks before Sen’s family could appeal. Enough time for the dread to sink in; the message to go out.

The case against Binayak Sen is so weak, a few days after the judgement, eminent lawyer Ram Jethmalani thundered that he would resign from the BJP if Sen was not released. But from the very beginning, the case has only been about sending out a message; not about facts or justice.

Three years ago, when many in the media were still sceptical about the rights and wrongs of Sen’s case and no one was ready to stand up for him, TEHELKA had done a cover story on him laying bare the fictitious case that had been concocted against the doctor (No Country For Good Men: The Doctor, the State, and a Sinister Case, 23 February 2008). Chhattisgarh Director General of Police (DGP) Vishwa Ranjan had admitted to TEHELKA then, “Left to myself, I would have kept Binayak under surveillance, not arrested him.”

On 27 December 2010, speaking to TEHELKA again after Sen was sentenced, he claims he was misquoted. “What I actually said was I would have kept Binayak under surveillance and nailed him with more concrete evidence.” Ranjan, who spent most of his career with the Intelligence Bureau is now the face of the Chhattisgarh government’s ‘war’ against Naxals.

But in the three years that elapsed between the two conversations, neither DGP Vishwa Ranjan nor the state’s prosecution team could come up with any clinching evidence. What they relied on instead was creating baseless paranoia. In its closing arguments, for instance, the prosecution argued that both Sen and his wife Ilina should be put away for life because, among other dangerous affiliations, they had links with the ISI. Their basis for saying this? An email from Ilina Sen to Walter Fernandes, director of ISI, which happens to be the Indian Social Institute in New Delhi!

This was not a stray gaffe. The whole prosecution case built against Sen is littered with such malevolent faux pax. In fact, the primary charge itself is ludicrous. On 19 December, during his closing arguments in court, special public prosecutor TC Pandya admitted that there is no direct evidence of conspiracy against Sen. But that did not stop him from having a thesis. This, in brief, is what it is. According to the prosecution, Binayak Sen, who is national vice-president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) (set up by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1976 during the Emergency) had met the jailed Naxal ideologue Narayan Sanyal 33 times in prison, between 26 May and 30 June 2006. During this time he had smuggled out seditious letters from Sanyal and passed them on to tendu leaf contractor Piyush Guha, who was supposedly acting as a courier for the Maoists. Three of these letters were supposedly seized when Piyush Guha was arrested on 6 May 2007. Based on this, Pandya argued that Sen was trying to establish an urban network of the banned extremist group, the CPI (Maoist).

However, none of this bears scrutiny. The three “seditious” letters are themselves ludicrous. They are addressed to a “Dear Mr P”, a “Friend V”, and a “Friend” and are unsigned. They could have been written by anybody and planted on Guha. In any case, their content is far from explosive. They complain about jail conditions, the onset of age and arthritis. They also congratulate P, V and Friend that the “ninth congress” has gone well and urge them blandly to expand “work” among the peasantry and urban centres. Sufficient basis to jail a doctor of peerless reputation for life? But that is not all. Even the jailers testified against the prosecution’s argument, saying there was no way Sen could have passed these letters on from Sanyal to Guha because their meetings were held under such close supervision.

There are other glaring discrepancies. After Sen was first arrested in 2007, the police had built such a miasma around him that he was denied bail twice both by the Chhattisgarh High Court and the Supreme Court. During the bail hearing in the Supreme Court, investigating officer BBS Rajpoot had claimed in his affidavit that Guha was arrested from Mahindra Hotel in Raipur, where he was meeting Sen. But when both witnesses from the hotel turned hostile, the prosecution suddenly changed its position. In the trial court, it claimed the police had arrested Guha on Station Road, near the Raipur railway station and that Mahindra Hotel had been a “typing error”! The court accepted this patently laughable assertion. The prosecution then introduced a new witness — Anil Kumar Singh, a clothes vendor — who they claimed was “passing by” when Guha was arrested on Station Road. Singh said he had “heard” Guha telling the police during his arrest on Station Road that Binayak Sen had passed the letters on to him. Even a novice would find that a thin assertion. (Singh’s address was listed vaguely as Noorani Chowk, Raja Talav — a little akin to saying someone lives in Dharavi, Mumbai. TEHELKA, however, tried to track Singh down in this locality but found no one who had heard of him.)

But that is the least of it. Three years ago, when DGP Vishwa Ranjan had spoken to TEHELKA, he had said confidently that since they had seized Sen’s computer CPU, they were sure to find a lot of evidence against him. The irony of his assertion seemed to have escaped him: Sen had already spent more than a year in jail by then and here was the DGP talking futuristically about the evidence that they would now surely find against Sen.

Despite all that delayed effort, this is the ‘key’ evidence that was marshalled against Sen: again, an unsigned typed letter allegedly written by the Maoists thanking Binayak Sen for his ‘service’, which the police claims to have seized from his house. However, unlike other items that were seized from Sen’s house during the search, this typed letter does not have either his or investigating office Rajpoot’s signature as proof that it was found in his house. “The judge simply accepted the police version. When we asked him to check the video footage of the seizure, he asked for a printout of the video!” recalls Ilina. This footage was shot with the permission of a District Magistrate when Sen’s house was searched by the police on 19 May 2007. Even the three letters to P, V and Friend allegedly seized from Guha do not bear his signature to prove it was taken from him, nor does Guha’s arrest memo mention the seized documents. However, DGP Vishwa Rajan claims, “If we had to plant evidence, we would have planted something more incriminating.”

But the ludicrous holes in the case go on endlessly. A postcard written by Ilina Sen addressing Kusumlata Kedia of the Gandhi Institute in Varanasi as ‘Comrade’ becomes evidence of Ilina’s Maoist ideology. “Comrade ussi ko kehte hai jo Maowadi hai (Only Maoists address each other as comrades),” argued special prosecutor Pandya. Investigating officer Rajpoot claimed to have seen a video of Sen meeting Naxalites inside a forest, but when questioned by the defence whether those Naxalites were armed and uniformed or just ordinary tribals, he could not give a clear answer.

Another police officer claimed Sen had participated in Maoist meetings in the jungle, but on cross-examination, conceded it could be hearsay. Deepak Choubey, son-in-law of Narayan Sanyal’s landlord in Raipur, testified that Sen had recommended Sanyal for the house. The defence claims this to be totally untrue. Its position is stengthened by the fact that Choubey claimed that Sanyal was arrested from Raipur in January 2006. However other police testimonies assert Sanyal was arrested in Bhadrachalam in Andhra Pradesh.

The prosecution had also claimed that Sen met Sanyal 33 times in less than 35 days, lending their meetings a kind of false urgency. However, Sen’s family claimed the meetings were spread over 18 months and each time Sen had filed an application to the jail authorities on the PUCL letterhead. The meetings took place in the jailer’s room, and instead of conversing in English or Bangla, they stuck to Hindi, so that every word could be understood by the supervising officer. Jail officials confirmed this.

Most crucially, back in 2007, when news had first started appearing in local papers that the police had declared “Naxal leader Binayak Sen” as absconding, far from running away or seeking anticipatory bail as his well-wishers had urged, Sen, who was visiting his mother in Kolkata, came racing back to Raipur. “There must be some misunderstanding,” he said. And driven by his idealistic belief in Indian democracy, his own good intention and years of public service, he went voluntarily to the police station to clear the air. They arrested him instead. The Chhattisgarh Police, therefore, did not arrest some dreaded combatant on the run, they arrested a citizen who had gone to them in good faith.

Despite all this, on 24 December 2010, at around 1 pm, Justice BP Verma pronounced Sen guilty of criminal conspiracy to commit sedition under Section 124(a) read with 20 (b) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In his 92- page judgement in Hindi, Verma declared Sen and Guha had aided and supported the Communist Party of India (Maoist) by carrying three letters written by Sanyal. The three were also convicted under Section 39(2) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, and Sections 8 (1), (2), (3) and (5) of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005, which charged them with supporting, aiding and abetting the activities of a banned organisation.

Justice Verma, who had replaced Justice BS Saluja midway into the trial and had only become a judge a year-and-half ago and is still on probation, announced: “The way that terrorists and Maoist organisations are killing state and Central paramilitary forces and innocent Adivasis and spreading fear, terror and disorder across the country and community implies that this court cannot be generous to the accused and give them the minimum sentence under law.”

Rather than justice, was the judge handing out deterrence?

“Two days before the verdict, the newspapers had screamed about the police bandobast being lined up for the judgement day,” Ilina told TEHELKA. “How did they know the verdict is going to be in their favour?” A week later, at a Delhi press conference, her disillusionment is even clearer. “My faith in the judiciary is weakening,” she said. “Sometimes I do think about walking into one of the embassies of a liberal democracy and asking for asylum.”

She might be wise to do that. The effort to nail Binayak Sen has included attempts to implicate the PUCL, of which he is the national vice-president. In 2004, when the Maoists had called a ban against voting, Ajay TG, a photographer-cum-filmmaker, had accompanied a fact-finding team of social activists that included Delhi University sociology professor Nandini Sundar and Binayak Sen, to south Bastar to assess the impact of this ban. A group of Maoists had accosted them and seized Ajay’s camera. Weeks later, a man visited Ajay at his home and apologised on behalf of the Maoists, saying they had mistakenly thought the team was from the government. However, they were willing to buy him a new camera if he could write down the make of his destroyed equipment. In all innocence, Ajay wrote a letter addressed to the Maoists asking his camera be replaced. In 2008, the police seized this letter during a raid on the house of Malti Rao, the wife of Gudsa Husendi, Maoist spokesperson. Ajay admitted to writing the letter explaining the circumstances under which he had done so. But he too was arrested for being a Naxalite. The police then claimed that Malti worked with Binayak and Ilina’s NGO Rupantar. Rupantar’s Malti, however, turned out to be a different person. (Speaking at a conference in Berkley in California in 2008, DGP Vishwa Ranjan admitted that arresting Ajay TG may have been a mistake. “It is possible he may not have been a Naxalite. There might have been some kind of technical error.”) Ajay is now out on bail.

Ram Jethmalani is not the only lawyer incensed by the judgement against Sen. At the press conference in Delhi on 3 January, Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan pointed out that in the Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar case (1962), the Supreme Court had ruled that provision 124(a) in the Indian Penal Code was a relic of a colonial, pre-Constitution era, and that it infringed on the individual’s right to freedom of speech and expression. “The Supreme Court had ruled that if, and only if, there is incitement to violence and public disorder, will the charge of sedition be said to be complete. The Raipur judge completely disregarded this important judgement in Dr Sen’s case,” Bhushan said.

He also questioned the very premise of the case. “The letters that Sen allegedly couriered, on which the charges against him were based, do not contain any conspiracy to commit crime or violence, but are routine letters written by somebody in prison. No acceptable, legally tenable evidence exists to back up this charge. Even if there is evidence, does it warrant life imprisonment?”

That is the key question. Why has the State been so adamant in making a lesson out of Binayak Sen? The answer lies outside the court.

BINAYAK SEN turned 61 on 4 January in jail. A gold medallist from the prestigious Christian Medical College in Vellore, he had moved to Chhattisgarh exactly 30 years earlier to work with Shankar Guha Niyogi, the legendary mine workers’ unionist. Sen helped set up the Shaheed Hospital at Dallirajhara, built with the workers’ own money. Later, he moved to the Mission Hospital in Tilda, and then, in 1990, joined his wife Ilina in Raipur to set up Rupantar, an NGO that has for 18 years trained village health workers and run mobile clinics in remote outposts.

As Dr Suranjan Bhattacharji, director, CMC Vellore, says, “Binayak walked the talk. He was an inspiration for generations of doctors. He reminded us that it takes many things — access, freedom, food security, shelter, equity and justice — to make a healthy society.” In 2004, the medical college honoured Sen with its prestigious Paul Harrison Award. The citation read, “Dr Binayak Sen has carried his dedication to truth and service to the very frontline of the battle. He has broken the mould, redefined the possible role of the doctor in a broken and unjust society, holding the cause much more precious than personal safety. CMC is proud to be associated with Binayak Sen.”

Even DGP Vishwa Ranjan calls Sen “a good doctor”. However, all of that changed in 2005 when the State launched its infamous Salwa Judum initiative — raising and arming a tribal civil militia to fight the Maoists, triggering a kind of civil war. Sen, whose work straddled both medicine and human rights, protested strongly against the excesses of the Salwa Judum and the State’s atrocities against the tribals. This earned him the State’s ire. Anyone who opposed the Salwa Judum was deemed a Maoist. You were either with Us or with Them. The State wanted to send out a message: Fall in line. Even a man as illustrious as Binayak Sen can be put away.

The irrational doggedness with which the police has pursued the case has only driven the message home harder. On 31 December 2007, seven months after he was arrested, the Indian Academy of Social Sciences conferred the RR Keithan Gold Medal on Binayak Sen. On May 2008, still in jail, he was given the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. Around the same time, 22 Nobel Prize winners appealed to the Indian government for his release. But none of that was enough to keep Binayak out of jail.

Now, as the fight for his release stretches in the months ahead, he will become a test case for pulling back some of the draconian laws that are threatening to change the very fabric of indian democracy. As Amartya Sen says, “Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.’’

The first step woud be for the Chhatisgarh High Court to suspend the trial court judgement against Binayak Sen.

Badal vs Badal‎

2010-10-14T02:29:00.000-07:00

Mubarak, This is Sukhbir Badal's Akali Dal

Manpreet Badal walks out of Akali-Bjp Govt

PARTING SHOT Accuses Sukhbir of misleading people, says Dy CM should resign

The ruling Shiromani Akali Dal was plunged into a fresh political crisis on Wednesday with Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal dropping his nephew and Finance Minister Manpreet Badal from the cabinet and the latter severing his ties with the party. “It is no longer the Shiromani Akali Dal I have known,” said a bitter Manpreet Badal at a press conference. “It is now Sukhbir’s Akali Dal,” he said while referring to his cousin and Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal.
While senior leaders of SAD tried everything to put up a ‘business as usual’ facade, and the state government announced a financial bonanza for the employees to gloss over the crisis, the presence of as many as three ruling party MLAs by the side of Manpreet would cause concern to the leadership.
While only time will tell if other SAD MLAs join the rank of the rebels, the presence of Charanjit Singh Channi (independent), Sant Ajit Singh, Jagbir Brar and Manjinder Kang (all SAD) at the residence of the ‘sacked’ finance minister sent ripples through the party and the leaders lost little time in launching a rearguard action to win them back. Also conspicuous by his presence was the sacked minister’s father, Gurdass Singh Badal, who happens to be the Chief Minister’s younger brother.
The Chief Minister’s office said in a cryptic note on Wednesday morning that in deference to the unanimous recommendation of the SAD disciplinary committee, the CM had recommended to the Governor that Manpreet Badal be dropped from the ministry. In view of his suspension from the party, the statement added, the continuance of Manpreet Badal had become untenable.
The Chief Minister has retained departments of Finance, Planning and Programme Implementation, held by the dropped minister.
Manpreet Badal, who returned from New Delhi this morning, also claimed to have forwarded his resignation to the Chief Minister and the Governor. While Governor Shivraj Patil was away to Tirupati on a pilgrimage, he had spoken to the Governor on phone and informed him of his resignation, added the former finance minister.
He could barely hide his bitterness while alleging that his telephones are tapped and his house is bugged. It, however, no longer mattered what came first, his resignation or his dismissal because he was finished with Akali Dal, he declared.
His residence, which looked desolate in the morning, filled up on his return with mediamen jostling with his supporters from his constituency and a few former MLAs.
Rubbishing charges of indiscipline and anti-party activities, for which he had been suspended yesterday from the party, Manpreet Badal declared that he was guilty of no such thing. He produced a sheaf of documents in support of his contention that talks were indeed being held with the Centre on the possibility of waiving a substantial part of Punjab’s growing debt.
The defiant former minister declared that he would not be responding to the show cause notice issued to him by the party, as he had decided to part ways with the SAD. “My expulsion form the party was expected and a logical fallout of the events over the past fortnight,” said an emotional Manpreet.
“I was born an Akali, my conscience and soul are Akali. The SAD was my religion till it remained under the command of my uncle Parkash Singh Badal, but under Sukhbir the party atmosphere has become stifling. Believe me, I am finished with SAD, the party I left today is not the Akali Dal I grew up in, this is Sukhbir’s Akali Dal”, he added.
Demanding Sukhbir’s resignation for “misleading the people and the party on the debt-waiver issue” he added, “I will now go to the people; knock at every home, if need be and seek their support to take Punjab out of the present financial debt”.
As finance minister, he had raised his concerns over the rising debt Punjab faced. “As finance minister if I don’t talk about finance then what do I talk about ?” he wondered aloud, adding, “Even though I have left the job, I would appeal to the Chief Minister to take an approval in the next cabinet to continue the dialogue with the Centre to get Punjab’s debt waived. It is in the interest of Punjab to rid its future generations of debt”.
Manpreet’s ouster from the government has caused a vertical split in the Badal family, which has remained at the helm of SAD affairs ever since chief minister Parkash Singh Badal took over its command. Manpreet’s departure from the party at this juncture, which started as a war of succession within the Badal clan, is unlikely to bring curtains down on the war of succession though. It may have just begun.

Cousin conflict
Manpreet Singh Badal is the son of Gurdas Singh Badal, Punjab CM Parkash's brother and a former MP and MLA. The brothers together worked out a strategy for the functioning of the Shiromani Akali Dal.
Manpreet, an honours graduate from Delhi's St Stephen's College and barrister at law from London, was given a party ticket by Parkash in 1995 for contesting the Gidderbaha bypoll. He retained the seat in 1997, 2002 and in February 2007.
Gidderbaha has been a pocket borough of the Badals since the 1960s, except on two occasions. Parkash's son Sukhbir returned from the US and joined politics.
He was defeated in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls and he was given a Rajya Sabha seat. Ever since the cousins joined politics, there were reports of tension between them. Parkash and Gurdas stepped in to defuse tension.

Badal, family acquitted in corruption case

2010-10-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

Mohali (Punjab) : The district court in this Punjab town Friday acquitted Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, his wife Surinder Kaur Badal and their son Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal in a disproportionate assets case against them.
The acquittal by the court in Mohali, 10 km from Chandigarh, is likely to come as a big relief to the Badal family and six of their close associates.
The chief minister and his son, Sukhbir Singh, were present in the court complex when the judge announced their acquittal.
'I am happy at this judgment. No politician wants a taint of false cases against him,' a relieved chief minister said after the verdict. 'It was political vendetta against us. That is why the case has fallen,' the deputy chief minister said.
The case was being heard in the court, initially at Ropar town, 45 km from Chandigarh, since 2003 after the state vigilance bureau, during the regime of the Congress government led by then chief minister Amarinder Singh, registered cases of disproportionate assets against the Badal family and others.
The vigilance probe initially accused the Badal family of amassing assets worth over Rs.30 billion (Rs.3,000 crore). However, in the charge sheet presented before the court, the Badal family's assets were valued at over Rs.780 million (Rs.78 crore). IANS

The Ayodhya Verdict

2010-10-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Disputed site ia Ram birthplace, said High Court
One part to Sunni board, one to Ram Lalla custodian and one to Nirmohi Akhara Legal experts frown but Centre gains political breather
SAMANWAYA RAUTRAY
Lucknow : The high court’s answer to the religious dispute has an old flavour, that of partition but with a potential to promote peace.
The disputed area in Ayodhya will be divided equally among the Sunni Central Wakf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Lalla Virajman (treated as a legal person), the court ruled today.
The Ram idol will stay put where once the Babri Masjid stood and a permanent temple may replace the makeshift one — but the wakf board may build a mosque on land it will get adjacent to it.
Many legal experts were disappointed by the judgment, which to them appeared to expose fissures among the judges.
However, the verdict will not be implemented immediately. The bench of Justice D.V. Sharma, Justice S.U. Khan and Justice Sudhir Agarwal ordered status quo for three months to allow all sides to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The wakf board and the Hindu Mahasabha have already declared they will appeal. The verdict may thus mark the beginning of the next round of litigation and give the Centre, which has the thankless task of implementing the order, much-needed time.
All the three parties were declared joint owners of the land today, while another party, Rajendra Singh Visharad (son of late petitioner Gopal Singh Visharad), was allowed the right to worship the Ram idol but not given a share of the property.
The court declared the “area covered by the central dome of the three-domed structure, i.e. the disputed structure, being the deity of Bhagwan Ram Janamsthan and place of birth of Lord Rama as per faith and belief of the Hindus, belong to plaintiffs (Ram Lalla) and shall not be obstructed or interfered in any manner by the defendants”.
This area, therefore, goes to representatives of Ram Lalla Virajman. The rest of the inner courtyard will belong to both the wakf board and Ram Lalla’s representatives. The Nirmohi Akhara, the owner of the deities, would get the Ram Chabutra, where Ram was originally worshipped before his idol was surreptitiously placed in the mosque in December 1949. The Akhara will also get the Sita Rasoi and Bhandar, and will share these with the worshippers of Ram.
The rest of the outer courtyard will be shared by the Akhara and Ram Lalla, since this area has generally been used by Hindus for worship.
However, the court made it clear that the wakf board’s share must not be less than one-third of the total disputed premises and, if necessary, it will be given a portion of the outer courtyard.
If minor adjustments are to be made later — after the three parties submit their suggestions within three months — the affected party may be compensated with land from the area acquired by the Centre. This government land will be made available in such a way that all three parties can have separate entry and exit points, so they do not disturb one another’s rights.
The court directed the parties to approach the Centre — the statutory receiver of 71 acres of land in Ayodhya, including the 2.77-acre disputed area — to work out these schemes.
Disquiet
Almost all the parties were left bemused by the verdict. Wakf board counsel Zafrab Jilani said his client would appeal against the decision to declare its suit time-barred, that is, not filed within the period mandated by law. The Hindu Mahasabha will appeal against the “partitioning”.
“The judgment is a panchayati judgment,” constitutional expert Rajeev Dhavan said. “It has converted a title (ownership) suit into a partition suit. It seems to have denuded the Muslims of their legal rights and converted the moral sentiments of the Hindus into legal entitlements.”
He added: “As a basis for the future, the judgment is infirm. The better way would have been to uphold Muslim entitlement and appeal to them for the rights of Hindu worship.”
Two of the high court judges have declared Ram a legal person who can hold property in his own name and said, citing Archaeological Survey of India evidence, that the mosque had been built by destroying a Hindu temple.
Justice Khan, however, said the mosque was probably built on the ruins of a temple, with a major part of the debris used in the construction.
When the case was being heard, some Supreme Court lawyers had expressed disquiet over the composition of the bench. They had faulted the high court for not appointing Parsi, Sikh and Christian judges to eliminate allegations of bias.
“After all, justice should not only be done, but should be seen to be done,” one of the critics had said.
Former law minister Shanti Bhushan welcomed today’s verdict, though.
“It strengthens secularism and paves the way for amity between communities,” he said.
“For centuries, both sides have been worshipping jointly; the site has been in joint use. This used to be the old tradition in India.”
The high court has, therefore, ruled that the area was jointly held land in which all had equal shares, so that a Ram temple and a mosque could be built side by side, Bhushan said. “What could be more beautiful?”

Judge refers 274 books, 798 judgements in 5,238 pages
NEW DELHI: Hymns of vedic age, 798 judgements and textbooks from all eras of history were referred by Justice of the Lucknow bench of the while deciding the ownership of the disputed land in Ayodhya. Justice Agarwal, who gave the majority verdict along with Justice S U Khan, prepared his separate judgement in 21 volumes in which he gave reference of 274 books and 798 judgements in 5,238 pages. The books consulted by him belonged to ancient, medieval and modern history along with the judgements of the recent times by the Supreme Court and various High Courts along with the law settled by the Privy Council. The judgements referred from the privy council dates back to early 19th century and included Tracy Perrage Case of 1843 for Forensic Science and Expert Evidence to Williams Vs Lourdusamy & another case of 2008. References have been taken from the books written by Muslim travellers including Ibn Batuta, who visited India during the Tughlaq period. The judge also took into accounts of cultural history of India from the book authored by Australian historian A L Basham. Justice Agarwal also made reference of Bhagwat Gita and other religious texts of both Hindus and Muslims in his judgement.

Commonwealth Games : DELHI 2010

2010-09-24T01:27:00.000-07:00

Kindly Adjust !

Anand Philar

So, what's new with the Commonwealth Games? Nothing, really! And that is cynicism at its best or worst, if you so wish.

But then, to look the other way would be a bigger crime. At the last guesstimate, Kalmadi and his cohorts had blown up Rs 70,000 crores and yet, the projects are far from complete. The numbers are nothing to scoff at and rather, they reflect the seriousness of the scam or gross mismanagement or whatever else you call it.

In the past 48 hours, so much muck and stink has surfaced that even the poor stray dogs are taking shelter, though in the ''swanky'' athletes' Village! But then, the top dogs of the Organising Committee are far too busy discussing and dismissing the levels of hygiene and preparedness besides the ''minor matter'' of an overhead footbridge collapsing, leaving five persons in critical condition. It reminds me of the advert in which Dravid pleads: ''Kindly adjust''. This is what the CWG authorities are telling us to do!

False ceiling in Nehru Stadium collapses

The issue is so serious that some of the countries are even contemplating pull-out and there is a threat of the Games itself being cancelled. Highly unlikely I would say given the massive investments, but if it does happen, then all Indians should hang their heads in shame and also hang those responsible for this unholy mess.

If it were to be the days of Wild West, then I am pretty sure, there would have been daily lynching in Delhi. Having known and seen the ''Kalmadi Tribe'' for over two decades, I am least surprised at the crassness of their response to criticism, even when confronted with hard evidence. They have survived for decades and as I have often mentioned, can teach even the best of politicians a thing or two.

The Indian Media has indeed gone ballistic to highlight the financial crimes related to the CWG, but I am afraid, it's all too little too late. It would be a death-blow for Indian sports if the Games are called off, though I suspect, it will not come to that.

But of more significance is the knee-jerk reaction from the Union government itself. I mean, they could see it coming and yet, chose to maintain Sphinx-like silence until foreigners (it always has to be the white skin!) complained of ''filth and unhygienic conditions'' at the Athletes Village; as if the visitors said anything different than what the Indian Media has been highlighting for the past six months.

I am sure, the saga will continue for a while and Ponting's Australians, wrapped up in a security blanket at Chandigarh, would be relieved that the attention is on them, at least for the time being. For sure, the forthcoming series will provide us all some relief from the wretched CWG that is an unwelcome talisman around our collective neck.

Problems faced by 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games

The series would be well fought as in the past as Ponting would be keen on conquering the ''final frontier'' and it would be far more satisfying for him if can swing it as India, this time, cannot complain about being at less than full strength.

While on the subject, Yuvraj's sacking was hardly a surprise given his list of injuries as also the inclusion of young Pujara who has been scoring runs by the dozen at the domestic level. But then, Test match is a different ball game and if at all Pujara gets to play, then he can expect baptism by fire against the Aussies.

As for the rest of the squad, there are no surprises though one might debate on the inclusion of Sreesanth ahead of young Abhimanyu Mithun who impressed the discerning during the series in Sri Lanka. The Bangalore youngster deserved a bit more exposure, but he is only the latest among the ''pick up and drop'' cases that litter Indian cricket. It is to be hoped that the seamer would take his omission as a motivation to win his place back rather than get depressed over it.

I also hope that the series would be clean and well-fought without any whiff of scandal of any sort. As Dhoni remarked the other day, the responsibility lies with the players of living up to expectations.

Sikhs threatened in Kashmir

2010-08-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

Embrace Islam or leave Valley

M Saleem Pandit

SRINAGAR: Sikhs in the Kashmir Valley have received anonymous letters from Islamic militants asking them to either embrace Islam and join the protests against civilian killings or pack up and leave the Valley. The 60,000-strong Sikh community is the single largest minority group in the Valley. An organisation of Kashmiri Sikhs said that several community members have received these letters. "Community members have received unsigned letters at various places," said All Party Sikh Coordination Committee (ASCC) coordinator Jagmohan Singh Raina. He said the community has decided to stay put and fight these "evil designs" at a meeting in Srinagar on Thursday. Raina quoted a letter as saying: "When you are enjoying the joys here, why can't you share the grief and sorrow of Kashmiris as well? We know you are afraid of bullets... Hold protests inside gurdwaras or leave Kashmir." He added, "Some letters have asked Sikhs to embrace Islam." Raina urged both factions of the Hurriyat, JKLF and PoK-based United Jihad Council to take serious note of the threats to maintain amity and brotherhood in the Valley. Hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani has reassured the Sikhs saying they shouldn't feel threatened and should ignore the "fake letters". He assured the community that nobody would force them to join the protests. Earlier, Geelani has made an emotional appeal against forcing minorities to join the protests and said harming them would be like "inflicting a wound on his (Geelani's) body". The state unit of Akali Dal (Badal) president Ajeet Singh Mastana described the threats as acts by anti-social elements. "The threats can't break us and reduce our love for our motherland," he said.

No need to fear: J-K govt, Hurriyat tell Sikhs
Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir government and separatist leaders have reassured Sikhs in the Valley are safe after the community allegedly received anonymous letters threatening them to either join protests or embrace Islam.
The anonymous letters have targeted 60,000 odd minority Kashmiri Sikhs.
"When these letters were thrown outside our houses at many places, we took note of this and met Hurriyat leaders. We met Geelani two times and he assured us support. The administration should take this seriously and assure us of protection," says All Kashmiri Sikh Coordination Committee Chairman Jagmohan Singh Raina.
While the issue was taken up in Parliament where members sought protection of the Sikh community, the separatist leadership was quick to get their act together by condemning the incident
"Minorities have no threat in Kashmir. I have assured the Sikhs that they are part and parcel of Kashmiri society and Muslim community will continue to protect them," says Hurriyat Conference Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.
"The incident should be condemned. Some invisible forces are trying to create a division," says separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani.
The Omar Abdullah government, grappling with the summer unrest, too assured the Sikhs of its total support.
Threat letters thrown outside gurudwaras have scared the Sikh community members but the assurance of protection from separatists and Omar government have prompted them to stay put and fight the divisive elements with the majority community.

'Khalistan militants still a threat'

2010-07-18T23:18:00.000-07:00

CHANDIGARH/NEW DELHI: Punjab government's move to recommend deletion of names of 46 former Khalistani militants from the Centre's list of 'blacklisted' Sikh radicals will not get the home ministry's nod as security and intelligence agencies still consider them potential threats amid several reports of attempts made to revive militancy in the state.

The existing blacklist — meant for travel ban and denial of visa — comprises names of 169 Sikhs who were directly or indirectly associated with various pro-Khalistan militant outfits. Names of 46 of them, however, have been cleared by a Punjab government committee for deletion from the central list. "It is highly unlikely that the Centre will prune the list at a time when reports hint at revival of militancy in Punjab at the behest of Sikh radicals and Khalistani militants who have taken political asylum in different countries," a senior home ministry official said. Referring to the Punjab government's move, the official said, "Review of the list is a constant process which is done keeping in mind radical ideological leanings of former Khalistani militants.

A different view may be taken in case of those who are very old and have no pending cases against them. But it does not appear to be happening in the near future." The home ministry had in May forwarded the list of 169 blacklisted Sikhs to the Punjab government. The state government's move has raised eyebrows within the security and intelligence establishment. Officials believe that though Sikh militancy ended in Punjab long ago, the government could not take a risk amid reports of attempts made by different elements — including Pakistan's ISI which has given shelter to a number of Khalistani militants — to revive the pro-Khalistan movement.

Police sources in Chandigarh said the blacklist has just been categorised in different segments based on demands made by NRIs to political leaders. No list has, however, been sent to the central government, they added. A top official said the police department had received the list of 169 names for categorisation under different heads like cases registered, wanted in connection with terrorist activities, status of cases, present address and identity.

The list was categorised and reviewed by the intelligence wing of Punjab police. These include names like Gurmit Sikh Aulakh, Ganga Singh Dhillon, Ajaib Singh Bagri, Balkar Singh, Shingara Singh Mann, Kulbir Singh Barapind and others, after the state police cleared that no criminal cases were registered against them.

Times Of India

Nikki Haley appears headed for a win

2010-06-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

With just three days left for her crucial run-off for the Republican Governor's nomination from South Carolina, American-Indian aspirant Nikki Haley received a major boost in her electoral prospects with a endorsement by the blogger who had alleged to have affair with her.
Her campaign received a further boost yesterday as the former Massachusetts Governor and top Republican leader Mitt Romney campaigned in her favour.
She also received USD 42,000 for election campaign before the run-off, media reports said.
Haley, a first-generation Indian-American who was raised as a Sikh, but converted to Methodism when she was 24, faces Congressman Gresham Barrett in the run-off on June 22.
She led in the primary last week with 49.5 per cent of the vote, coming to within a hair's breadth short of winning the nomination outright.
'The Washington Post' today said she is favoured to win the runoff Tuesday despite attempts by detractors this week to question her Christianity.
"I think the 49 and a half per cent figure that Nikki Haley garnered is a pretty clear indication that the people of South Carolina want to focus on the key issues," Romney said yesterday.
"The distractions are not distractions anymore," he said.
Meanwhile, the blogger who tried to jeopardise her campaign earlier by claiming that he had an affair with her, yesterday came out in her support.
"The fact remains that this election (at least to us) isn't about whether Haley is telling the truth" about the allegations, blogger Will Folks wrote on Fitsnews.com.

It's about the hundreds of millions of dollars that will likely be saved as a result of her winning the general election in November," he said.
His article suggested that Haley, if elected, would do more to limit the size of state government.
If elected, in the November elections, Haley would be the second Indian-American Governor of an US State and the first Indian-American woman to occupy such a constitutional post.

Chandigarh: Peon's daughter makes it to IAS

2010-05-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

Maoists Camp

2010-04-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Walking With The Comrades

Gandhians with a Gun? Arundhati Roy plunges into the sea of Gondi people to find some answers...
Arundhati Roy
The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”Namashkar Guruji. I wondered whether the Meeter and Greeter would be expecting a man. And whether I should get myself a moustache.
There are many ways to describe Dantewada. It’s an oxymoron. It’s a border town smack in the heart of India. It’s the epicentre of a war. It’s an upside down, inside out town.
Red Shadow: Centenary celebrations of the adivasi uprising in Bastar; Sten gun at hand
In Dantewada, the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call ‘Pakistan’. There the villages are empty, but the forest is full of people. Children who ought to be in school run wild. In the lovely forest villages, the concrete school buildings have either been blown up and lie in a heap, or they are full of policemen. The deadly war that is unfolding in the jungle is a war that the Government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister (and CEO of the war), says it does not exist, that it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised for it. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.If ghosts are the lingering spirits of someone, or something, that has ceased to exist, then perhaps the new four-lane highway crashing through the forest is the opposite of a ghost. Perhaps it is the harbinger of what is still to come.

In Dantewada, the police wear plain clothes, the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail; the prisoners are free.

The antagonists in the forest are disparate and unequal in almost every way. On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerrilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion. The Maoists and the paramilitary are old adversaries and have fought older avatars of each other several times before: Telangana in the ’50s; West Bengal, Bihar, Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in the late ’60s and ’70s; and then again in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra from the ’80s all the way through to the present. They are familiar with each other’s tactics, and have studied each other’s combat manuals closely. Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or their previous avatars) had been not just defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal—homeland to millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.It’s easier on the liberal conscience to believe that the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State. It’s convenient to forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries. (That’s a truism of course. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist.) The Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds have all rebelled several times, against the British, against zamindars and moneylenders. The rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands killed, but the people were never conquered. Even after Independence, tribal people were at the heart of the first uprising that could be described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West Bengal (where the word Naxalite—now used interchangeably with ‘Maoist’—originates). Since then, Naxalite politics has been inextricably entwined with tribal uprisings, which says as much about the tribals as it does about the Naxalites.
Staying Put: People of Kudur village protest the Bodhghat dam: ‘It does not belong to the capitalists, Bastar is OUrs’y
This legacy of rebellion has left behind a furious people who have been deliberately isolated and marginalised by the Indian government. The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight of hand, the government began to use their own penury against them. Each time it needed to displace a large population—for dams, irrigation projects, mines—it talked of “bringing tribals into the mainstream” or of giving them “the fruits of modern development”. Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone), refugees of India’s ‘progress’, the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it’s time to worry.The most recent expression of concern has come from home minister P. Chidambaram who says he doesn’t want tribal people living in “museum cultures”. The well-being of tribal people didn’t seem to be such a priority during his career as a corporate lawyer, representing the interests of several major mining companies. So it might be an idea to enquire into the basis for his new anxiety.
The Day of the Bhumkal: Face to face with "India's greatest Security Threat".
Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.Therefore, this war.When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?
The day before I left, my mother called, sounding sleepy. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, with a mother’s weird instinct, “what this country needs is revolution.”An article on the internet says that Israel’s Mossad is training 30 high-ranking Indian police officers in the techniques of targeted assassinations, to render the Maoist organisation “headless”. There’s talk in the press about the new hardware that has been bought from Israel: laser range-finders, thermal imaging equipment and unmanned drones, so popular with the US army. Perfect weapons to use against the poor.The drive from Raipur to Dantewada takes about 10 hours through areas known to be ‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. ‘Infest/infestation’ implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways, the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.To protect the highway, security forces have ‘secured’ a narrow bandwidth of forest on either side. Further in, it’s the raj of the ‘Dada log’. The Brothers. The Comrades.On the outskirts of Raipur, a massive billboard advertises Vedanta (the company our home minister once worked with) Cancer Hospital. In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways, mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It’s called CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. It allows mining companies to be like the legendary actor and former chief minister NTR, who liked to play all the parts in Telugu mythologicals—the good guys and the bad guys, all at once, in the same movie. This CSR masks the outrageous economics that underpins the mining sector in India. For example, according to the recent Lokayukta report for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined by a private company, the government gets a royalty of Rs 27 and the mining company makes Rs 5,000. In the bauxite and aluminium sector, the figures are even worse. We’re talking about daylight robbery to the tune of billions of dollars. Enough to buy elections, governments, judges, newspapers, TV channels, NGOs and aid agencies. What’s the occasional cancer hospital here or there?I don’t remember seeing Vedanta’s name on the long list of MoUs signed by the Chhattisgarh government. But I’m twisted enough to suspect that if there’s a cancer hospital, there must be a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere.

Tribal people in central India have a history of resistance predating Mao. The rebellions were crushed, but the people were never conquered.

We pass Kanker, famous for its Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College run by Brigadier B.K. Ponwar, Rumpelstiltskin of this war, charged with the task of turning corrupt, sloppy policemen (straw) into jungle commandos (gold). “Fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla”, the motto of the warfare training school, is painted on the rocks. The men are taught to run, slither, jump on and off air-borne helicopters, ride horses (for some reason), eat snakes and live off the jungle. The brigadier takes great pride in training street dogs to fight ‘terrorists’. Eight hundred policemen graduate from the warfare training school every six weeks. Twenty similar schools are being planned all over India. The police force is gradually being turned into an army. (In Kashmir, it’s the other way around. The army is being turned into a bloated, administrative police force.) Upside down. Inside out. Either way, the Enemy is the People.It’s late. Jagdalpur is asleep, except for the many hoardings of Rahul Gandhi asking people to join the Youth Congress. He’s been to Bastar twice in recent months but hasn’t said anything much about the war. It’s probably too messy for the People’s Prince to meddle in at this point. His media managers must have put their foot down. The fact that the Salwa Judum—the dreaded, government-sponsored vigilante group responsible for rapes, killings, for burning down villages and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes—is led by Mahendra Karma, a Congress MLA, does not get much play in the carefully orchestrated publicity around Rahul Gandhi.
I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. “Are you the one who’s going in?” he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I did not know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said, “Outlook nahin mila (couldn’t find Outlook).”“And the bananas?”“I ate them,” he said, “I got hungry.”He really was a security threat.His backpack said Charlie Brown—Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.

I’m surrounded by strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal—all Maoists. Are they going to die? What for? To turn this into a mine?

We walked to the bus stand, only a few minutes away from the temple. It was already crowded. Things happened quickly. There were two men on motorbikes. There was no conversation—just a glance of acknowledgment, a shifting of body weight, the revving of engines. I had no idea where we were going. We passed the house of the Superintendent of Police (SP), which I recognised from my last visit. He was a candid man, the SP: “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”In no time at all we were riding out of town. No tail. It was a long ride, three hours by my watch. It ended abruptly in the middle of nowhere, on an empty road with forest on either side. Mangtu got off. I did too. The bikes left, and I picked up my backpack and followed the small internal security threat into the forest. It was a beautiful day. The forest floor was a carpet of gold.In a while we emerged on the white, sandy banks of a broad flat river. It was obviously monsoon-fed, so now it was more or less a sand flat, at the centre a stream, ankle deep, easy to wade across. Across was ‘Pakistan’. “Out there, ma’am,” the candid SP had said to me, “my boys shoot to kill.” I remembered that as we began to cross. I saw us in a policeman’s rifle-sights—tiny figures in a landscape, easy to pick off. But Mangtu seemed quite unconcerned, and I took my cue from him.Waiting for us on the other bank, in a lime-green shirt that said Horlicks!, was Chandu. A slightly older security threat. Maybe twenty. He had a lovely smile, a cycle, a jerry can with boiled water and many packets of glucose biscuits for me, from the Party. We caught our breath and began to walk again. The cycle, it turned out, was a red herring. The route was almost entirely non-cycleable. We climbed steep hills and clambered down rocky paths along some pretty precarious ledges. When he couldn’t wheel it, Chandu lifted the cycle and carried it over his head as though it weighed nothing. I began to wonder about his bemused village boy air. I discovered (much later) that he could handle every kind of weapon, “except for an LMG”, he informed me cheerfully.

CSR. It allows corporates to play good guys and bad guys all at once. If Vedanta has a cancer hospital somewhere, a bauxite mountain can’t be far.

Three beautiful, sozzled men with flowers in their turbans walked with us for about half an hour, before our paths diverged. At sunset, their shoulder bags began to crow. They had roosters in them, which they had taken to market but hadn’t managed to sell.Chandu seems to be able to see in the dark. I have to use my torch. The crickets start up and soon there’s an orchestra, a dome of sound over us. I long to look up at the night sky, but I dare not. I have to keep my eyes on the ground. One step at a time. Concentrate.I hear dogs. But I can’t tell how far away they are. The terrain flattens out. I steal a look at the sky. It makes me ecstatic. I hope we’re going to stop soon. “Soon,” Chandu says. It turns out to be more than an hour. I see silhouettes of enormous trees. We arrive.The village seems spacious, the houses far away from each other. The house we enter is beautiful. There’s a fire, some people sitting around. More people outside, in the dark. I can’t tell how many. I can just about make them out. A murmur goes around. Lal Salaam Kaamraid (Red Salute, Comrade). Lal Salaam, I say. I’m beyond tired. The lady of the house calls me inside and gives me chicken curry cooked in green beans and some red rice. Fabulous. Her baby is asleep next to me, her silver anklets gleam in the firelight.After dinner, I unzip my sleeping bag. It’s a strange intrusive sound, the big zip. Someone puts on the radio. BBC Hindi service. The Church of England has withdrawn its funds from Vedanta’s Niyamgiri project, citing environmental degradation and rights violations of the Dongria Kondh tribe. I can hear cowbells, snuffling, shuffling, cattle-farting. All’s well with the world. My eyes close.
We’re up at five. On the move by six. In another couple of hours, we cross another river. We walk through some beautiful villages. Every village has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind. By 11, the sun is high, and walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch. Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A beautiful young girl flirts with him. He looks a little shy, maybe because I’m around. Lunch is raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red chilli powder. We’re going to wait for the sun to lose some of its vehemence before we start walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is clean and necessary. No clutter. A black hen parades up and down the low mud wall. A bamboo grid stabilises the rafters of the thatched roof and doubles as a storage rack. There’s a grass broom, two drums, a woven reed basket, a broken umbrella and a whole stack of flattened, empty, corrugated cardboard boxes. Something catches my eye. I need my spectacles. Here’s what’s printed on the cardboard: Ideal Power 90 High Energy Emulsion Explosive (Class-2) SD CAT ZZ.We start walking again at about two. In the village we are going to meet a Didi (Sister, Comrade) who knows what the next step of the journey will be. Chandu doesn’t. There is an economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to know everything. But when we reach the village, Didi isn’t there. There is no news of her. For the first time, I see a little cloud of worry settling over Chandu. A big one settles over me. I don’t know what the systems of communication are, but what if they’ve gone wrong?
Spare Beauty: Pots, rifles, jhillies... Everything in these villages is clean and necessary
We’re parked outside a deserted school building, a little way out of the village. Why are all the government village schools built like concrete bastions, with steel shutters for windows and sliding folding steel doors? Why not like the village houses, with mud and thatch? Because they double up as barracks and bunkers. “In the villages in Abujhmad,” Chandu says, “schools are like this....” He scratches a building plan with a twig in the earth. Three octagons attached to each other like a honeycomb. “So they can fire in all directions.” He draws arrows to illustrate his point, like a cricket graphic—a batsman’s wagon wheel. There are no teachers in any of the schools, Chandu says. They’ve all run away. Or have you chased them away? No, we only chase police. But why should teachers come here, to the jungle, when they get their salaries sitting at home? Good point.He informs me that this is a ‘new area’. The Party has entered only recently.

Rahul’s been to Bastar twice in recent months, but has said nothing on the war. Perhaps it’s too messy for the People’s Prince at this point.

About 20 young people arrive, girls and boys. In their teens and early 20s. Chandu explains that this is the village-level militia, the lowest rung of the Maoists’ military hierarchy. I have never seen anyone like them before. They are dressed in saris and lungis, some in frayed olive-green fatigues. The boys wear jewellery, headgear. Every one of them has a muzzle-loading rifle, what’s called a bharmaar. Some also have knives, axes, a bow and arrow. One boy carries a crude mortar fashioned out of a heavy three-foot GI pipe. It’s filled with gunpowder and shrapnel and ready to be fired. It makes a big noise, but can only be used once. Still, it scares the police, they say, and giggle. War doesn’t seem to be uppermost on their minds. Perhaps because their area is outside the home range of the Salwa Judum. They have just finished a day’s work, helping to build fencing around some village houses to keep the goats out of the fields. They’re full of fun and curiosity. The girls are confident and easy with the boys. I have a sensor for this sort of thing, and I am impressed. Their job, Chandu says, is to patrol and protect a group of four or five villages and to help in the fields, clean wells or repair houses—doing whatever’s needed.Still no Didi. What to do? Nothing. Wait. Help out with some chopping and peeling.After dinner, without much talk, everybody falls in line. Clearly, we are moving. Everything moves with us, the rice, vegetables, pots and pans. We leave the school compound and walk single file into the forest. In less than half an hour, we arrive in a glade where we are going to sleep. There’s absolutely no noise. Within minutes everyone has spread their blue plastic sheets, the ubiquitous ‘jhilli’ (without which there will be no Revolution). Chandu and Mangtu share one and spread one out for me. They find me the best place, by the best grey rock. Chandu says he has sent a message to Didi. If she gets it, she will be here first thing in the morning. If she gets it.It’s the most beautiful room I have slept in, in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel. I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal. They’re all Maoists for sure. Are they all going to die? Is the jungle warfare training school for them? And the helicopter gunships, the thermal imaging and the laser range-finders?Why must they die? What for? To turn all of this into a mine? I remember my visit to the open cast iron-ore mines in Keonjhar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound. Red dust fills your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the air is red, the people are red, their lungs and hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble through their villages, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to Paradip port from where it will go to China. There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden cities that spring up overnight. Into a ‘growth rate’ that leaves economists breathless. Into weapons to make war.Everyone’s asleep except for the sentries who take one-and-a-half-hour shifts. Finally, I can look at the stars. When I was a child growing up on the banks of the Meenachal river, I used to think the sound of crickets—which always started up at twilight—was the sound of stars revving up, getting ready to shine. I’m surprised at how much I love being here. There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be. Who should I be tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars? Maybe Didi will come tomorrow.
They arrive in the early afternoon. I can see them from a distance. About 15 of them, all in olive-green uniforms, running towards us. Even from a distance, from the way they run, I can tell they are the heavy hitters. The People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA). For whom the thermal imaging and laser-guided rifles. For whom the jungle warfare training school.

In April ’05, the Chhattisgarh government signed two MoUs for steel plants. The same month, the PM called Maoists the ‘gravest security threat’.

They carry serious rifles, INSAS, SLR, two have AK-47s. The leader of the squad is Comrade Madhav who has been with the Party since he was nine. He’s from Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. He’s upset and extremely apologetic. There was a major miscommunication, he says again and again, which usually never happens. I was supposed to have arrived at the main camp on the very first night. Someone dropped the baton in the jungle-relay. The motorcycle drop was to have been at an entirely different place. “We made you wait, we made you walk so much. We ran all the way when the message came that you were here.” I said it was okay, that I had come prepared, to wait and walk and listen. He wants to leave immediately, because people in the camp were waiting, and worried.It’s a few hours’ walk to the camp. It’s getting dark when we arrive. There are several layers of sentries and concentric circles of patrolling. There must be a hundred comrades lined up in two rows. Everyone has a weapon. And a smile. They begin to sing: Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam, aane vaale saathiyon ko lal lal salaam (red salute to the comrades who have arrived). It is sung sweetly, as though it was a folk song about a river, or a forest blossom. With the song, the greeting, the handshake, and the clenched fist. Everyone greets everyone, murmuring Lalslaam, mlalslaa mlalslaam....

I remember my visit to the iron ore mines in Keonjhar. Once it had forest. Now the land’s like a raw, red wound. Red water, red air, red people.

Other than a large blue jhilli spread out on the floor, about 15 feet square, there are no signs of a ‘camp’. This one has a jhilli roof as well. It’s my room for the night. I was either being rewarded for my days of walking, or being pampered in advance for what lay ahead. Or both. Either way it was the last time in the entire trip that I was going to have a roof over my head. Over dinner I meet Comrade Narmada, in charge of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (KAMS), who has a price on her head; Comrade Saroja of the PLGA who is only as tall as her SLR; Comrade Maase (which means Black Girl in Gondi), who has a price on her head too; Comrade Rupi, the tech wizard; Comrade Raju, who’s in charge of the division I’d been walking through; and Comrade Venu (or Murali or Sonu or Sushil, whatever you would like to call him), clearly the seniormost of them all. Maybe central committee, maybe even politburo. I’m not told, I don’t ask. Between us we speak Gondi, Halbi, Telugu, Punjabi and Malayalam. Only Maase speaks English. (So we all communicate in Hindi!) Comrade Maase is tall and quiet and seems to have to swim through a layer of pain to enter the conversation. But from the way she hugs me, I can tell she’s a reader. And that she misses having books in the jungle. She will tell me her story only later. When she trusts me with her grief.Bad news arrives, as it does in this jungle. A runner, with ‘biscuits’. Handwritten notes on sheets of paper, folded and stapled into little squares. There’s a bag full of them. Like chips. News from everywhere. The police have killed five people in Ongnaar village, four from the militia and one ordinary villager: Santhu Pottai (25), Phoolo Vadde (22), Kande Pottai (22), Ramoli Vadde (20), Dalsai Koram (22). They could have been the children in my star-spangled dormitory of last night.Then good news arrives. A small contingent of people with a plump young man. He’s in fatigues too, but they look brand new. Everybody admires them and comments on the fit. He looks shy and pleased. He’s a doctor who has come to live and work with the comrades in the forest. The last time a doctor visited Dandakaranya was many years ago.
Performing Arts: Members of the Chetna Natya Manch, the cultural wing of the party, waiting in the wings
On the radio there’s news about the home minister’s meeting with chief ministers of states ‘affected by Left-Wing Extremism’. The chief ministers of Jharkhand and Bihar are being demure and have not attended. Everybody sitting around the radio laughs. Around the time of elections, they say, right through the campaign, and then maybe a month or two after the government is formed, mainstream politicians all say things like “Naxals are our children”. You can set your watch to the schedule of when they will change their minds, and grow fangs.I am introduced to Comrade Kamla. I am told that I must on no account go even five feet away from my jhilli without waking her. Because everybody gets disoriented in the dark and could get seriously lost. (I don’t wake her. I sleep like a log.) In the morning Kamla presents me with a yellow polythene packet with one corner snipped off. Once it used to contain Abis Gold Refined Soya Oil. Now it was my Loo Mug. Nothing’s wasted on the Road to the Revolution.(Even now I think of Comrade Kamla all the time, every day. She’s 17. She wears a homemade pistol on her hip. And boy, what a smile. But if the police come across her, they’ll kill her. They might rape her first. No questions will be asked. Because she’s an Internal Security Threat.)
After breakfast, Comrade Venu (Sushil, Sonu, Murali) is waiting for me, sitting cross-legged on the jhilli, looking for all the world like a frail village schoolteacher. I’m going to get a history lesson. Or, more accurately, a lecture on the history of the last 30 years in the Dandakaranya forest, which has culminated in the war that’s swirling through it today. For sure, it’s a partisan’s version. But then, what history isn’t? In any case, the secret history must be made public if it is to be contested, argued with, instead of merely being lied about, which is what is happening now.
Around the time of elections, mainstream netas say things like Naxals are our children. You can set your watch to when they’ll grow fangs.

Comrade Venu has a calm, reassuring manner and a gentle voice that will, in the days to come, surface in a context that will completely unnerve me. This morning he talks for several hours, almost continuously. He’s like a little store manager who has a giant bunch of keys with which to open up a maze of lockers full of stories, songs and insights.
Comrade Venu was in one of the seven armed squads who crossed the Godavari from Andhra Pradesh and entered the Dandakaranya forest (DK, in Partyspeak) in June 1980, 30 years ago. He is one of the original forty-niners. They belonged to People’s War Group (PWG), a faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(ML), the original Naxalites. PWG was formally announced as a separate, independent party in April that year, under Kondapalli Seetharamiah. PWG had decided to build a standing army, for which it would need a base. DK was to be that base, and those first squads were sent in to reconnoitre the area and begin the process of building guerrilla zones. The debate about whether communist parties ought to have a standing army, and whether or not a ‘people’s army’ is a contradiction in terms, is an old one. PWG’s decision to build an army came from its experience in Andhra Pradesh, where its ‘Land to the Tiller’ campaign led to a direct clash with the landlords, and resulted in the kind of police repression that the party found impossible to withstand without a trained fighting force of its own.(By 2004, PWG had merged with the other CPI(ML) factions, Party Unity (PU) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC)—which functions for the most part out of Bihar and Jharkhand. To become what it is now, the Communist Party of India-Maoist.)
Dandakaranya is part of what the British, in their White Man’s way, called Gondwana, land of the Gonds. Today the state boundaries of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra slice through the forest. Breaking up a troublesome people into separate administrative units is an old trick. But these Maoists and Maoist Gonds don’t pay much attention to things like state boundaries. They have different maps in their heads, and like other creatures of the forest, they have their own paths. For them, roads are not meant for walking on. They’re meant only to be crossed, or as is increasingly becoming the case, ambushed. Though the Gonds (divided between the Koya and Dorla tribes) are by far the biggest majority, there are small settlements of other tribal communities too. The non-adivasi communities, traders and settlers, live on the edges of the forest, near the roads and markets.The PWG were not the first evangelicals to arrive in Dandakaranya. Baba Amte, the well-known Gandhian, had opened his ashram and leprosy hospital in Warora in 1975. The Ramakrishna Mission had begun opening village schools in the remote forests of Abujhmad. In north Bastar, Baba Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to “bring tribals back into the Hindu fold”, which involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism’s great gift—caste. The first converts, the village chiefs and big landlords—people like Mahendra Karma, founder of the Salwa Judum—were conferred the status of Dwij, twice-born, Brahmins. (Of course, this was a bit of a scam, because nobody can become a Brahmin. If they could, we’d be a nation of Brahmins by now.) But this counterfeit Hinduism is considered good enough for tribal people, just like the counterfeit brands of everything else—biscuits, soap, matches, oil—that are sold in village markets. As part of the Hindutva drive, the names of villages were changed in land records, as a result of which most have two names now, people’s names and government names. Innar village, for example, became Chinnari. On voters’ lists, tribal names were changed to Hindu names. (Massa Karma became Mahendra Karma.) Those who did not come forward to join the Hindu fold were declared ‘Katwas’ (by which they meant untouchables) who later became the natural constituency for the Maoists.

These Maoists and Maoist Gonds don’t pay attention to things like state boundaries. They have different maps in their heads, their own paths.

The PWG first began work in south Bastar and Gadchiroli. Comrade Venu describes those first months in some detail: how the villagers were suspicious of them, and wouldn’t let them into their homes. No one would offer them food or water. The police spread rumours that they were thieves. The women hid their jewellery in the ashes of their wood stoves. There was an enormous amount of repression. In November 1980, in Gadchiroli, the police opened fire at a village meeting and killed an entire squad. That was DK’s first ‘encounter’ killing. It was a traumatic setback, and the comrades retreated across the Godavari and returned to Adilabad but in 1981 they returned. They began to organise tribal people to demand a rise in the price they were being paid for tendu leaves (which are used to make beedis). At the time, traders paid three paise for a bundle of about 50 leaves. It was a formidable job to organise people entirely unfamiliar with this kind of politics, to lead them on strike. Eventually the strike was successful and the price was doubled, to six paise a bundle. But the real success for the party was to have been able to demonstrate the value of unity and a new way of conducting a political negotiation. Today, after several strikes and agitations, the price of a bundle of tendu leaves is Re 1. (It seems a little improbable at these rates, but the turnover of the tendu business runs into hundreds of crores of rupees.) Every season, the government floats tenders and gives contractors permission to extract a fixed volume of tendu leaves—usually between 1,500 and 5,000 standard bags known as manak boras. Each manak bora contains about 1,000 bundles. (Of course, there’s no way of ensuring that the contractors don’t extract more than they’re meant to.) By the time the tendu enters the market, it is sold in kilos. The slippery arithmetic and the sly system of measurement that converts bundles into manak boras into kilos is controlled by the contractors, and leaves plenty of room for manipulation of the worst kind. The most conservative estimate puts their profit per standard bag at about Rs 1,100. (That’s after paying the party a commission of Rs 120 per bag.) Even by that gauge, a small contractor (1,500 bags) makes about Rs 16 lakh a season and a big one (5,000 bags) upto Rs 55 lakh. A more realistic estimate would be several times this amount. Meanwhile, the Gravest Internal Security Threat makes just enough to stay alive until the next season.
Gathered Storm: Dance troupes of various Janatana Sarkars perform on Bhumkal Day
We’re interrupted by some laughter and the sight of Nilesh, one of the young PLGA comrades, walking rapidly towards the cooking area, slapping himself. When he comes closer, I see that he’s carrying a leafy nest of angry red ants that have crawled all over him and are biting him on his arms and neck. Nilesh is laughing too. “Have you ever eaten ant chutney?” Comrade Venu asks me. I know red ants well, from my childhood in Kerala, I’ve been bitten by them, but I’ve never eaten them. (The chapoli turns out to be nice. Sour. Lots of folic acid.)Nilesh is from Bijapur, which is at the heart of Salwa Judum operations. Nilesh’s younger brother joined the Judum on one of its looting and burning sprees and was made a Special Police Officer (SPO). He lives in the Basaguda camp with his mother. His father refused to go and stayed behind in the village. In effect, it’s a family blood feud. Later on, when I had an opportunity to talk to him, I asked Nilesh why his brother had done that. “He was very young,” Nilesh said, “he got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people and burn houses. He went crazy, did terrible things. Now he is stuck. He can never come back to the village. He will not be forgiven. He knows that.”We return to the history lesson. The party’s next big struggle, Comrade Venu says, was against the Ballarpur Paper Mills. The government had given the Thapars a 45-year contract to extract 1.5 lakh tonnes of bamboo at a hugely subsidised rate. (Small beer compared to bauxite, but still.) The tribals were paid 10 paise for a bundle which contained 20 culms of bamboo. (I won’t yield to the vulgar temptation of comparing that with the profits the Thapars were making.) A long agitation, a strike, followed by negotiations with officials of the paper mill in the presence of the people, tripled the price to 30 paise per bundle. For the tribal people, these were huge achievements. Other political parties had made promises, but showed no signs of keeping them. People began to approach the PWG asking if they could join up.But the politics of tendu, bamboo and other forest produce was seasonal. The perennial problem, the real bane of people’s lives, was the biggest landlord of all, the Forest Department. Every morning, forest officials, even the most junior of them, would appear in villages like a bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their fields, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit, grazing their cattle, from living. They brought elephants to overrun fields and scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, from the forest department’s point of view, these were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional activity, and the department was only implementing the Rule of Law. (Their sexual exploitation of women was just an added perk in a hardship posting.)Emboldened by the people’s participation in these struggles, the party decided to confront the forest department. It encouraged people to take over forest land and cultivate it. The forest department retaliated by burning new villages that came up in forest areas. In 1986, it announced a National Park in Bijapur, which meant the eviction of 60 villages. More than half of them had already been moved out, and construction of national park infrastructure had begun when the party moved in. It demolished the construction and stopped the eviction of the remaining villages. It prevented the forest department from entering the area. On a few occasions, officials were captured, tied to trees and beaten by villagers. It was cathartic revenge for generations of exploitation. Eventually, the forest department fled. Between 1986 and 2000, the party redistributed 3,00,000 acres of forest land. Today, Comrade Venu says, there are no landless peasants in Dandakaranya.For today’s generation of young people, the forest department is a distant memory, the stuff of stories mothers tell their children, about a mythological past of bondage and humiliation. For the older generation, freedom from the forest department meant genuine freedom. They could touch it, taste it. It meant far more than India’s Independence ever did. They began to rally to the party that had struggled with them.
The seven-squad team had come a long way. Its influence now ranged across a 60,000 sq km stretch of forest, thousands of villages and millions of people.But the departure of the forest department heralded the arrival of the police. That set off a cycle of bloodshed. Fake ‘encounters’ by the police, ambushes by the PWG. With the redistribution of land came other responsibilities: irrigation, agricultural productivity and the problem of an expanding population arbitrarily clearing forest land. A decision was taken to separate ‘mass work’ and ‘military work’.Today, Dandakaranya is administered by an elaborate structure of Janatana Sarkars (people’s governments). The organising principles came from the Chinese revolution and the Vietnam war. Each Janatana Sarkar is elected by a cluster of villages whose combined population can range from 500 to 5,000. It has nine departments: Krishi (agriculture), Vyapar-Udyog (trade and industry) Arthik (economic), Nyay (justice), Raksha (defence), Hospital (health), Jan Sampark (public relations), School-Riti Rivaj (education and culture), and Jungle. A group of Janatana Sarkars come under an Area Committee. Three area committees make up a Division. There are 10 divisions in Dandakaranya.“We have a Save the Jungle department now,” Comrade Venu says. “You must have read the government report that says forest has increased in Naxal areas?”
Ironically, Comrade Venu says, the first people to benefit from the party’s campaign against the forest department were the mukhias (village chiefs)—the Dwij brigade. They used their manpower and their resources to grab as much land as they could while the going was good. But then people began to approach the party with their “internal contradictions”, as Comrade Venu put it quaintly. The party began to turn its attention to issues of equity, class and injustice within tribal society. The big landlords sensed trouble on the horizon. As the party’s influence expanded, theirs had begun to wane. Increasingly, people were taking their problems to the party instead of to the mukhias. Old forms of exploitation began to be challenged. On the day of the first rain, people were traditionally supposed to till the mukhia’s land instead of their own. That stopped. They no longer offered them the first day’s picking of mahua or other forest produce. Obviously, something needed to be done.Enter Mahendra Karma, one of the biggest landlords in the region and at the time a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1990, he rallied a group of mukhias and landlords and started a campaign called the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (public awakening campaign). Their way of ‘awakening’ the ‘public’ was to form a hunting party of about 300 men to comb the forest, killing people, burning houses and molesting women. The then Madhya Pradesh government—Chhattisgarh had not yet been created—provided police back-up. In Maharashtra, something similar called ‘Democratic Front’ began its assault. People’s War responded to all of this in true People’s War style, by killing a few of the most notorious landlords. In a few months, the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the ‘white terror’—Comrade Venu’s term for it—faded. In 1998, Mahendra Karma, who had by now joined the Congress party, tried to revive the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan. This time it fizzled out even faster than before.
Armed Strugglers: A village militia, the ‘base force’ of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army
Then, in the summer of 2005, fortune favoured him. In April, the BJP government in Chhattisgarh signed two MoUs to set up integrated steel plants (the terms of which are secret). One for Rs 7,000 crore with Essar Steel in Bailadila, and the other for Rs 10,000 crore with Tata Steel in Lohandiguda. That same month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made his famous statement about the Maoists being the “Gravest Internal Security Threat” to India. (It was an odd thing to say at the time, because actually the opposite was true. The Congress government in Andhra Pradesh had just outmanoeuvred the Maoists, decimated them. They had lost about 1,600 of their cadre and were in complete disarray.) The PM’s statement sent the share value of mining companies soaring. It also sent a signal to the media that the Maoists were fair game for anyone who chose to go after them. In June 2005, Mahendra Karma called a secret meeting of mukhias in Kutroo village and announced the Salwa Judum (the Purification Hunt). A lovely melange of tribal earthiness and Dwij/Nazi sentiment.Unlike the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.Along with a steel mug of black tea, as a special treat, someone hands me a pair of earphones and switches on a little MP3 player. It’s a scratchy recording of Mr Manhar, the then SP Bijapur, briefing a junior officer over the wireless about the rewards and incentives the state and central governments are offering to ‘jagrit’ (awakened) villages, and to people who agree to move into camps. He then gives clear instructions that villages that refuse to surrender should be burnt and journalists who want to ‘cover’ Naxalites should be shot on sight. (I’d read about this in the papers long ago. When the story broke, as punishment—it’s not clear to whom—the SP was transferred to the State Human Rights Commission.)The first village the Salwa Judum burnt (on June 18, 2005) was Ambeli. Between June and December 2005, it burned, killed, raped and looted its way through hundreds of villages of south Dantewada. The centre of its operations were the districts of Bijapur and Bhairamgarh, near Bailadila, where Essar Steel’s new plant was proposed. Not coincidentally, these were also Maoist strongholds, where the Janatana Sarkars had done a great deal of work, especially in building water-harvesting structures. The Janatana Sarkars became the special target of the Salwa Judum’s attacks. Hundreds of people were killed in the most brutal ways. About 60,000 people moved into camps, some voluntarily, others out of terror. Of these, about 3,000 were appointed SPOs on a salary of Rs 1,500.For these paltry crumbs, young people, like Nilesh’s brother, have sentenced themselves to a life-sentence in a barbed wire enclosure. Cruel as they have been, they could end up being the worst victims of this horrible war. No Supreme Court judgement ordering the Salwa Judum to be dismantled can change their fate.The remaining hundreds of thousands of people went off the government radar. (But the development funds for these 644 villages did not. What happens to that little goldmine?) Many of them made their way to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa where they usually migrated to work as contract labour during the chilli-picking season. But tens of thousands fled into the forest, where they still remain, living without shelter, coming back to their fields and homes only in the daytime.In the slipstream of the Salwa Judum, a swarm of police stations and camps appeared. The idea was to provide carpet security for a ‘creeping reoccupation’ of Maoist-controlled territory. The assumption was that the Maoists would not dare to attack such a large concentration of security forces. The Maoists, for their part, realised that if they did not break that carpet security, it would amount to abandoning people whose trust they had earned, and with whom they had lived and worked for 25 years. They struck back in a series of attacks on the heart of the security grid.
On January 26, 2006, the PLGA attacked the Gangalaur police camp and killed seven people. On July 17, 2006, the Salwa Judum camp at Erabor was attacked, 20 people were killed and 150 injured. (You might have read about it: “Maoists attacked the relief camp set up by the state government to provide shelter to the villagers who had fled from their villages because of terror unleashed by the Naxalites.”) On December 13, 2006, they attacked the Basaguda ‘relief’ camp and killed three SPOs and a constable. On March 15, 2007, came the most audacious of them all. One hundred and twenty PLGA guerrillas attacked the Rani Bodili Kanya Ashram, a girls’ hostel that had been converted into a barrack for 80 Chhattisgarh Police (and SPOs) while the girls still lived in it as human shields. The PLGA entered the compound, cordoned off the annexe in which the girls lived, and attacked the barracks. Some 55 policemen and SPOs were killed. None of the girls was hurt. (The candid SP of Dantewada had shown me his PowerPoint presentation with horrifying photographs of the burned, disembowelled bodies of the policemen amidst the ruins of the blown-up school building. They were so macabre, it was impossible not to look away. He looked pleased at my reaction.)The attack on Rani Bodili caused an uproar in the country. Human rights organisations condemned the Maoists not just for their violence, but also for being anti-education and attacking schools. But in Dandakaranya, the Rani Bodili attack became a legend: songs, poems and plays were written about it.

We shouldn’t judge Charu Mazumdar too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug.

The Maoist counter-offensive did break the carpet security and gave people breathing space. The police and the Salwa Judum retreated into their camps, from which they now emerge—usually in the dead of night—only in packs of 300 or 1,000 to carry out cordon and search operations in villages. Gradually, except for the SPOs and their families, the rest of the people in the Salwa Judum camps began to return to their villages. The Maoists welcomed them back and announced that even SPOs could return if they genuinely, and publicly, regretted their actions. Young people began to flock to the PLGA. (The PLGA had been formally constituted in December 2000. Over the last 30 years, its armed squads had very gradually expanded into sections, sections had grown into platoons, and platoons into companies. But after the Salwa Judum’s depredations, the PLGA was rapidly able to declare battalion strength.)The Salwa Judum had not just failed, it had backfired badly.As we now know, it was not just a local operation by a small-time hood. Regardless of the doublespeak in the press, the Salwa Judum was a joint operation by the state government of Chhattisgarh and the Congress party which was in power at the Centre. It could not be allowed to fail. Not when all those MoUs were still waiting, like wilting hopefuls on the marriage market. The government was under tremendous pressure to come up with a new plan. They came up with Operation Green Hunt. The Salwa Judum SPOs are called Koya Commandos now. It has deployed the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Greyhounds, Scorpions, Cobras. And a policy that’s affectionately called WHAM—Winning Hearts and Minds.

Lohandiguda was never a Naxal area. The comrades moved in when graffiti saying ‘Naxali aao, hamein bachao’ began appearing on walls.

Significant wars are often fought in unlikely places. Free Market Capitalism defeated Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. Here in the forests of Dantewada, a battle rages for the soul of India. Plenty has been said about the deepening crisis in Indian democracy and the collusion between big corporations, major political parties and the security establishment. If anybody wants to do a quick spot check, Dantewada is the place to go.A draft report on State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task of Land Reform (Volume 1) said that Tata Steel and Essar Steel were the first financiers of the Salwa Judum. Because it was a government report, it created a flurry when it was reported in the press. (That fact has subsequently been dropped from the final report. Was it a genuine error, or did someone receive a gentle, integrated steel tap on the shoulder?)On October 12, 2009, the mandatory public hearing for Tata’s steel plant, meant to be held in Lohandiguda where local people could come, actually took place in a small hall inside the Collectorate in Jagdalpur, many miles away, cordoned off with massive security. A hired audience of 50 tribals was brought in a guarded convoy of government jeeps. After the meeting, the district collector congratulated ‘the people of Lohandiguda’ for their cooperation. The local newspapers reported the lie, even though they knew better. (The advertisements rolled in.) Despite villagers’ objections, land acquisition for the project has begun.The Maoists are not the only ones who seek to depose the Indian State. It’s already been deposed several times by Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism.

In true colonial fashion, they send Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, the Sikhs to Kashmir, and the Tamilians to Assam.

Lohandiguda, a five-hour drive from Dantewada, never used to be a Naxalite area. But it is now. Comrade Joori, who sat next to me while I ate the ant chutney, works in the area. She said they decided to move in after graffiti had begun to appear on the walls of village houses, saying, Naxali aao, hamein bachao (Naxals come and save us)! A few months ago, Vimal Meshram, president of the village panchayat, was shot dead in the market. “He was Tata’s man,” Joori says. “He was forcing people to give up their land and accept compensation. It’s good that he’s been finished. We lost a comrade too. They shot him. D’you want more chapoli?” She’s only 20. “We won’t let the Tatas come there. People don’t want them.” Joori is not PLGA. She’s in the Chetna Natya Manch (CNM), the cultural wing of the party. She sings. She writes songs. She’s from Abujhmad. (She’s married to Comrade Madhav. She fell in love with his singing when he visited her village with a CNM troupe.)I feel I ought to say something at this point. About the futility of violence, about the unacceptability of summary executions. But what should I suggest they do? Go to court? Do a dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi? A rally? A relay hunger strike? It sounds ridiculous. The promoters of the New Economic Policy—who find it so easy to say “There Is No Alternative”—should be asked to suggest an alternative Resistance Policy. A specific one, to these specific people, in this specific forest. Here. Now. Which party should they vote for? Which democratic institution in this country should they approach? Which door did the Narmada Bachao Andolan not knock on during the years and years it fought against Big Dams on the Narmada?
It’s dark. There’s a lot of activity in the camp, but I can’t see anything. Just points of light moving around. It’s hard to tell whether they are stars or fireflies or Maoists on the move. Little Mangtu appears from nowhere. I found out that he’s part of the first batch of the Young Communists Mobile School, who are being taught to read and write and tutored in basic Communist principles. (“Indoctrination of young minds!” our corporate media howls. The TV advertisements that brainwash children before they can even think are not seen as a form of indoctrination.) The young Communists are not allowed to carry guns or wear uniforms. But they trail the PLGA squads, with stars in their eyes, like groupies of a rock band.Mangtu has adopted me with a gently proprietorial air. He has filled my water bottle and says I should pack my bag. A whistle blows. The blue jhilli tent is dismantled and folded up in five minutes flat. Another whistle and all hundred comrades fall in line. Five rows. Comrade Raju is the Director of Ops. There’s a roll call. I’m in the line too, shouting out my number when Comrade Kamla who is in front of me, prompts me. (We count to twenty and then start from one, because that’s as far as most Gonds count. Twenty is enough for them. Maybe it should be enough for us too.) Chandu is in fatigues now, and carries a sten gun. In a low voice, Comrade Raju is briefing the group. It’s all in Gondi, I don’t understand a thing, but I keep hearing the word RV. Later Raju tells me it stands for Rendezvous! It’s a Gondi word now. “We make RV points so that in case we come under fire and people have to scatter, they know where to regroup.” He cannot possibly know the kind of panic this induces in me. Not because I’m scared of being fired on, but because I’m scared of being lost. I’m a directional dyslexic, capable of getting lost between my bedroom and my bathroom. What will I do in 60,000 square kilometres of forest? Come hell or high water, I’m going to be holding on to Comrade Raju’s pallu.

Dandakaranya was full of people who had many names, fluid identities. It was balm to me, the idea. Not to be stuck with yourself, be someone else.

Before we start walking, Comrade Venu comes up to me: “Okaythen comrade. I’ll take your leave.” I’m taken aback. He looks like a little mosquito in a woollen cap and chappals, surrounded by his guards, three women, three men. Heavily armed. “We are very grateful to you comrade, for coming all the way here,” he says. Once again the handshake, the clenched fist. “Lal Salaam Comrade.” He disappears into the forest, the Keeper of the Keys. And in a moment, it’s as though he was never here. I’m a little bereft. But I have hours of recordings to listen to. And as the days turn into weeks, I will meet many people who paint colour and detail into the grid he drew for me. We begin to walk in the opposite direction. Comrade Raju, smelling of Iodex from a mile off, says with a happy smile, “My knees are gone. I can only walk if I have had a fistful of painkillers.”Comrade Raju speaks perfect Hindi and has a deadpan way of telling the funniest stories. He worked as an advocate in Raipur for 18 years. Both he and his wife Malti were party members and part of its city network. At the end of 2007, one of the key people in the Raipur network was arrested, tortured and eventually turned informer. He was driven around Raipur in a closed police vehicle and made to point out his former colleagues. Comrade Malti was one of them. On January 22, 2008, she was arrested along with several others. The charge against her is that she mailed CDs containing video evidence of Salwa Judum atrocities to several members of Parliament. Her case rarely comes up for hearing because the police know their case is flimsy. But the new Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) allows the police to hold her without bail for several years. “Now the government has deployed several battalions of Chhattisgarh police to protect the poor members of Parliament from their own mail,” Comrade Raju says. He did not get caught because he was in Dandakaranya at the time, attending a meeting. He’s been here ever since. His two schoolgoing children, who were left alone at home, were interrogated extensively by the police. Finally, their home was packed up and they went to live with an uncle. Comrade Raju received news of them for the first time only a few weeks ago. What gives him this strength, this ability to hold on to his acid humour? What keeps them all going, despite all they have endured? Their faith and hope—and love—for the Party. I encounter it again and again, in the deepest, most personal ways.

This army is more Gandhian than any Gandhian, even in sabotage. Before burning a police vehicle, it’s stripped down, the parts cannibalised.

We’re moving in single file now. Myself and one hundred “senselessly violent”, bloodthirsty insurgents. I looked around at the camp before we left. There are no signs that almost a hundred people had camped here, except for some ash where the fires had been. I cannot believe this army. As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist. But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt, for example, it is stripped down and every part cannibalised. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. (The new instructions from the high command are that captured vehicles should be buried and not cremated. So they can be resurrected when needed.) Should I write a play, I wonder—Gandhi Get Your Gun? Or will I be lynched?We’re walking in pitch darkness and dead silence. I’m the only one using a torch, pointed down so that all I can see in its circle of light are Comrade Kamla’s bare heels in her scuffed, black chappals, showing me exactly where to put my feet. She is carrying 10 times more weight than I am. Her backpack, her rifle, a huge bag of provisions on her head, one of the large cooking pots and two shoulder bags full of vegetables. The bag on her head is perfectly balanced, and she can scramble down slopes and slippery rock pathways without so much as touching it. She is a miracle. It turns out to be a long walk. I’m grateful to the history lesson because apart from everything else it gave my feet a rest for a whole day. It’s the most beautiful thing, walking in the forest at night.And I’ll be doing it night after night.
We’re going to a celebration of the centenary of the 1910 Bhumkal rebellion in which the Koyas rose up against the British. Bhumkal means earthquake. Comrade Raju says people will walk for days together to come for the celebration. The forest must be full of people on the move. There are celebrations in all the DK divisions. We are privileged because Comrade Leng, the Master of Ceremonies, is walking with us. In Gondi, Leng means ‘the voice’. Comrade Leng is a tall, middle-aged man from Andhra Pradesh, a colleague of the legendary and beloved singer-poet Gadar, who founded the radical cultural organisation Jan Natya Manch (JNM) in 1972. Eventually, JNM became a formal part of the PWG and in Andhra Pradesh could draw audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. Comrade Leng joined in 1977 and became a famous singer in his own right. He lived in Andhra through the worst repression, the era of ‘encounter’ killings in which friends died almost every day. He himself was picked up one night from his hospital bed, by a woman Superintendent of Police masquerading as a doctor. He was taken to the forest outside Warangal to be ‘encountered’. But luckily, Gadar got the news and managed to raise an alarm. When the PW decided to start a cultural organisation in DK in 1998, Comrade Leng was sent to head the Chetna Natya Manch. And here he is now, walking with me, for some reason wearing an olive-green shirt and purple pyjamas with pink bunnies on them. “There are 10,000 members in cnm now,” he told me. “We have 500 songs, in Hindi, Gondi, Chhattisgarhi and Halbi. We have printed a book with 140 of our songs. Everybody writes songs.” The first time I spoke to him, he sounded very grave, very single-minded. But days later, sitting around a fire, still in those pyjamas, he tells us about a very successful, mainstream Telugu film director (a friend of his) who always plays a Naxalite in his own films. “I asked him,” Comrade Leng said in his lovely Telugu-accented Hindi, “why do you think Naxalites are always like this?”—and he did a deft caricature of a crouched, high-stepping, hunted-looking man emerging from the forest with an AK-47, and left us screaming with laughter.

Happiness is taken seriously in Dandakaranya. People walk for miles, for days, to sing and dance together. This is their defiance.

I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to the Bhumkal celebrations. I fear I’ll see traditional tribal dances stiffened by Maoist propaganda, rousing, rhetorical speeches and an obedient audience with glazed eyes. We arrive at the grounds quite late in the evening. A temporary monument, of bamboo scaffolding wrapped in red cloth, has been erected. On top, above the hammer and sickle of the Maoist Party, is the bow and arrow of the Janatana Sarkar, wrapped in silver foil. Appropriate, the hierarchy. The stage is huge, also temporary, on a sturdy scaffolding covered by a thick layer of mud plaster. Already, there are small fires scattered around the ground, people have begun to arrive and are cooking their evening meal. They’re only silhouettes in the dark. We thread our way through them (lalsalaam, lalsalaam, lalsalaam) and keep going for about 15 minutes until we re-enter the forest.At our new campsite, we have to fall-in again. Another roll call. And then instructions about sentry positions and ‘firing arcs’—decisions about who will cover which area in the event of a police attack. RV points are fixed again.
Boy, What A Smile: Comrade Kamla, 17, wearing a pistol on her hip. Also, a miracle.
An advance party has arrived and cooked dinner already. For dessert, Kamla brings me a wild guava that she has plucked on the walk and squirrelled away for me.From dawn, there is the sense of more and more people gathering for the day’s celebration. There’s a buzz of excitement building up. People who haven’t seen each other in a long time meet again. We can hear the sound of mikes being tested. Flags, banners, posters, buntings are going up. A poster with the pictures of the five people who were killed in Ongnaar the day we arrived has appeared.I’m drinking tea with Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Rupi. Comrade Narmada talks about the many years she worked in Gadchiroli before becoming the DK head of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan. Rupi and Maase have been urban activists in Andhra Pradesh and tell me about the long years of struggle by women within the party, not just for their rights, but also to make the party see that equality between men and women is seen as central to a dream of a just society. We talk about the ’70s and the stories of women within the Naxalite movement who were disillusioned by male comrades who thought themselves great revolutionaries but were hobbled by the same old patriarchy, the same old chauvinism. Maase says things have changed a lot since then, though they still have a way to go. (The party’s central committee and politburo have no women yet.)Around noon, another PLGA contingent arrives. This one is headed by a tall, lithe, boyish-looking man. This comrade has two names—Sukhdev, and Gudsa Usendi—neither of them his. Sukhdev is the name of a very beloved comrade who was martyred. (In this war, only the dead are safe enough to use their real names.) As for Gudsa Usendi, many comrades have been Gudsa Usendi at one point or another. (A few months ago, it was Comrade Raju.) Gudsa Usendi is the name of the party’s spokesperson for Dandakaranya. So even though Sukhdev spends the rest of the trip with me, I have no idea how I’d ever find him again. I’d recognise his laugh anywhere though. He came to DK in ’88, he says, when the PWG decided to send one-third of its forces from north Telangana into DK. He’s nicely dressed, in ‘civil’ (Gondi for ‘civilian clothes’) as opposed to ‘dress’ (the Maoist ‘uniform’) and could pass off as a young executive. I ask him why no uniform. He says he’s been travelling and has just come back from the Keshkal ghats near Kanker. There are reports of 3 million tonnes of bauxite that a company called Vedanta has its eye on.Bingo. Ten on ten for my instincts.Sukhdev says he went there to measure the people’s temperature. To see if they were prepared to fight. “They want squads now. And guns.” He throws his head back and roars with laughter, “I told them it’s not so easy, bhai.” From the stray wisps of conversation and the ease with which he carries his AK-47, I can tell he’s also high up and hands-on PLGA.
Jungle post arrives. There’s a biscuit for me! It’s from Comrade Venu. On a tiny piece of paper, folded and refolded, he has written down the lyrics of a song he promised he would send me. Comrade Narmada smiles when she reads them. She knows this story. It goes back to the ’80s, around the time when people first began to trust the party and come to it with their problems—their ‘inner contradictions’, as Comrade Venu put it. Women were among the first to come. One evening an old lady sitting by the fire got up and sang a song for the dada log. She was a Maadiya, among whom it was customary for women to remove their blouses and remain bare-breasted after they were married.
Jumper polo intor Dada, DakonileyTaane tasom intor Dada, DakonileyBata papam kittom Dada, DakonileyDuniya kadile maata Dada, Dakoniley(They say we cannot keep ourblouses, Dada, DakonileyThey make us take them off, Dada,In what way have we sinned, Dada,The world’s changed, has it not Dada)Aatum hatteke Dada, DakonileyAada nanga dantom Dada, DakonileyId pisval manni Dada, DakonileyMava koyaturku vehat Dada, Dakoniley(But when we go to market Dada,We have to go half-naked Dada,We don’t want this life Dada,Tell our ancestors this Dada).
This was the first women’s issue the party decided to campaign against. It had to be handled delicately, with surgical tools. In 1986, it set up the Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (AMS) which evolved into the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan and now has 90,000 enrolled members. It could well be the largest women’s organisation in the country. (They’re all Maoists by the way, all 90,000 of them. Are they going to be ‘wiped out’? And what about the 10,000 members of CNM? Them too?) KAMS campaigns against the adivasi traditions of forced marriage and abduction. Against the custom of making menstruating women live outside the village in a hut in the forest. Against bigamy and domestic violence. It hasn’t won all its battles, but then which feminists have? For instance, in Dandakaranya, even today women are not allowed to sow seeds. In party meetings, men agree that this is unfair and ought to be done away with. But, in practice, they simply don’t allow it. So, the party decided that women would sow seeds on common land which belongs to the Janatana Sarkar. On that land, they sow seed, grow vegetables and build check dams. A half-victory, not a whole one.

In most jan adalats, at least the collective is physically present to make a decision. It’s not made by judges who’ve lost touch with ordinary life.

As police repression has grown in Bastar, the women of KAMS have become a formidable force and rally in their hundreds, sometimes thousands, to physically confront the police. The very fact that KAMS exists has radically changed traditional attitudes and eased many of the traditional forms of discrimination against women. For many young women, joining the party, in particular the PLGA, became a way of escaping the suffocation of their own society. Comrade Sushila, a senior office-bearer of KAMS talks about the Salwa Judum’s rage against KAMS women. She says one of their slogans was Hum do bibi layenge! Layenge! (We will have two wives! We will!). A lot of the rape and bestial sexual mutilation was directed at members of KAMS. Many young women who witnessed the savagery then joined the PLGA and now women make up 45 per cent of its cadre. Comrade Narmada sends for some of them and they join us in a while.Comrade Rinki has very short hair. A bob-cut, as they say in Gondi. It’s brave of her, because here, ‘bob-cut’ means ‘Maoist’. For the police, that’s more than enough evidence to warrant summary execution. Comrade Rinki’s village, Korma, was attacked by the Naga battalion and the Salwa Judum in 2005. At that time, Rinki was part of the village militia. So were her friends Lukki and Sukki, who were also members of KAMS. After burning the village, the Naga battalion caught Lukki and Sukki and one other girl, gang-raped and killed them. “They raped them on the grass,” Rinki says, “but after it was over, there was no grass left.” It’s been years now, the Naga battalion has gone, but the police still come. “They come whenever they need women, or chickens.”
Rest Station: A Maoist ‘camp’. When they move, all that will remain is the ash from the kitchen fire.
Ajitha has a bob-cut too. The Judum came to Korseel, her village, and killed three people by drowning them in a nallah. Ajitha was with the militia and followed the Judum at a distance to a place close to the village called Paral Nar Todak. She watched them rape six women and shoot a man in his throat.Comrade Laxmi, who is a beautiful girl with a long plait, tells me she watched the Judum burn 30 houses in her village, Jojor. “We had no weapons then,” she says, “we could do nothing but watch.” She joined the PLGA soon after. Laxmi was one of the 150 guerrillas who walked through the jungle for three-and-a-half months in 2008, to Nayagarh in Orissa, to raid a police armoury from where they captured 1,200 rifles and 2,00,000 rounds of ammunition.Comrade Sumitra joined the PLGA in 2004, before the Salwa Judum began its rampage. She joined, she says, because she wanted to escape from home. “Women are controlled in every way,” she told me. “In our village, girls were not allowed to climb trees; if they did, they would have to pay a fine of Rs 500 or a hen. If a man hits a woman and she hits him back she has to give the village a goat. Men go off to the hills for months together to hunt. Women are not allowed to go near the kill, the best part of the meat goes to men. Women are not allowed to eat eggs.” Good reason to join a guerrilla army?Sumitra tells the story of two of her friends, Telam Parvati and Kamla, who worked with KAMS. Telam Parvati was from Polekaya village in south Bastar. Like everyone else from there, she too watched the Salwa Judum burn her village. She then joined the PLGA and went to work in the Keshkal ghats. In 2009, she and Kamla had just finished organising the March 8 Women’s Day celebrations in the area. They were together in a little hut just outside a village called Vadgo. The police surrounded the hut at night and began to fire. Kamla fired back, but she was killed. Parvati escaped, but was found and killed the next day.That’s what happened last year on Women’s Day. And here’s a press report from a national newspaper about Women’s Day this year:
Bastar rebels bat for women’s rightsSahar Khan, Mail Today, Raipur, March 7, 2010
The government may have pulled out all stops to combat the Maoist menace in the country. But a section of rebels in Chhattisgarh has more pressing matters in hand than survival. With International Women’s Day around the corner, Maoists in the Bastar region of the state have called for week-long “celebrations” to advocate women’s rights. Posters were also put up in Bijapur, a part of Bastar district. The call by the self-styled champions of women’s rights has left the state police astonished. Inspector-general (IG) of Bastar, T.J. Longkumer said, “I have never seen such an appeal from the Naxalites, who believe only in violence and bloodshed.”
And then the report goes on to say:
“I think the Maoists are trying to counter our highly successful Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (mass awareness campaign). We started the ongoing campaign with an aim to win popular support for Operation Green Hunt, which was launched by the police to root out Left-wing extremists,” the IG said.
This cocktail of malice and ignorance is not unusual. Gudsa Usendi, chronicler of the party’s present, knows more about this than most people. His little computer and MP3 recorder are full of press statements, denials, corrections, party literature, lists of the dead, TV clips and audio and video material. “The worst thing about being Gudsa Usendi,” he says, “is issuing clarifications which are never published. We could bring out a thick book of our unpublished clarifications about the lies they tell about us.” He speaks without a trace of indignation, in fact, with some amusement.“What’s the most ridiculous charge you’ve had to deny?”He thinks back. “In 2007, we had to issue a statement saying, ‘Nahin bhai, hamne gai ko hathode se nahin mara (No brother, we did not kill the cows with a hammer).’ In 2007, the Raman Singh government announced a Gai Yojana (cow scheme), an election promise, a cow for every adivasi. One day the TV channels and newspapers reported that Naxalites had attacked a herd of cows and bludgeoned them to death—with hammers—because they were anti-Hindu, anti-BJP. You can imagine what happened. We issued a denial. Hardly anybody carried it. Later, it turned out that the man who had been given the cows to distribute was a rogue. He sold them and said we had ambushed him and killed the cows.”And the most serious?“Oh, there are dozens, they are running a campaign, after all. When the Salwa Judum started, the first day they attacked a village called Ambeli, burned it down and then all of them—SPOs, the Naga battalion, police—moved towards Kotrapal...you must have heard about Kotrapal? It’s a famous village, it has been burnt 22 times for refusing to surrender. When the Judum reached Kotrapal, our militia was waiting for it. They had prepared an ambush. Two SPOs died. We captured seven, the rest ran away. The next day the newspapers reported that the Naxalites had massacred poor adivasis. Some said we had killed hundreds. Even a respectable magazine like Frontline said we had killed 18 innocent adivasis. Even K. Balagopal, the human rights activist, who is usually meticulous about facts, even he said this. We sent a clarification. Nobody published it. Later, in his book, Balagopal acknowledged his mistake.... But who noticed?”
Remembering The Martyrs: Pictures of slain comrades displayed on Bhumkal Day
I asked what happened to the seven people who were captured. “The area committee called a jan adalat (people’s court). Four thousand people attended it. They listened to the whole story. Two of the SPOs were sentenced to death. Five were warned and let off. The people decided. Even with informers—which is becoming a huge problem nowadays—people listen to the case, the stories, the confessions and say, ‘Iska hum risk nahin le sakte (We’re not prepared to take the risk of trusting this person)’, or ‘Iska risk hum lenge (We are prepared to take the risk of trusting this person)’. The press always reports about informers who are killed. Never about the many who are let off. So everybody thinks it is some bloodthirsty procedure in which everybody is always killed. It’s not about revenge, it’s about survival and saving future lives.... Of course, there are problems, we’ve made terrible mistakes, we have even killed the wrong people in our ambushes thinking they were policemen, but it is not the way it’s portrayed in the media.”The dreaded ‘People’s Courts’. How can we accept them? Or approve this form of rude justice?On the other hand, what about ‘encounters’, fake and otherwise—the worst form of summary justice—that get policemen and soldiers bravery medals, cash awards and out-of-turn promotions from the Indian government? The more they kill, the more they are rewarded. ‘Bravehearts’, they are called, the ‘Encounter Specialists’. ‘Anti-nationals’, we are called, those of us who dare to question them. And what about the Supreme Court that brazenly admitted it did not have enough evidence to sentence Mohammed Afzal (accused in the December 2001 Parliament attack) to death, but did so anyway, because “the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender”.At least in the case of the Kotrapal jan adalat, the collective was physically present to make its own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, presuming to speak on behalf of an absent collective.What should the people of Kotrapal have done, I wonder? Sent for the police?
The sound of drums has become really loud. It’s Bhumkal time. We walk to the grounds. I can hardly believe my eyes. There is a sea of people, the most wild, beautiful people, dressed in the most wild, beautiful ways. The men seem to have paid much more attention to themselves than the women. They have feathered headgear and painted tattoos on their faces. Many have eye make-up and white, powdered faces. There’s lots of militia, girls in saris of breathtaking colours with rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. There are old people, children, and red buntings arc across the sky. The sun is sharp and high. Comrade Leng speaks. And several office-holders of the various Janatana Sarkars. Comrade Niti, an extraordinary woman who has been with the party since 1997, is such a threat to the nation that in January 2007 more than 700 policemen surrounded Innar village because they heard she was there. Comrade Niti is considered to be so dangerous and is being hunted with such desperation not because she has led many ambushes (which she has), but because she is an adivasi woman who is loved by people in the village and is a real inspiration to young people. She speaks with her AK on her shoulder. (It’s a gun with a story. Almost everyone’s gun has a story: who it was snatched from, how, and by whom.)

‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. Infest or infestation implies pests. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out.

A CNM troupe performs a play about the Bhumkal uprising. The evil white colonisers wear hats and golden straw for hair, and bully and beat adivasis to pulp—causing endless delight in the audience. Another troupe from south Gangalaur performs a play called Nitir Judum Pito (Story of the Blood Hunt). Joori translates for me. It’s the story of two old people who go looking for their daughter’s village. As they walk through the forest, they get lost because everything is burnt and unrecognisable. The Salwa Judum has even burned the drums and the musical instruments. There are no ashes because it has been raining. They cannot find their daughter. In their sorrow, the old couple starts to sing, and hearing them, the voice of their daughter sings back to them from the ruins: the sound of our village has been silenced, she sings. There’s no more pounding of rice, no more laughter by the well. No more birds, no more bleating goats. The taut string of happiness has been snapped.Her father sings back: my beautiful daughter, don’t cry today. Everyone who is born must die. These trees around us will fall, flowers will bloom and fade, one day this world will grow old. But who are we dying for? One day our looters will learn, one day Truth will prevail, but our people will never forget you, not for thousands of years.A few more speeches. Then the drumming and the dancing begins. Each Janatana Sarkar has its own troupe. Each troupe has prepared its own dance. They arrive one by one, with huge drums and they dance wild stories. The only character every troupe has in common is Bad Mining Man, with a helmet and dark glasses, and usually smoking a cigarette. But there’s nothing stiff, or mechanical, about their dancing. As they dance, the dust rises. The sound of drums becomes deafening. Gradually, the crowd begins to sway. And then it begins to dance. They dance in little lines of six or seven, men and women separate, with their arms around each other’s waists. Thousands of people. This is what they’ve come for. For this. Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing, to put feathers in their turbans and flowers in their hair, to put their arms around each other and drink mahua and dance through the night. No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilisation that seeks to annihilate them.I can’t believe all this is happening right under the noses of the police. Right in the midst of Operation Green Hunt.At first, the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, standing aside with their guns. But then, one by one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of olive-green dancers, swirling with all the other colours. And then, as sisters and brothers and parents and children and friends who haven’t met for months, years sometimes, encounter each other, the lines break up and re-form and the olive green is distributed among the swirling saris and flowers and drums and turbans. It surely is a People’s Army. For now, at least. And what Chairman Mao said about the guerrillas being the fish and people being the water they swim in, is, at this moment, literally true.Chairman Mao. He’s here too. A little lonely, perhaps, but present. There’s a photograph of him, up on a red cloth screen. Marx too. And Charu Mazumdar, the founder and chief theoretician of the Naxalite Movement. His abrasive rhetoric fetishises violence, blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal. Standing here, on Bhumkal day, I can’t help thinking that his analysis, so vital to the structure of this revolution, is so removed from its emotion and texture. When he said that only “an annihilation campaign” could produce “the new man who will defy death and be free from all thought of self-interest”—could he have imagined that this ancient people, dancing into the night, would be the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest?
It’s a great disservice to everything that is happening here that the only thing that seems to make it to the outside world is the stiff, unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party that has evolved from a problematic past. When Charu Mazumdar famously said, “China’s Chairman is our Chairman and China’s Path is Our Path,” he was prepared to extend it to the point where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan committed genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), because at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too, over the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid achievements of the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat.... And yet, despite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone, we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of “the non-violent way” and his notion of trusteeship: “The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.”How strange it is, though, that the contemporary tsars of the Indian Establishment—the State that crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly—should now be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path.Upside Down. Inside Out.
The Damned: Villagers from the submergence area of the proposed Bodhghat dam
China’s Path has changed. China has become an imperial power now, preying on other countries, other people’s resources. But the Party is still right, only, the Party has changed its mind.When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to their every need, then it genuinely is a People’s Party, its army genuinely a People’s Army. But after the Revolution how easily this love affair can turn into a bitter marriage. How easily the People’s Army can turn upon the people. Today in Dandakaranya, the Party wants to keep the bauxite in the mountain. Tomorrow, will it change its mind? But can we, should we let apprehensions about the future immobilise us in the present?

How strange that the contemporary tsars of the Indian establishment now say what Charu Mazumdar said: China’s Path is Our Path.

The dancing will go on all night. I walk back to the camp. Maase is there, awake. We chat late into the night. I give her my copy of Neruda’s Captain’s Verses (I brought it along, just in case). She asks, again and again, “What do they think of us outside? What do students say? Tell me about the women’s movement, what are the big issues now?” She asks about me, my writing. I try and give her an honest account of my chaos. Then she starts to talk about herself, how she joined the party. She tells me that her partner was killed last May, in a fake encounter. He was arrested in Nashik, and taken to Warangal to be killed. “They must have tortured him badly.” She was on her way to meet him when she heard he had been arrested. She’s been in the forest ever since. After a long silence, she tells me she was married once before, years ago. “He was killed in an encounter too,” she says, and adds with heart-breaking precision, “but in a real one.”I lie awake on my jhilli, thinking of Maase’s protracted sadness, listening to the drums and the sounds of protracted happiness from the grounds, and thinking about Charu Mazumdar’s idea of protracted war, the central precept of the Maoist Party. This is what makes people think the Maoists’ offer to enter ‘peace talks’ is a hoax, a ploy to get breathing space to regroup, re-arm themselves and go back to waging protracted war. What is protracted war? Is it a terrible thing in itself, or does it depend on the nature of the war? What if the people here in Dandakaranya had not waged their protracted war for the last 30 years, where would they be now?And are the Maoists the only ones who believe in protracted war? Almost from the moment India became a sovereign nation, it turned into a colonial power, annexing territory, waging war. It has never hesitated to use military interventions to address political problems—Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, Nagaland, Manipur, Telangana, Assam, Punjab, the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now across the tribal areas of Central India. Tens of thousands have been killed with impunity, hundreds of thousands tortured. All of this behind the benign mask of democracy. Who have these wars been waged against? Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Communists, Dalits, Tribals and, most of all, against the poor who dare to question their lot instead of accepting the crumbs that are flung at them. It’s hard not to see that the Indian State is an essentially upper-caste Hindu State (regardless of the party in power) which harbours a reflexive hostility towards the ‘other’. One that, in true colonial fashion, sends the Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, Sikhs to Kashmir, Kashmiris to Orissa, Tamilians to Assam and so on. If this isn’t protracted war, what is?Unpleasant thoughts on a beautiful, starry night. Sukhdev is smiling to himself, his face lit by his computer screen. He’s a crazy workaholic. I ask him what’s funny. “I was thinking about the journalists who came last year for the Bhumkal celebrations. They came for a day or two. One posed with my AK, had himself photographed and then went back and called us Killing Machines or something.”
The dancing hasn’t stopped and it’s daybreak. The lines are still going, hundreds of young people still dancing. “They won’t stop,” Comrade Raju says, “not until we start packing up.”On the grounds I run into Comrade Doctor. He’s been running a little medical camp on the edge of the dance floor. I want to kiss his fat cheeks. Why can’t he be at least 30 people instead of just one? Why can’t he be one thousand people? I ask him what it’s looking like, the health of Dandakaranya. His reply makes my blood run cold. Most of the people he has seen, he says, including those in the PLGA, have a haemoglobin count that’s between five and six (when the standard for Indian women is 11.) There’s TB caused by more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young children are suffering from Protein Energy Malnutrition Grade II, in medical terminology called Kwashiorkor. (I looked it up later. It’s a word derived from the Ga language of Coastal Ghana and means “the sickness a baby gets when the new baby comes”. Basically the old baby stops getting mother’s milk, and there’s not enough food to provide it nutrition.) “It’s an epidemic here, like in Biafra,” Comrade Doctor says, “I have worked in villages before, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”Apart from this, there’s malaria, osteoporosis, tapeworm, severe ear and tooth infections and primary amenorrhea—which is when malnutrition during puberty causes a woman’s menstrual cycle to disappear, or never appear in the first place.“There are no clinics in this forest apart from one or two in Gadchiroli. No doctors. No medicines.”He’s off now, with his little team, on an eight-day trek to Abujhmad. He’s in ‘dress’ too, Comrade Doctor. So, if they find him, they’ll kill him.
Comrade Raju says that it isn’t safe for us to continue to camp here. We have to move. Leaving Bhumkal involves a lot of goodbyes spread over time.
Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam,Jaane wale saathiyon ko lal lal salaam(Red Salute to departing comrades)Phir milenge, phir milengeDandakaranya jungle mein phir milenge(We’ll meet again, some day, in the Dandakaranya forest).
It’s never taken lightly, the ceremony of arrival and departure, because everybody knows that when they say “we’ll meet again” they actually mean “we may never meet again”.Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Rupi are going separate ways. Will I ever see them again?So, once again, we walk. It’s becoming hotter every day. Kamla picks the first fruit of the tendu for me. It tastes like chikoo. I’ve become a tamarind fiend. This time we camp near a stream. Women and men take turns to bathe in batches. In the evening, Comrade Raju receives a whole packet of ‘biscuits’. News:
60 people arrested in Manpur Division at the end of Jan 2010 have not yet been produced in Court.
Huge contingents of police have arrived in South Bastar. Indiscriminate attacks are on.
On Nov 8, 2009, in Kachlaram Village, Bijapur Jila, Dirko Madka (60) and Kovasi Suklu (68) were killed
On Nov 24, Madavi Baman (15) was killed in Pangodi village
On Dec 3, Madavi Budram from Korenjad also killed
On Dec 11, Gumiapal village, Darba Division, 7 people killed (names yet to come)
On Dec 15, Kotrapal village, Veko Sombar and Madavi Matti (both with KAMS) killed
On Dec 30, Vechapal village Poonem Pandu and Poonem Motu (father and son) killed
On Jan 2010 (date unknown), head of the Janatana Sarkar in Kaika village, Gangalaur, killed
On Jan 9, 4 people killed in Surpangooden village, Jagargonda Area
On Jan 10, 3 people killed in Pullem Pulladi village (no names yet)
On Jan 25, 7 people killed in Takilod village, Indravati Area
On Feb 10 (Bhumkal Day), Kumli raped and killed in Dumnaar Village, Abujhmad. She was from a village called Paiver
2,000 troops of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) are camped in the Rajnandgaon forests
5,000 additional BSF troops have arrived in Kanker
And then:
PLGA quota filled.
Some dated newspapers have arrived too. There’s a lot of press about Naxalites. One screaming headline sums up the political climate perfectly: ‘Khadedo, Maaro, Samarpan Karao (Eliminate, kill, make them surrender).’ Below that: ‘Vaarta ke liye loktantra ka dwar khula hai’ (Democracy’s door is always open for talks).’ A second says the Maoists are growing cannabis to make money. The third has an editorial saying that the area we’ve camped in and are walking through is entirely under police control.The young Communists take the clips away to practice their reading. They walk around the camp reading the anti-Maoist articles loudly in radio-announcer voices.
New day. New place. We’re camped on the outskirts of Usir village, under huge mahua trees. The mahua has just begun to flower and is dropping its pale green blossoms like jewels on the forest floor. The air is suffused with its slightly heady smell. We’re waiting for the children from the Bhatpal school which was closed down after the Ongnaar encounter. It’s been turned into a police camp. The children have been sent home. This is also true of the schools in Nelwad, Moonjmetta, Edka, Vedomakot and Dhanora.
The Bhatpal school children don’t show up.
Bob-Cut Brigade: In Bastar, women with a bob-cut haircut can get you killed
Comrade Niti (Most Wanted) and Comrade Vinod lead us on a long walk to see the series of water-harvesting structures and irrigation ponds that have been built by the local Janatana Sarkar. Comrade Niti talks about the range of agricultural problems they have to deal with. Only 2 per cent of the land is irrigated. In Abujhmad, ploughing was unheard of until 10 years ago. In Gadchiroli on the other hand, hybrid seeds and chemical pesticides are edging their way in. “We need urgent help in the agriculture department,” Comrade Vinod says. “We need people who know about seeds, organic pesticides, permaculture. With a little help we could do a lot.”Comrade Ramu is the farmer in charge of the Janatana Sarkar area. He proudly shows us around the fields, where they grow rice, brinjal, gongura, onions, kohlrabi. Then, with equal pride, he shows us a huge but bone-dry irrigation pond. What’s this? “This one doesn’t even have water during the rainy season. It’s dug in the wrong place,” he says, a smile wrapped around his face. “It’s not ours, it was dug by the Looti Sarkar (the government that loots).” There are two parallel systems of government here, Janatana Sarkar and Looti Sarkar.I think of what Comrade Venu said to me: they want to crush us, not only because of the minerals, but because we are offering the world an alternative model.It’s not an Alternative yet, this idea of Gram Swaraj with a Gun. There’s too much hunger, too much sickness here. But it has certainly created the possibilities for an alternative. Not for the whole world, not for Alaska, or New Delhi, nor even perhaps for the whole of Chhattisgarh, but for itself. For Dandakaranya. It’s the world’s best-kept secret. It has laid the foundations for an alternative to its own annihilation. It has defied history. Against the greatest odds it has forged a blueprint for its own survival. It needs help and imagination, it needs doctors, teachers, farmers.It does not need war.But if war is all it gets, it will fight back.Over the next few days, I meet women who work with KAMS, various office-bearers of the Janatana Sarkars, members of the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (DAKMS), the families of people who had been killed, and just ordinary people trying to cope with life in these terrifying times.
I met three sisters—Sukhiari, Sukdai and Sukkali—not young, perhaps in their 40s, from Narayanpur district. They have been in KAMS for 12 years. The villagers depend on them to deal with the police. “The police come in groups of two to three hundred. They steal everything: jewellery, chickens, pigs, pots and pans, bows and arrows,” Sukkali says, “they won’t even leave a knife.” Her house in Innar has been burned twice, once by the Naga battalion and once by the CRPF Sukhiari has been arrested and jailed in Jagdalpur for seven months. “Once they took away the whole village, saying the men were all Naxals.” Sukhiari followed with all the women and children. They surrounded the police station and refused to leave until the men were freed. “Whenever they take someone away,” Sukdai says, “you have to go immediately and snatch them back. Before they write any report. Once they write in their book, it becomes very difficult.”Sukhiari, who as a child was abducted and forcibly married to an older man (she ran away and went to live with her sister), now organises mass rallies, speaks at meetings. The men depend on her for protection. I asked her what the party means to her. “Naxalvaad ka matlab hamara parivaar (Naxalvaad means our family). When we hear of an attack, it is like our family has been hurt,” Sukhiari says.I asked her if she knew who Mao was. She smiled shyly, “He was a leader. We’re working for his vision.”I met Comrade Somari Gawde. Twenty years old, and she has already served a two-year jail sentence in Jagdalpur. She was in Innar village on January 8, 2007, the day that 740 policemen laid a cordon around it because they had information that Comrade Niti was there. (She was, but she had left by the time they arrived.) But the village militia, of which Somari was a member, was still there. The police opened fire at dawn. They killed two boys, Suklal Gawde and Kachroo Gota. Then they caught three others, two boys, Dusri Salam and Ranai, and Somari. Dusri and Ranai were tied up and shot. Somari was beaten within an inch of her life. The police got a tractor with a trailer and loaded the dead bodies into it. Somari was made to sit with the dead bodies and taken to Narayanpur.

Booby-traps has become a Gondi word. Everyone smiles when they hear it. They know other words too: Cordon and Search, Advance, Retreat.

I met Chamri, mother of Comrade Dilip who was shot on July 6, 2009. She says that after they killed him, the police tied her son’s body to a pole, like an animal and carried it with them. (They need to produce bodies to get their cash rewards, before someone else muscles in on the kill.) Chamri ran behind them all the way to the police station. By the time they reached, the body did not have a scrap of clothing on it. On the way, Chamri says, they left the body by the roadside while they stopped at a dhaba to have tea and biscuits. (Which they did not pay for.) Picture this mother for a moment, following her son’s corpse through the forest, stopping at a distance to wait for his murderers to finish their tea. They did not let her have her son’s body back so she could give him a proper funeral. They only let her throw a fistful of earth in the pit in which they buried the others they had killed that day. Chamri says she wants revenge. Badla ku badla. Blood for blood.I met the elected members of the Marskola Janatana Sarkar that administers six villages. They described a police raid: they come at night, 300, 400, sometimes 1,000 of them. They lay a cordon around a village and lie in wait. At dawn they catch the first people who go out to the fields and use them as human shields to enter the village, to show them where the booby-traps are. (‘Booby-traps’ has become a Gondi word. Everybody always smiles when they say it or hear it. The forest is full of booby-traps, real and fake. Even the PLGA needs to be guided past villages.) Once the police enter a village, they loot and steal and burn houses. They come with dogs. The dogs catch those who try and run. They chase chickens and pigs and the police kill them and take them away in sacks. SPOs come along with the police. They’re the ones who know where people hide their money and jewellery. They catch people and take them away. And extract money before they release them. They always carry some extra Naxal ‘dresses’ with them in case they find someone to kill. They get money for killing Naxals, so they manufacture some. Villagers are too frightened to stay at home.
Dressed To The Nines: Adivasi boys in colourful traditional gear for Bhumkal day celebrations
In this tranquil-looking forest, life seems completely militarised now. People know words like Cordon and Search, Firing, Advance, Retreat, Down, Action! To harvest their crops, they need the PLGA to do a sentry patrol. Going to the market is a military operation. The markets are full of mukhbirs (informers) who the police have lured from their villages with money. I’m told there’s a mukhbir mohalla (informers’ colony) in Narayanpur where at least 4,000 mukhbirs stay. The men can’t go to market anymore. The women go, but they’re watched closely. If they buy even a little extra, the police accuse them of buying it for Naxals. Chemists have been instructed not to let people buy medicines except in very small quantities. Low-price rations from the Public Distribution System (PDS), sugar, rice, kerosene, are warehoused in or near police stations, making it impossible for most people to buy.Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
All the walking seems to have finally got to me. I’m tired. Kamla gets me a pot of hot water. I bathe behind a tree in the dark. But I can’t eat dinner and crawl into my bag to sleep. Comrade Raju announces that we have to move. This happens frequently, of course, but tonight it’s hard. We have been camped in an open meadow. We’d heard shelling in the distance. There are 104 of us. Once again, single file through the night. Crickets. The smell of something like lavender. It must have been past 11 when we arrived at the place where we will spend the night. An outcrop of rocks. Formation. Roll call. Someone switches on the radio. BBC says there’s been an attack on a camp of Eastern Frontier Rifles in Lalgarh, West Bengal. Sixty Maoists on motorcycles. Fourteen policemen killed. Ten missing. Weapons snatched. There’s a murmur of pleasure in the ranks. Maoist leader Kishenji is being interviewed. When will you stop this violence and come for talks? When Operation Green Hunt is called off. Any time. Tell Chidambaram we will talk. Next question: it’s dark now, you have laid landmines, reinforcements have been called in, will you attack them too? Kishenji: Yes, of course, otherwise people will beat me. There’s laughter in the ranks. Sukhdev the clarifier says, “They always say landmines. We don’t use landmines. We use IEDs.”Another luxury suite in the thousand-star hotel. I’m feeling ill. It starts to rain. There’s a little giggling. Kamla throws a jhilli over me. What more do I need? Everyone else just rolls themselves into their jhillis.By next morning the body count in Lalgarh has gone up to 21, 10 missing.Comrade Raju is considerate this morning. We don’t move till evening.One night, people are crowded like moths around a point of light. It’s Comrade Sukhdev’s tiny computer, powered by a solar panel, and they’re watching Mother India, the barrels of their rifles silhouetted against the sky. Kamla doesn’t seem interested. I ask her if she likes watching movies. “Nahin didi. Sirf ambush video (No didi. Only ambush videos).” Later, I ask Comrade Sukhdev about these ambush videos. Without batting an eyelid, he plays one for me.It starts with shots of Dandakaranya, rivers, waterfalls, the close-up of a bare branch of a tree, a brainfever bird calling. Then suddenly a comrade is wiring up an IED, concealing it with dry leaves. A cavalcade of motorcycles is blown up. There are mutilated bodies and burning bikes. The weapons are being snatched. Three policemen, looking shell-shocked, have been tied up.Who’s filming it? Who’s directing operations? Who’s reassuring the captured cops that they will be released if they surrender? (They were. I confirm that later.)I know that gentle, reassuring voice. It’s Comrade Venu.“It’s the Kudur ambush,” Comrade Sukhdev says.He also has a video archive of burned villages, testimonies from eyewitnesses and relatives of the dead. On the singed wall of a burnt house, it says, ‘Nagaaa! Born to Kill!’ There’s footage of a little boy whose fingers were chopped off to inaugurate the Bastar chapter of Operation Green Hunt. (There’s even a TV interview with me. My study. My books. Strange.)At night, on the radio, there’s news of another Naxal Attack. This one in Jamui, Bihar. It says 125 Maoists attacked a village and killed 10 people belonging to the Kora tribe in retaliation for giving police information that led to the death of six Maoists. Of course, we know that the media report may or may not be true. But, if it is, this one’s unforgivable. Comrade Raju and Sukhdev look distinctly uncomfortable.The news that has been coming from Jharkhand and Bihar is disturbing. The gruesome beheading of the policeman Francis Induvar is still fresh in everyone’s mind. It’s a reminder of how easily the discipline of armed struggle can dissolve into lumpen acts of criminalised violence, or into ugly wars of identity between castes and communities and religious groups. By institutionalising injustice in the way that it does, the Indian State has turned this country into a tinderbox of massive unrest. The government is quite wrong if it thinks that by carrying out ‘targeted assassinations’ to render the CPI (Maoist) ‘headless’, it will end the violence. On the contrary, the violence will spread and intensify, and the government will have nobody to talk to.On my last few days, we meander through the lush, beautiful Indravati valley. As we walk along a hillside, we see another line of people walking in the same direction, but on the other side of the river. I’m told they are on their way to an anti-dam meeting in Kudur village. They’re overground and unarmed. A local rally for the valley. I jump ship and join them.

The government has Koya Commandos, the CAF, CRPF, ITBP, CISF, Cobras, Scorpions. And a policy called wham: Winning Hearts and Minds.

The Bodhghat dam will submerge the entire area that we have been walking in for days. All that forest, all that history, all those stories. More than 100 villages. Is that the plan then? To drown people like rats, so that the integrated steel plant in Lohandiguda and the bauxite mine and aluminium refinery in the Keshkal ghats can have the river?At the meeting, people who have come from miles away say the same thing we have all heard for years. We will drown, but we won’t move! They are thrilled that someone from Delhi is with them. I tell them Delhi is a cruel city that neither knows nor cares about them.Only weeks before I came to Dandakaranya, I visited Gujarat. The Sardar Sarovar Dam has more or less reached its full height now. And almost every single thing the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) predicted would happen has happened. People who were displaced have not been rehabilitated, but that goes without saying. The canals have not been built. There’s no money. So Narmada water is being diverted into the empty riverbed of the Sabarmati (which was dammed a long time ago.) Most of the water is being guzzled by cities and big industry. The downstream effects—saltwater ingress into an estuary with no river—are becoming impossible to mitigate.
The Long March: Maoists on the move in Bastar, single file as always
There was a time when believing that Big Dams were the ‘temples of modern India’ was misguided, but perhaps understandable. But today, after all that has happened, and when we know all that we do, it has to be said that Big Dams are a crime against humanity.The Bodhghat dam was shelved in 1984 after local people protested. Who will stop it now? Who will prevent the foundation stone from being laid? Who will stop the Indravati from being stolen? Someone must.On the last night, we camped at the base of the steep hill we would climb in the morning, to emerge on the road from where a motorcycle would pick me up. The forest has changed even since I first entered it. The chiraunji, silk-cotton and mango trees have begun to flower.The villagers from Kudur send a huge pot of freshly-caught fish to the camp. And a list for me, of 71 kinds of fruit, vegetables, pulses and insects they get from the forest and grow in their fields, along with the market price. It’s just a list. But it’s also a map of their world.Jungle post arrives. Two biscuits for me. A poem and a pressed flower from Comrade Narmada. A lovely letter from Maase. (Who is she? Will I ever know?)Comrade Sukhdev asks if he can download the music from my Ipod onto his computer. We listen to a recording of Iqbal Bano singing Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge (We will Witness the Day) at the famous concert in Lahore at the height of the repression during the Zia-ul-Haq years.
Jab ahl-e-safa-Mardud-e-haram,Masnad pe bithaiye jayenge(When the heretics and the reviled will be seated on high)Sab taaj uchhale jayengeSab takht giraye jayenge(All crowns will be snatched awayAll thrones toppled)Hum dekhenge
Fifty thousand people in the audience in that Pakistan begin a defiant chant: Inqilab Zindabad! Inqilab Zindabad! All these years later, that chant reverberates around this forest. Strange, the alliances that get made.The home minister’s been issuing veiled threats to those who “erroneously offer intellectual and material support to Maoists”. Does sharing music qualify?

Does the government think that by rendering CPI (Maoist) headless, it’ll end the violence? It’ll only spread and they’ll have no one to talk to.

At dawn, I say goodbye to Comrade Madhav and Joori, to young Mangtu and all the others. Comrade Chandu has gone to organise the bikes, and will come with me to the main road. Comrade Raju isn’t coming (the climb would be hell on his knees). Comrade Niti (Most Wanted), Comrade Sukhdev, Kamla and five others will take me up the hill. As we start walking, Niti and Sukhdev casually but simultaneously unclick the safety catches of their AKs. It’s the first time I’ve seen them do that. We’re approaching the ‘Border’. “Do you know what to do if we come under fire?” Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.“Yes,” I said, “immediately declare an indefinite hunger strike.”He sat down on a rock and laughed. We climbed for about an hour. Just below the road, we sat in a rocky alcove, completely concealed, like an ambush party, listening for the sound of the bikes. When it comes, the farewell must be quick. Lal Salaam Comrades.When I looked back, they were still there. Waving. A little knot. People who live with their dreams, while the rest of the world lives with its nightmares. Every night I think of this journey. That night sky, those forest paths. I see Comrade Kamla’s heels in her scuffed chappals, lit by the light of my torch. I know she must be on the move. Marching, not just for herself, but to keep hope alive for us all.

Sikhs in Pakistan : Citizen 'Alien'

2010-03-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

Slaughter Of Sikhs In Pakistan

Omer Farooq Khan, TNN, Mar 2, 2010, 03.13am IST
PESHAWAR: But for his blue turban and flowing beard there's almost nothing to distinguish Charanjit Singh, 78, from other residents of this northwestern Pakistani city. Dressed in a Pathan suit, he speaks fluent Pashto. He might be the stereotypical Pathan. Except that he is Sikh. He is the patriarch of a large Sikh family in nondescript Mohallah Jogan Shah here, which made headlines recently when the Taliban beheaded a local, Jaspal Singh. An estimated 380 Sikh families live in Mohallah Jogan Shah. It is fair to say they live in exceedingly difficult times. Charanjit and others like him are intertwined with the history of Pakistan and Peshawar in particular, which they call 'home'. And yet, they're Citizen 'Alien'.

REAL HOME: But Peshawar was not always home to Charanjit. He migrated in 1997 from the Khyber Agency's Tirah Valley in the tribal northwest. An estimated 80% of the Sikh families who migrated to Peshawar came from three tribal regions – Orakzai, Kurram and Khyber. The migration started in the mid-1980s at the peak of the Afghan jihad. At the time, the area was the launchpad for thousands of US-backed anti-Soviet fighters. But the fighters' presence didn't change traditional life too much and the Sikhs lived in harmony with their tribal neighbours. But when the region became a sanctuary for Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives on the run from Afghanistan, the migration became a flood. Charanjit says some Sikhs moved to Peshawar after the historic shrine of Gurdwara Bhai Joga Singh re-opened in 1981. But the main reason for leaving the volatile tribal regions was the Taliban's rise to prominence. They made life unbearable for minorities. They found it particularly difficult because till then, they had been part of a traditional tribal set-up, which treated them as Dhimmis or a protected minority. They had another reason to be bitter in the 1980s. Ten gurdwaras were under government control since Partition and an anguished Charanjit recounts their fate since: "Some were turned into schools and colleges and hired by non-Sikhs."

AURANGZEB'S HAND: How did these Sikhs end up in Pakistan? Ironically, it was to escape the persecution unleashed by Aurangzeb in the 17th century. Many migrated to the mountainous tribal areas of what would later become Pakistan because Pashtun tribesmen offered them sanctuary, says Jagat Singh, who lives in Peshawar. The region was always known to have rigid Islamist views but the tribals were hospitable, he says. It helped, he adds, that the Sikhs displayed "the ability to integrate into the local culture.'' They spoke the local Pashto dialect and followed local customs. Farhad Afridi of Tirah Valley says, "They were as illiterate and strong-headed as the Afridis and the Orakzais, but like other Pathans, were loyal. Their hospitality was proverbial -- every household kept separate utensils for their Muslim friends.'' It helped the estimated 10,000 Sikhs living in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province thrive over the years as traders, shopkeepers and farmers. Often, they became the backbone of the middle classes. Many were descended from families that stayed on after Partition, protected by the ultra-secular volunteers of Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar. But the old order gave way to the new. Young Sikhs were increasingly inclined towards getting an education. "They not only went to secular schools, but also attended religious studies at Guru Angadh Devjee's Khalsa Tharmak,'' says Jagat. This was a far cry from their tribal forefathers who underwent only five years of religious schooling in Gurmukhi.

A DIFFERENT WORLD: 9/11 changed everything. For everyone, but it was especially nightmarish for local tribesmen who had to face relentless American drone attacks and military operations by the Pakistan army. "Hundreds of people died in the attacks,'' says Jagat. But as fighting gripped Swat after Pakistan launched an operation to oust the Taliban in April 2009, it was a Sikh doctor, Gian Singh, who remained in the city hospital. The rest of its staff had fled. "We lived with the local people like brothers. I even treated wounded Taliban who were brought to my clinic,'' says Gian Singh. But he admits that the arrival of Taliban fighters, brandishing AK-47s steamrollered tolerance and it now became impossible for Sikhs to stay on in these tribal areas. The Taliban offered three options to non-Muslims: Embrace Islam; pay protection money or vacate the area. "For the Taliban, it was collection of protection money (Jizya) that helped them get funds for arms and ammunition,'' says Prakash Singh, a college student. His own family in Orakzai Agency refused to pay up and left the area. "If ordinary Muslims live in fear of the Taliban, what sort of future can we minorities hope for?'' he says.

TALIBAN DIKTAT: To make matters worse, Taliban commander Hakimullah Mehsud, who died in a recent attack, ordered the demolition of 11 Sikh houses in Orakzai Agency after these families refused to pay up. Mehsud is believed to have declared: "Sharia has been enforced in the area and every non-Muslim has to pay the protection money." But roughly 35 Sikh families found themselves unable to raise the Rs 150 million required. They were forced to move from Feroze Khel to nearby Merozai in Lower Orakzai Agency. The Taliban occupied Sikh houses and took charge of their businesses. Paying Jizya didn't guarantee security. Last month, Tariq Afridi, a Taliban commander, abducted three Sikhs, including Jaspal from Khyber Agency. The rest is history. And yet, despite the harsh ground realities, these Peshawari Sikhs long for their tribal homeland. "If the situation returns to normal there, we'll go back. We have property there and above all, we're nostalgic about the area,'' says Suraj Prakash Singh, a shopkeeper. Home, even in Taliban heartland, is where the heart is.

New Ravidassia faith !

2010-02-03T22:48:00.001-08:00

India's 'Untouchables'

declare own Religion

By Harmeet Shah Singh, CNN
New Delhi, India (CNN) -- In an event considered rare, one of India's low-caste communities has declared its own distinct religion. Followers of a 14-century spiritual figure, Guru Ravidass, will now have their own holy scriptures, a flag and a greeting, sect officials said.
The new holy book compiles Guru Ravidass' writings, which until now were predominantly found in sacred Sikh scriptures that the sect placed in its houses of worship.
The declaration was made by a key Ravidass monastery whose priest's killing in May last year in Vienna, Austria sparked furious protests in the Sikh heartland of Punjab.
Thousands of protesters from the low-caste communities -- called the Dalits, meaning the suppressed -- attacked road and rail transportation in the wake of the murder blamed on Sikh hardliners.
C.R. Suman, the manager of the Sachkhand Ballan monastery in Punjab state, told CNN that the announcement of a new Ravidassia faith was made on Saturday to a large congregation at the birthplace of the revered leader in Uttar Pradesh state.
Experts say the move was a response to social discrimination against low castes in Punjab, where close to 30 percent of the population is Dalit, the highest in any Indian state.
"The Ravidassias and other Dalits remain marginalized in Punjab, politically, religiously and economically," said author Balbir Madhopuri, who has written several books on the Hindu caste system.
Analysts say the declaration of a new faith is likely to be a psychological boost for Dalits in India. "They appear to have asserted themselves in a strategy that will give them a greater bargaining strength in their home state where power has centered around specific castes," said columnist Jaspal Singh Sidhu. "Outside of Punjab, it is likely to give a big psychological boost to other Dalit communities."
There are estimated about five million Ravidassias from Punjab now spread across the world, said Madhopuri.
Madhopuri, however, believes the new sacred text may not attract other Dalit communities because it only contains Ravidass verses.
"Yet, this announcement of a distinct religion is a symbol of Dalit assertion," he said.
According to Madhopuri, the last time the Dalits came together as a faith was in 1925 when the British ruled India. In the 1931 census, more than 450,000 registered themselves as members of the new Dalit faith called Ad Dharam, or Original Religion.
But the faith vanished after India's independence mainly because of what Madhopuri explained were lures of government jobs reserved for low-caste Hindus and Sikhs.
In India, Hindus make up more than 80 percent of its billion-plus population. Muslims constitute the second-largest religious group.
Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and other faiths together form about 6 percent of remaining Indians.
After independence from the British in 1947, India outlawed what was an age-old practice of untouchability of low-caste Hindus by those seen as superior by birth.
Still, the communities are believed to be facing bias despite having being given quotas for government jobs.
India's crime statistics show that police registered more than 133,000 cases from 2004 to 2008 under the country's stringent laws to protect Dalits against atrocities.
The birth of a new religion in Punjab has had Sikhs worried the most, as it emerged in their state where the monotheistic faith was founded in the 15th century to break caste and religious distinctions.
The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the top Sikh religious administration, termed the Ravidassia declaration unfortunate.
It disagrees that the practical Sikh response to the downtrodden did not match the Sikh faith's core beliefs of equality.
"It's unfortunate that this has happened. Sikh thought is against any kind of prejudice," said SGPC general secretary Sukhdev Singh Bhaur. "I would appeal to them (the Ravidassias) to revisit their decision."

Ravidassia sect sends shockwaves across world’s Sikh community
Jeremy Page in Delhi
India has never been short of religions: although 80 per cent Hindu, it also incorporates Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism as well as hundreds of lesser known faiths.
Now it has another. The establishment of Ravidassia in the northern city of Varanasi last weekend — the latest addition — is sending shockwaves across the world’s 23 million-strong Sikh community. Ravidassia was founded by a radical Sikh sect called Dera Sachkhand Ballan, which consists mainly of “Untouchables”, or Dalits, who come at the bottom of India’s complex and still pervasive caste hierarchy.
It claims its own pilgrimage site to rival the Sikhs’ Golden Temple in Amritsar, its own book to replace the Sikhs’ Guru Granth Sahib, and its own symbol, known as the Har (which it translates as Almighty).
“We aim to respect all religions, love mankind and live a virtuous life,” C. R. Suman, a Radivassia spokesman, told The Times. He added that the religion had hundreds of thousands of devotees, with followers across the diaspora, including in Britain. Ravidassia already has temples in Southall, Coventry and Toronto, as well as several web sites and Facebook pages.
The split from Sikhism seems to be a reaction to the killing of Guru Sant Rama Nand, the sect’s deputy leader, by fundamentalist Sikhs in a gunfight at a temple in Vienna last year, which caused rioting across Punjab.
Sikhs do not officially believe in the caste system, which has its origins in Hinduism, and divides society into hundreds of groups that define where one lives, who one marries and what job one does.
Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak in the 16th century, partly to rebel against the system. But the concept of caste remains deeply rooted in Indian society, even among Sikhs, Christians and Muslims.
Dera Sachkhand Ballan claims to represent lower castes who felt that they were still suffering discrimination, especially at the hands of Jat Sikhs, who have traditionally owned most of the farmland in Punjab.
It differs from mainstream Sikhism on several religious issues, including worshipping living gurus, which is considered blasphemous by most Sikhs. It also focuses predominantly on the teachings of Guru Ravidass, who was born in Varanasi in the 14th century and taught that people should be judged according to their merits, rather than their caste or social status.
“Our objective is to propagate the writing and teachings of Sant Guru Ravidass and other gurus who belonged to suppressed classes,” said Mr Suman.

1984 Anti-Sikh Riots

2009-12-31T23:28:00.000-08:00

Finally, CBI given nod to

prosecute Sajjan Kumar

New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation has got official sanction to prosecute Congress leader Sajjan Kumar for his alleged role in 1984 anti-Sikh riots in New Delhi.
Delhi Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna on Thursday granted sanction to CBI to prosecute Kumar and launch court proceedings against him for riots that broke out in the nation capital after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.
The sanction was required as Kumar is a former MP and has been charged with Section 153-A of IPC (spreading enmity between two communities).
According to Delhi Police’s FIR against Kumar in 1984, he and ten accomplices instigated riots in Sultanpuri area of Delhi that killed 49 people.
Kumar was an MP from the Outer Delhi constituency in the 14th Lok Sabha, but opted out as a Congress candidate in Northwest Delhi constituency in the April 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
Senior Advocate HS Phoolka has said that the state now has no option but to file a chargesheet against Sajjan Kumar.
"Now that the permission has been granted, the state has no option but to file the chargesheet against Sajjan," he stated.
Jasbir Singh, a witness in the case, spoke to CNN-IBN tv channel from California a short while earlier. He said the CBI has betrayed the Sikhs for 25 years.
"The CBI is working under Government pressure. If Delhi burned for three straight days, don't they know who ordered the killings? Our statements were ignored. The nation has lit candles for the Chandigarh girl Ruchika who was molested by one policeman but what about the policemen who harassed us? CBI knows everything. Gurudwaras were attacked, the Guru Granth Sahib was burnt, the CBI has been fooling us for 25 years," he said.
Meanwhile, Home Minister P Chidambaram said, "In the 1984 riots cases I have asked for pending claims of compensation as well as decisions on sanctions of prosecution applications for jobs."

Anti-Sikh Riots: 2733 Killed; 13 Punished !

2009-12-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

Never again?

Javed Anand
On December 2, Harsimrat Kaur Badal, the 43-year-old Akali Dal MP from Bathinda, filled the Lok Sabha with sadness and remorse with her poignant account of the victims and survivors of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, and how even after 25 years they have not been given justice... House Leader and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said he agreed with Kaur that the tragedy should never happen again. “Not just tragic, it’s horrendous,” said Kaur.
Never again? Fact is, the “horrendous” has happened: again and again. Mercifully, 1984 has not again happened to Sikhs. But it happened to Muslims in 1989 (Bhagalpur), 1992 (Ayodhya, Mumbai) and 2002 (Gujarat) and to Orissa’s Christians in 2008. It happened just a year before 1984 too, to Muslims in Nellie (Assam). By the definition given in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, that adds up to six “genocidal killings” in 25 years. Only in India, the world’s largest democracy.
Never again? Great idea. Will someone, please, do something to stop the carnage carnivals that are a familiar feature of the Indian landscape? But if the report of the Liberhan Commission, the Union government’s ATR (Action Taken Report), editorials and comment pieces in the media are anything to go by, there’s little room for hope that that which must not happen will not be allowed to happen ever again.
Who can rescue Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan, a reckless man apparently bent on digging his own grave? Seventeen years is a long time, eight crore a lot of rupees. And he can’t even get the date of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination right: January 31, says the report. Howlers apart, the learned judge seems all too eager to portray the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao as a “helpless” man. In his detailed account of the build-up to December 6, 1992, he also carefully skirts any mention of the role of the previous Congress regime in the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid as a trade-off — sarva communalists’ sambhav — for the Shah Bano case (1986). Had Justice Liberhan been more candid his report could possibly have dwelt on the inability, or unwillingness, of the Indian state to address the unsettled “law of the land” vs “religious belief” duel.
It is easy to punch a dozen holes in Justice Liberhan’s report. But to unceremoniously bury it would be yet another horrendous thing to do for it’s the only documentation on how, and who all, pushed the Indian Republic to the brink in 1992. Despite the howlers and bias, it contains invaluable and highly incriminating information which both the state and society must address if “never again” is sincerely meant. With all its faults the report remains a damning evidence-based account of what the institutions sworn to protect the Constitution of India did when rogues inveigled their way inside the system and manipulated it to the hilt aiding those leading the charge from without. The commission’s report can be summed up in a simple sentence: unless the System (pillars of state) addresses the rot within, forget about ever meeting the challenge from without. It’s about the future, not only the past.
Among the favourite war cries of the kar sevaks and their ringmasters before and on December 6, 1992 in Ayodhya was this: “Bade khushi kee baat hai, police hamare saath hai!” (“Oh happiness, the police are on our side!”) The commission’s report establishes in minute detail how this was not about ordinary constables manning the barricade. This was the message repeatedly sent out — within hearing range of the Allahabad high court, the governor of UP, the Supreme Court of India and the Union government — by UP’s chief minister, Kalyan Singh. Kalyan Singh surprises no one. But the report also indicts five top IAS and five IPS officers among others who, though sworn to serve the Constitution, functioned as loyal soldiers of the Sangh Parivar’s private army.

In Gujarat in 2002 it was the same story with a slight difference: “Ye andar kee baat hai, police hamare saath hai!” (“I’ll tell you a secret, cops are on our side!”) The Union government now promises action on its communal violence prevention bill. The only problem is that instead of making policemen and civil servants more accountable and enforcing the principle of “command responsibility”, the new legislation proposes more powers to them. Never again?
In conclusion, says Justice Liberhan, “historians, journalists and jurists may — and should — explore these dimensions and tell these untold stories for the benefit of the current and unborn generations.” The dimensions, the untold stories have to do with “the intransigent stance of the high court of Uttar Pradesh, the obdurate attitude of the governor [of UP, a Congress appointee], the inexplicable irresponsibility of the Supreme Court’s observer and the short-sightedness of the Supreme Court itself”.
You read it right, the learned judge counts his own brotherhood among the culpable and here are his parting words: “These cannot unfortunately be dwelt upon in this report (not being part of the commission’s mandate) although I have neither suppressed nor minced words about these at the appropriate places and in appropriate contexts in my report.”
When was the last time a judge spoke like this? If all we can do is to damn Justice Liberhan’s report, we are doomed. Dare I say a word more except that I have read it in full? Painful and time-consuming though it is, perhaps you should too.
P.S. On April 22, 1993, Stephen Lawrence, a young black man was stabbed to death by five white racists at a bus stop in London. The accused were all acquitted for lack of “firm evidence”.
Heeding the cry for justice from Lawrence’s parents, the then
home secretary of the UK, Jack Straw, appointed a three-member commission headed by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny. The Macpherson Report was published on February 24, 1999.
While tabling it in Parliament, Straw said the report “challenges us all, not just the police service”. The prime minister declared his commitment to “drive home a programme of change”.
Action on the recommendations of the Macpherson Report led to a roots-and-branch overhaul of the policing system in the UK. It can be no one’s case that racialism has altogether vanished in the British police system. Every new entrant is now made aware of the no nonsense message of the “Hate Crime Manual”: “There is no place in the police service for those who will not uphold and protect the human rights of others.” Another planet?

The writer is co-editor, ‘Communalism Combat’ and general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy

Exclusive : As Published in Indian Express

2009-11-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

Babri demolition meticulously

planned, says Liberhan

Indicts Atal, Advani, Joshi

Calling them “pseudo-moderates,” the Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan Commission of Inquiry has indicted former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee along with current Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha L K Advani and former BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi, among others, for the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.
Citing the evidence it gathered, which includes witness statements and official records, one of the key conclusions of the Commission is said to be that the entire build-up to the demolition was meticulously planned. And there was nothing to show that these leaders were either unaware of what was going on or innocent of any wrongdoing.
The one-man Commission probed the “sequence of events leading, and all facts and circumstances relating, to the occurrences at Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid complex on December 6, 1992” — the day the Babri Masjid was brought down by kar sevaks
Sources in the Union Home Ministry have confirmed to The Indian Express that the report is also severely critical of many Muslim leaders representing organizations such as the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee.
The elite leaders of these Muslim organizations, the report is learnt to have observed, constituted a class of their own and were neither responsible to nor were they caring for the welfare of those they claimed to represent. These leaders failed the community by failing to put forth a logical, cohesive and consistent point of view on the dispute, both inside and outside the courts, the Commission is said to have stated.
The Home Ministry, which is giving final touches to the action taken report (ATR), intends to table the ATR in Parliament along with the report of the Commission during the ongoing Winter Session.
The Commission was set up 10 days after the demolition as communal riots rocked several parts of the country. After 17 years and 48 extensions, it submitted its report on June 30 this year.
It is learnt that among others indicted and found culpable — for what the Commission calls pushing the nation to the brink of communal discord — are the entire top brass of the Sangh Parivar. These include the leaderships of the RSS, VHP and Shiv Sena.
It is learnt that Justice Liberhan has not come down heavily on the then Union Government headed by P V Narasimha Rao. Its argument: as per the Constitution, the Union Government can act only after it receives the recommendation of the state Governor. In this case, the Governor didn’t do much and also didn’t seek the Centre’s intervention.
The report is learnt to have said that despite claims to the contrary, the Ayodhya campaign did not enjoy the willing and voluntary support of the common masses, particularly Hindus. In fact, Liberhan is learnt to have said that the demand for a temple never became a mass movement. The campaign only ended up silencing the voices of sanity and shaming them into joining the movement.
Liberhan is learnt to have said that despite claims by Advani and Vajpayee that they had no role in the demolition, the two leaders cannot be absolved of their responsibility for the same. When he appeared before the Commission, Advani had said he was pained by the events at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.
Liberhan is said to have stated that while Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi could have been used by the Parivar as the publicly acceptable faces of the movement, they were still party to all decisions.
And that none of them had the capacity to defy the orders of the RSS without damaging their political future. In fact, the Commission calls them tools in the hands of the RSS.
However, drawing from history, particularly from the trials of Nazi soldiers, at which the plea of having acted on the orders of superiors was not accepted, the Commission is learnt to have concluded that these leaders can’t be given the benefit of doubt or absolved of culpability. Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi have also been indicted for having violated the trust of voters.
Rath yatras by Advani and Joshi, Liberhan is learnt to have concluded, were targeted at making the emotionally-charged common man join the movement.
In sharp contrast to the BJP and the Sangh Parivar stand that the demolition was a spontaneous outburst, Liberhan is said to have argued that the events resulting in the demolition were carefully planned. The Commission is also said to have concluded that diversion of funds to Faizabad and Ayodhya just before the kar seva, mobilization of kar sevaks as well as arrangements made at the site with military-like precision, clearly proves that the plan was not just limited to symbolic kar seva, as stated by Sangh and BJP leaders.
To substantiate this argument, Liberhan is learnt to have pointed to the mode of assault on the disputed structure as well as easy availability of instruments and material. The small number of kar sevaks who actually carried out the demolition, the hidden faces of such kar sevaks, the removal of idols and cash boxes from under the domes and the eventual installation in the makeshift temple clearly show that demolition was carried out with painstaking preparation and planning, he is learnt to have said.
The report is said to suggest that the emergence of a host of leaders to lead the movement from among the ranks of the BJP, RSS, Bajrang Dal and other Sangh Parivar groups was because of the lure of wealth and power rather than ideology.
Liberhan is learnt to have written that these leaders saw the Ayodhya movement as their road to success, and they acted as executioners wielding swords provided by the ideologues.
Referring to the funds collected by leaders of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, the Commission has reportedly said that many tens of crores of rupees collected from the people were deposited into bank accounts operated by these leaders. These funds were used to provide infrastructure and other amenities for kar sevaks in the days leading to the demolition.

Carnage 84

2009-10-24T23:14:00.000-07:00

Let's Tackle Hate With Love

by H.S. PHOOLKA, Esq.

In 2009, it's difficult for young people to conceive of a time when no member of the Sikh community was safe in any corner of India's sprawling capital. But this was the terrible reality of November 1-3, 1984.
Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora, the legendary war hero, could not sleep under his own roof on those nights; he took refuge in the home of I.K. Gujral. The eminent writer Khushwant Singh found shelter at the Swedish embassy; Justice S.S. Chadha, a sitting judge of the Delhi High Court, had to move to the high court complex.
I, only a young, budding lawyer at the time, was even more vulnerable to the mobs roaming the streets, baying for blood after Indira Gandhi's assassination. Miraculously, I escaped them on the evening of October 31, but on November 2, my house was attacked. Thanks to my Hindu landlord, who hid us in his storeroom, my pregnant wife and I were saved.
I was lucky, but nearly 4,000 of my fellow Sikhs were not. (Though the official death toll in Delhi is 2,733, in 1985 we submitted a list to the Ranganath Misra Commission, of 3,870 persons killed.) The worst affected was Delhi's east district where, according to official figures, over 1,200 Sikhs were killed on November 1 and 2.
Where was the police, you might ask. Well, the police made 26 arrests here, but, unbelievable though it may sound, those arrested were Sikhs - members of the very community being targeted and slaughtered by the mobs!
Logbook entries and evidence from the police control room later showed the police only went to places where they got information of Sikhs defending themselves. For three days, mobs killed, looted and raped openly and not one member of a mob was arrested for the first two days. The arrests began only on November 3, when the government decided to control the violence - and within hours the situation was under control.
A glaring example of the police-mob connivance was at Pusa Road in the Patel Nagar area, where a Mahavir Chakra awardee, Group Captain M.S. Talwar, fired at a mob that had set his house ablaze. The police failed to come to his rescue despite repeated calls, but after he fired at the mob, police and army arrived, led by the commissioner of police, arrested Talwar and jailed him for over two weeks.
Not a single member of the mob was held.
When I asked the SHO of the area, who appeared before the Nanavati Commission, why no one from the mob was arrested, his answer was, the police was outnumbered. How two truckloads of soldiers and policemen were outnumbered remains a mystery.
That very month, as a junior lawyer, I began pursuing cases relating to the carnage and have been pursuing them since. They are unlike any other cases I have handled, in that, for years they were simply not allowed to proceed.
Extraordinary though it sounds, a single FIR was filed for 292 murders committed at different places at different times between November 1-3, 1984. This (FIR 426/1984) was registered on November 3 for the killings in different parts of Trilokpuri, one of the worst affected areas.
Over a decade later, in 1995, thanks to an order by Justice S.N. Dhingra, who was then additional sessions judge, the chalaans were split, and this one FIR was divided into 50 different cases. Only after that did some of these cases lead to convictions. Until 1995 - that is, for all of 11 years - there had been only two convictions in the Delhi carnage cases.
In 2002, we saw a repeat of 1984 in Gujarat, but due to the Supreme Court's promptness in appointing an independent special investigation team, cases could not be covered up so blatantly.
In the case of the 1984 carnage, out of 2,733 officially admitted murders, only nine cases led to convictions. Just over 20 accused have been convicted in 25 years - a conviction rate of less than 1 per cent.
One of the basic principles of criminal jurisprudence is that punishment to the guilty should act as a deterrent for the future. Does such an abysmal rate of conviction and punishment serve to act as a deterrent or does it send out the message that one can get away with committing heinous crimes?
Think: if the guilty of 1984 had been punished, perhaps the Gujarat carnage would not have happened.
The year 1984 also completed the evolution of a certain brand of politics of violence - belonging to the ruling party led murderous mobs. It saw the beginning of a disturbing trend of political parties complicit in the mass killing of citizens winning elections with a thumping majority - Rajiv Gandhi's Congress in December 1984, the Shiv Sena in Mumbai in 1993 and Narendra Modi in Gujarat, in 2002.
It was primarily due to the active role played by the media that official connivance in the killings was highlighted in Gujarat 2002. Nothing of this sort happened in 1984. Barring exceptions, the voice of the media was subdued. But recent media responses to the 1984 riots, and equally to the situation in Gujarat after Godhra, have been encouraging.
In 2007, my book When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath, co-authored with senior journalist Manoj Mitta, received tremendous response - there was hardly a newspaper or magazine that did not review it favourably.
The Congress party, however, maintained a studied silence, despite all the damaging disclosures in the book. Given its own dubious record, it is no surprise that the so-called secular party could not muster the will to pass the Communal Violence Bill promised in the Common Minimum Programme of 2004. Having pushed our justice system to its limits over two-and-a-half decades, my associates and I have decided to observe the 25th anniversary of the massacre with a life-affirming gesture.
In July this year, we initiated a massive tree plantation programme across Delhi as a tribute to those killed in 1984. We plan to plant and tend 25,000 trees in Delhi through Gyan Sewa Trust, a registered charity.
The 1984 killings were meant to teach a lesson to the Sikh community. The lesson we seek to impart in turn is to respond to hate with love, death with life. We trust the trees we have planted will not only help us remember the victims of 1984 but also prevent the recurrence of such a terrible crime on any community.

[Courtesy: Outlook. H.S. Phoolka is a senior Supreme Court advocate.]
October 12, 2009

Akali Dal wins its first assembly seat in Haryana

2009-10-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

Chandigarh: Punjab's ruling Shiromani Akali Dal Thursday scored its first electoral win in Haryana with its candidate Charanjeet Singh getting elected from the Kalanwali (reserved) assembly seat. Charanjeet Singh defeated Sushil Kumar Indora of the Congress by over 12,500 votes. This is the first electoral victory for the Akali Dal in Haryana. The Akalis had an electoral alliance with the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) in the state in this election even though its candidates fought under the Akali Dal symbol. Indora had left the August this year to join the ruling Congress. The only other Akali Dal candidate, Charanjeet Kaur, however, lost the Ambala city assembly seat to Congress candidate and former union minister Venod Sharma by over 35,500 votes. IANS

Kirpan Bill in USA

2009-10-15T00:54:00.000-07:00

Sikhs feel let down by Arnold Schwarzenegger

S. Rajgopalan
WASHINGTON: In a major disappointment to California’s Sikh community, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a Bill that would have made it mandatory for law enforcement officers to be educated about the ‘kirpan’.
The Bill, intended to help stem the arrests of Sikhs for carrying their article of faith, had been passed unanimously by both Houses of the state legislature and there was a general expectation that the governor will sign the measure into law.
But in a surprise move, Schwarzenegger termed the legislation “unnecessary” and vetoed it, pouring cold water on the Sikh community’s efforts to use the California Bill as a model legislation across the United States in their protracted battle over the ‘kirpan’.
Sikh organisations suspect that the final veto was the result of the law enforcement agencies’ strong desire to avoid promoting the acceptance of Sikhs with ‘kirpans’.
“We have been here in (California) for over 100 years. It’s a shame that we haven’t been able to get even a basic education bill passed,” lamented Prabhjot Singh, the Sikh Coalition Board Chairman.
Activists of the Sikh community, who have been closely following the progress of the California Bill, termed the veto a big blow.
In the enhanced security system that has been in place since 9/11, there has been a marked increase in arrests of Sikhs for carrying ‘kirpans’ with the police treating them as violation of concealed weapons laws, disregarding protestations that the arrests violate Sikhs’ religious rights.
“This loss for the Sikh community is a reminder of our serious lack of political clout in this state.
After months of hard work and 100 per cent support from our lawmakers, the Sikh voice was still not strong enough to overcome the whim of one man,” said Prabhjot Singh.
The Bill, AB 504, was introduced last February by Democrat Warren Furutani in the California Assembly in response to the Sikhs’ long-standing representations.
The Bill did not touch on the legality of the ‘kirpan’, but asked that police officers be trained about who Sikhs are and learn about the significance of the ‘kirpan’, in the hope that religious understanding would decrease arrests.
“The Governor’s response is very disappointing. It shows his lack of support for promoting religious understanding in California.
It is an utter shame that he does not understand the value of educating our law enforcement agencies on the diverse communities they are policing,” said Neha Singh, Western Region Director of the Sikh Coalition.
The Sikh Coalition, which has taken the lead in pushing the legislation, said it hopes to work with lawmaker Furutani to reintroduce the Bill in next year’s session. “I am committed to carrying this legislation again until this or any other governor signs it. I urge the Sikh community to stand with me as we continue this fight,” said Furutani.

The Art Of Firing Blanks

2009-08-28T02:06:00.000-07:00

Jaswant Singh’s summary dismissal is a clear sign that the BJP is caught in the midst of an ideological crisis. Will the pragmatists prevail or will the party be claimed by the champions of insular Hindutva?

SWAPAN DASGUPTA,

Senior Journalist

MEMBERSHIP OF a political party”, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party told me on phone from the venue of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s chintan baithak in Shimla last Wednesday morning, “also involves personal compromises. You must be prepared to accept curbs on your individual rights.”

The suggestion that political activism is not merely a set of entitlements but also involves genuflecting at the altar of the “party line” is known to all those who take the plunge into public life. It is to the credit of Jaswant Singh that he could persist with his individualism and free thinking and, at the same time, climb to the top rungs of the BJP leadership. To a large extent this was due to the remarkable indulgence of his angularities by three BJP stalwarts: Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and, most important, Atal Behari Vajpayee. It was Vajpayee who persevered with him despite the misgivings of the RSS and the exasperation of middle-rung BJP leaders who could never quite fathom what he was all about. The cumulative effect was that Jaswant remained his own man, never afraid of undertaking voyages into either uncharted or potentially hazardous waters.
Since 2004, however, the party’s exasperation with his individualism had been mounting. The release of his autobiography A Call To Honour, was accompanied by huge controversies over his version of the Kandahar hijack of December 1999 and his suggestion that there was a “mole” in PV Narasimha Rao’s Cabinet. On both counts Jaswant caused a huge embarrassment to the party, something he disregarded with disdain. He added to his offence by attempting to become a faction player in Rajasthan and campaigning openly for the then Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s ouster. Then, following the defeat in this year’s Lok Sabha election, he took the injudicious step of teaming up with Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha to ask uncomfortable questions of the leadership. The points he raised weren’t entirely invalid but it prompted too many people to retaliate with the query: “When has he lifted his little finger for the party? For 29 years he has eaten the party’s cream.”
The accusation against Jaswant was that he viewed his privileged status in the BJP as an entitlement, sans obligations.
That Jaswant was undertaking a political biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah was known since 2005. He had made that public during the row over LK Advani’s misadventure in Pakistan. At that time, he had also let it be known that he would resign his primary membership of the BJP if it failed to back Advani on the Jinnah issue. It never came to that because the Advani tangle was settled — or, more accurately, brushed under the carpet — through some face- saving compromises.
In January this year, when news of the imminent publication of Jaswant’s Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence broke, an alarmed party leadership pressed the author to delay publication till after the Lok Sabha poll. It was rightly calculated that the Congress would have a field day if the so-called “face of Kandahar” was now seen to be heaping lavish praise on the man who created Pakistan. Jaswant obliged. But never for a day did it enter his mind that the publication should be shelved for a time when he was no longer active in politics.
JASWANT’S ASTONISHING reassurance was not bravado; it was based on calculation. He was certain that the BJP faithful would take a dim view of any reappraisal of Jinnah that made him appear as just another canny politician. The demonization of Jinnah has, after all, become a part of the broad nationalist consensus, just as Jawaharlal Nehru always wanted. However, this storm, he believed, would be managed. The BJP, he believed, would dissociate from the book, perhaps drop him from the Parliamentary Board, but would then allow the storm to pass. Jaswant took solace from the belief that the BJP would not really like to resurrect the Jinnah debate because Advani too would suffer collateral damage.

In hindsight it was a colossal miscalculation. The first part of the script went perfectly when BJP stalwarts stayed away from the book release at Teen Murti and so did the second act when, first Sushma Swaraj and then Rajnath Singh dissociated the party from Jaswant’s views. But things had already started going wrong. Jaswant’s interview to Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN on Sunday night and its reports in the next morning’s newspapers fuelled anger in the BJP ranks in much the same as when Advani uttered his praise of Jinnah at the mausoleum in Lahore four years ago.
The party faithful were incensed on a number of counts: the description of Jinnah as “secular”, the suggestion that Muslims were yet to be regarded as equal citizens in India and, most important, the inclusion of Sardar Vallabbhai Patel as a man also responsible for the Partition. That Jaswant’s view of the Muslim plight in India was actually a subtle indictment of a two-nation theory which had led to an unending spiral of minorityism was too subtle for ordinary comprehension need hardly be stated. Read in isolation and without reference to the arguments in the book, it seemed very much like an endorsement of religion-based fragmentation.

Of greater consequence was the inclusion of Sardar Patel among the architects of Partition, along with Nehru and Lord Mountbatten. Since 1989, the BJP had very consciously tried to appropriate the legacy of Sardar Patel by including him in their pantheon of national heroes. At one time, Advani had cast himself as another Iron Man in the mould of Patel and after 2002 Narendra Modi had been deified as the Chhote Sardar.
To be fair, Jaswant does not deal at length in his book on the culpability of Patel. He is included as a part of the larger Congress leadership that had to finally acquiesce to Partition as a way out of spiralling sectarian riots that followed the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day in August 1946. Yet, the perception, gained from a reading of his interview with Thapar, that Jaswant had tarred Patel with the brush of ignominy proved too much for the volatile Gujarat unit of the BJP to stomach.
There was another political compulsion that Jaswant never factored: a set of seven by-elections to the Gujarat Assembly where the Patidar (the community to which Patel belonged) vote was crucial. The Congress, which had jumped gleefully into the controversy by dubbing BJP the Bharatiya Jinnah Party, was more than prepared to remind Gujaratis and the Patels in particular that a front-ranking leader of the BJP had insulted their greatest icon.
Had Jaswant confined his indictment of the Congress to a targeted criticism of Nehru — something the BJP does routinely — his worst punishment would have been the withdrawal of invitation to attend the Chintan Baithak and subsequent exclusion from all posts in the BJP. In fact, that is what was contemplated till Tuesday morning. However, by the time Rajnath Singh mustered the requisite self-confidence to communicate the order to stay away from Simla, Jaswant was already ensconced in the very agreeable Oberoi Cecil in Simla.

When the order to stay away was finally communicated at 8.30 am or so on Wednesday morning, it was a case of too little and too late. The party leadership, influenced by reports of BJP cadres burning effigies of Jaswant, demanded exemplary action. This appealed to Rajnath who had seen his own authority successfully challenged by Vasundhara Raje the week before. He too wanted a scalp, if only to establish his claim as a tough, no-nonsense leader. Throughout Wednesday, the party president’s spin doctors kept feeding a hungry media the assertion that it was Rajnath who had decided to crack the whip, emboldened by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s pronouncement that inner-party squabbling must stop immediately.
When the Parliamentary Board members met on the sidelines of the Chintan Baithak at 9 am on Wednesday, Jaswant’s goose was cooked. The decision to expel him from the party was unanimous. Even Advani endorsed it.
From a public relations perspective, the Jaswant expulsion drama was a disaster for the BJP. First, there was the obvious discourtesy involved in communicating a decision of this magnitude by telephone and, if Jaswant is to be believed, with a chuckle from Rajnath. Secondly, the BJP leadership proved utterly insensitive to the perception that Jaswant was being expelled for writing a 600-page treatise which it was common knowledge almost none of the Parliamentary Board had actually read. To the faithful, the leadership had taken the right decision, albeit belatedly, but to the Indians (including BJP voters) unfamiliar with the innards of the party, it seemed an act of intolerance.

THE LEGITIMATE outrage over a party arrogating to itself the role of a thought police has, quite rightly, fuelled speculation about greater RSS control over the BJP and the formal abandonment of all liberal pretensions. The BJP, it is being claimed, has retreated into the shell of a narrow, insular Hindutva and being an extension counter of Nagpur. It is said that it will no longer entertain the “overdose of democracy” that many leaders had in private complained of.
Are these fears real? At present, it is difficult to arrive at definite conclusions but certain factors are worth considering. For some years the BJP has been witnessing a tussle between ideology and politics. There are those who believe that the BJP exists as a Hindu party to uphold Hindu interests, even if such an approach proves electorally counterproductive. By this logic, the responsibility for organising the party should be entrusted to RSS functionaries and that lay RSS members should be encouraged to enter electoral politics in a big way and emerge as trusted mass leaders. The pragmatists who prefer the political approach feel that the 2009 election is an eye-opener. The BJP, they insist, must focus only on those issues that are aimed at winning back the middle classes and the youth — segments that have deserted the party in favour of the Congress. In short, the BJPmust embrace modernity, be in a position to re-forge meaningful alliances and relegate identity politics to the backburner. Interestingly, it is the Chief Ministers who favour such an approach.
An interesting feature of this debate is that the adherents of one position are not necessarily always on the same side. Unfortunately for the BJP, a decision on political positioning has been derailed by unresolved leadership questions. Who will be the party president in January? Will Rajnath Singh manage to amend the party constitution and a procure third term for himself? Is Advani really going to play out his full term as Leader of Opposition? Will the RSS chief’s desire for a younger leadership be translated into reality?
The answers to these questions are relevant because the redefined priorities of the BJPmust match with the image and personality of those who are entrusted with the leadership. Tragically, the BJP has no institutionalised democratic mechanism to choose a leader who is most acceptable to both its ordinary karyakartas and, more important, ordinary non-attached voters. Traditionally, the party has left complex leadership questions to be settled by a small cabal that works closely with the RSS. The RSS would prefer if Advani drew up his own succession plans, but Advani has shown no inclination to redefine himself as an elder statesman. Does Bhagwat’s clear preference for a younger leader mean that Advani will now be forced into revealing his hand? More important, does Advani still have the authority to not merely nominate his successor but ensuring he or she actually secures the post.
Alternatively, the BJP may decide that it will not rush things and wait for its next prime ministerial face to emerge at a time nearer the election. As of today, the real BJP leadership is in the states. Yet, it is the Centre that pretends it wields authority.
The chintan baithak may well help clear confusion in the minds of the top leadership and help forge something akin to a consensus. But that is assuming the participants speak their minds frankly and fearlessly. The kerfluffle over Jaswant and the abstruse non-debate over Jinnah may have defined politics in the age of swine flu – when voices are muffled by the most visible symbol of self-preservation, the ubiquitous mouth gag.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 34, Dated August 29, 2009

World watch's Indian Election

2009-05-21T01:20:00.000-07:00

The Verdict : India votes for

stability, the world salutes

The world’s largest democracy has just concluded a free, fair and peaceful election, and the world is applauding.

International newspapers praised the complex process of conducting the elections and noted that Indians had rejected Right and Left parties and voted for middle path politics. “The governing coalition led by the Indian National Congress sailed to a surprisingly decisive victory in India’s grueling parliamentary elections, vaulting Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken economic reformer, to a second term as Prime Minister, and sweeping away the prospect of political instability in the world’s most populous democracy,” said the New York Times on May 16.
The Times, London, said the election results would help in consensus and unity. “That means the ruling coalition should face fewer internal divisions over reforms desperately needed to stimulate growth and spread its benefits to the 880 million Indians who live on less than 2 dollars a day," it said.
“Congress wins election, Singh to remain PM: India votes for hope; rejects religion, caste”, said the headline of Daily Times, the Pakistani newspaper, on May 17.

Has this election result boosted India's image abroad? CNN-IBN’s Sagarika Ghose asked this to Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, and Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP and former UN undersecretary general.
“This is a very, very significant moment for India,” said Zakaria. “China’s coming-out party was the Beijing Olympics. India’s coming-out party as a great power may well turn out to be these elections.”
India had till now been “hamstrung” from playing its appropriate role on the world stage because its government had never been able to mobilise national power.
“There always has been a sense that India is divided, decentralized, defused between castes and regions, classes and parties. For the first time in many years you have sense of a government that has a national coalition behind it that is purposeful,” said Zakaria. “If that happens I think you will see a very different reception India will get on world stage.”

India, America, and the world
The Western media has commented that the clear verdict would allow Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to push for economic reforms. Will Singh’s test be his ability to implement reforms?
“The government has demonstrated the capacity to reconcile policies that encourage growth with policies that are attentive to the need of the dispossessed and marginalised,” said Tharoor. “We should not do anything for anybody’s approval. We do what is right for us.”
US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are the two “most erudite” chief executives in the world, said Zakaria. “The key issue is does have the energy to play a responsible world role--without being hobbled by fears of being seen as pro-American or being seen as part of the capitalist world.”
The election result gives Singh the opportunity he always sought in foreign policy. “This allows him to move forward, and I think the Obama people will be very willing partners,” said Zakaria.
Tharoor believed the new government, with a clear mandate in its favour, had the opportunity to pursue a foreign policy guided by India’s interests and not dogma.
“If a Indo-US nuclear deal achieves national goals you don’t worry if that makes you look non-aligned. You are being empirical--you are looking at what the world offers you; what is needed by your people and then you proceed,” he said.

What next for BJP
The BJP has gone into a shell after its electoral defeat but it is the country’s main Opposition party. What does it need to revive itself?
“In almost all parts of the world where you have democracy there is a backlash against globalization and against modernization that takes the form of nationalism or some form of Hindutva,” said Zakaria.
Zakaria believed Hindutva-like ideologies had no answers for the modern world. “The BJP has got to recognise that it can no longer prey on people’s fears or scratch their hatreds or incite them. They have to answers to the modern world.
“Unless they can embrace the agenda of modernity rather than the agenda of resentment I think they are going to have a tough time. They say their ideology is not for sale or change, but I think they are not going to walk alone.”
The BJP calls secularism “pseudo-secularism, tokenism and minority appeasement.” What will the Manmohan Singh government be doing to prove that its secularism is genuine?
“Opportunities must be extended to all (minorities) because it is not in the interest of India for any segment of the population to feel that somehow their opportunities are less because of a fact of birth,” said Tharoor.
Zakaria’s final comment: “I think Manmohan Singh is the most intelligent decent, incorruptible Prime Minister India has had since Nehru. He should do what is in his heart and in his mind.
“He knows what India needs. Just go for it, don’t worry about the short-term political costs. This is your moment; this is the chance to take India to a whole different stage. Don’t hesitate now because you probably won’t get this opportunity again.”

SMS poll on ‘has this election result boosted India's image abroad?’
Yes : 96 per cent, No : 4 per cent.

THE NATIONAL PICTURE

2009-05-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

Congress-led UPA has been projected to have an edge over NDA
The curtains came down on the staggered Lok Sabha elections on Wednesday with millions of Indians voting peacefully in the fifth and last round covering 86 constituencies, and the first exit polls putting the Congress-led coalition on top of a fractured verdict.
Even as both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed they would finish as the number one, an India TV exit poll telecast after balloting ended said the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) could end up with 195-201 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha.
This tally could go up to 227-237 if the seats bagged by estranged allies such as Rashtriya Janata Dal and Samajwadi Party were to be included. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was tipped to bag 189-195 seats and the Third Front 113-121 seats, it said.
But political leaders and analysts kept their fingers tightly crossed, with the expected cliffhanger verdict forcing both the Congress and BJP -- the two main contenders for power -- desperately scouting for new allies. As the voting progressed, some parties switched loyalties, making it one of the most difficult electoral battles to predict.
"It seems to be a very complex political situation. It is the complexity that makes it difficult to make any predictions," Kerala-based political analyst NP Chekutty told IANS, reflecting an opinion widely held in the world's largest democracy.
Election officials estimated that some 55 per cent of the 714 million electorate - which is more than the combined population of Russia and the US - had voted over five phases starting April 16. The result will be known on Saturday.
Wednesday's polling was overwhelmingly peaceful but for the murder of a political worker in Tamil Nadu and clashes in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, two key states whose outcome will have a bearing on government formation in New Delhi.
The exercise involved all 39 seats of Tamil Nadu, all four seats of Himachal Pradesh and all five seats of Uttarakhand besides two in Jammu and Kashmir, nine in Punjab, 11 in West Bengal and 14 in Uttar Pradesh besides one each in Chandigarh and Pondicherry.
The most notable of the 1,432 candidates included Home Minister P Chidambaram of the Congress (Sivaganga, Tamil Nadu) and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee (South Kolkata). Fearing uncertain times, Indian markets turned edgy on Wednesday, with a key index losing 138 points from its last closing figure at end of trade. The 30-scrip sensitive index of the Bombay Stock Exchange opened at 12,201.93 points and fell 138.38 points or 1.14 per cent from Tuesday's close.
"I'm fully confident that a BJP-led government will be formed at the centre. We will get new partners (after the polls)," BJP president Rajnath Singh said confidently. Within hours, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh asserted that his party would occupy the number one slot.
Not to be left behind, the Third Front - made up of the Communists and regional parties - announced they would meet in New Delhi Monday to decide the future course of action. The meeting would be attended by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which is widely expected to win around 40 seats, said Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and a key mover behind the Third Front.
With neither the UPA nor NDA expected to cross the magic figure of 272 in the Lok Sabha, the Congress and BJP tried to outsmart one another in order to woo leaders of smaller and regional parties.
AIADMK chief and former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalitha, a key Third Front partner, said in Chennai: "There are feelers from many places. I am not responding to them now. Everything depends on the results. If the results are as expected, then I will go to Delhi."
Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who in 2004 pulled off a coup by most unexpectedly worsting the BJP-led alliance in general elections, Wednesday telephoned estranged ally Ram Vilas Paswan after a fire in his house which adjoins her own in the heart of New Delhi.

It’s Badals vs. Patiala royals in Punjab

2009-05-07T01:22:00.000-07:00

Four constituencies in the State go to polls in the first phase

V for victory: Shiromani Akali Dal leader and Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal with his son and Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal and daughter-in-law Harsimrat Kaur Badal, who is contesting from the Bhatinda parliamentary constituency, at a public meeting in the constituency on Tuesday.

K. V. Prasad

SANGRUR: Punjab is getting ready to go to the polls in the first phase on Thursday and the battle opener in the four constituencies of Patiala, Bhatinda, Sangrur and Ferozepur can set the pace for the main political rivals – the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Congress party.
While the Akali leader and Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal may claim that the contest is between parties, the buzz among party workers is that this election is a direct duel between the two big political families of the State -- the Badals and the Patiala royals represented by former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh; his wife and Congress MP from Patiala Parneet Kaur who is now seeking a third term in the Lok Sabha; and their son Raninder Singh, a candidate from Bhatinda.
Deputy Chief Minister and Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal, who has taken over command of the campaign, has made the contest a matter of prestige by fielding his wife Harsimrat Kaur Badal in Bhatinda, considered an Akali stronghold. She also hails from another prominent Majitha family with her brother Bikaramjit Singh serving as a powerful Minister in the Badal Government.
On the other hand, Raninder Singh has been nursing the constituency for the past few years and is credited to be the architect behind the Congress winning the maximum seats in the Malwa region when it faced a rout in Majha and Doaba, the other two regions of Punjab, in the 2007 State Assembly polls. The stakes are high for both sides.
Yet one factor, the call by the influential Dera Sacha Sauda sect to vote for the Congress two years ago enabling the party to buck the anti-incumbency trend against the Amarinder Singh Government, is missing. Having faced turbulence and criminal cases against its chief, the Dera has preferred to advise its followers spread across Punjab and Haryana to vote according to local “consensus”.
Elsewhere the Congress has fielded former MP and strongman Jagmeet Singh Brar from Ferozepur while in Sangrur, former State Youth Congress chief Vijay Inder Singla is engaged in a tight contest with sitting MP and former Union Minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa.
Mr. Singla may be a rookie in poll politics but being the son of former State Minister and former MP Sant Ram Singla he has the blessings of the Patiala palace.
Adding to it is the talk that he is among the four youth candidates handpicked by Rahul Gandhi in the State where he initiated the process of internal democracy in the State Youth Congress to elect its leaders.

Taking on a feudal mindset

2009-05-06T21:46:00.000-07:00

by Sarabjit Pandher from Bathinda

PARTY: Shiromani Akali Dal
CONSTITUENCY: Bathinda
STATE: Punjab

MISSION STATEMENT

Roll back female foeticide and halt denudation of Punjab’s green cover
Born into Amritsar’s Majithia family, and trained as a textile designer, Harsimrat Kaur is married into one of the most powerful political families of Punjab, the Badals of Muktsar.
Daughter-in-law of Sardar Parkash Singh Badal, who has been Punjab’s Chief Minister four times, she is the Shiromani Akali Dal’s candidate from Bathinda, where she faces the Congress’s Raninder Singh, son of the former Chief Minister , Amarinder Singh and a scion of the Patiala royal family.
Both Bathinda and Harsimrat Kaur have been in news for different reasons. Bathinda and Mansa districts, which are part of this constituency, were among the 10 districts of the country to report the worst sex ratios. Apart from being Punjab’s cotton belt, the region has a high incidence of diseases .
Ms. Harsimrat Kaur has launched a programme “Nanhi Chhan” (the elfin shade), to project her struggle against female foeticide and denudation of Punjab’s green cover.
“Nanhi Chhan is my politics,” asserts Harsimrat as in her public meetings where she makes her voters realise that a tree and a mother are the embodiments of nurturing. However in Punjab, the number of girl children aged 0-6 has dwindled fast as has forest cover, from 33 per cent to a pathetic six per cent. She accepts that her programme is a struggle to liberate Punjab from the vicious grip of the feudal patriarchy, which has also led to various socio-economic problems.
In January, when her husband, Sukhbir Singh Badal, was sworn in as Punjab’s Deputy Chief Minister, she saw the opportunity to use political power to spread her programme.
Though she was initially quite reluctant to plunge into active politics, Ms. Harsimrat Kaur hopes that she will be able to take her programme to the next level if she gains entry into Parliament. She is optimistic that being an MP will help her get support to change a mindset that is heavily biased against the girl child.
So far, she has involved a pharmaceutical major, religious leaders, the SGPC, social activists and the forest department in the distribution of the “Buta Prasad” (saplings).
Her target is to distribute about 12 lakh saplings of neem, ber, mango, guava and other fruit trees as well as medicinal plants. The programme, which was launched from the Golden Temple last year, has attracted appreciation even from her political opponents. Her electoral rival, Mr. Raninder Singh, says he would like to promote the project.
As she appeals for votes, Ms. Harsimrat Kaur seeks to draw the attention of women to a rare opportunity to enjoy the fruits of “shakti” (political power).
“If you elect me, you get a Chief Minister, a deputy Chief Minister and a Finance Minister as free,” she says.

What forced Cong hand on Tytler, Sajjan

2009-04-10T01:51:00.000-07:00

'Jutta Factor'

RAMESH VINAYAK

Even as the Congress has attempted to cut its political losses by withdrawing the Lok Sabha candidature of 1984 anti-Sikh riot-tainted Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), a key NDA ally, is showing no sign of piping down. Instead, in tandem with radical Sikh organisations, it appears intent on keeping the issue alive as high stake elections draw nearer. Two days after the shoe-hurling episode by a Sikh journalist catapulted the political row over the tickets to the duo into an expression of collective anger of the Sikhs, Congress president Sonia Gandhi moved decisively by asking both beleaguered leaders to opt out of the electoral arena. What ostensibly forced the high command’s hand was the blunt feedback from Punjab that any delay in dropping Tytler and Sajjan would seriously undermine the Congress’s poll prospects. Former CM Amarinder Singh amplified the party’s nervousness saying the resurrection of the riots issue had aroused the sentiments of the Sikh youth, and that allowing Akalis to stoke the emotive issue would make the going much tougher for three GenNext candidates handpicked by Rahul Gandhi. The Gandhi scion had ensured tickets to Ravneet Singh Bittu (Anandpur Sahib), Sukhwinder Singh Danny (Faridkot-reserve) and Vijay Inder Singla (Sangrur). However, a palpable pro-Congress groundswell across Punjab suddenly seemed to swing into antagonism for the party riding on anti-incumbency sentiment against the SAD-BJP rule until last week.While the Congress has reason to heave a sigh of comfort, all of a sudden SAD, which was staring at grim poll prospects and was rattled by a spate of defections to the Congress, has spring in its feet. “At stake is not tickets to the accused, but the core issue of punishment of the guilty and the CBI’s dubious role,” said Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal.Implicit in the SAD’s game plan to throw the Congress off balance is its move of pitching the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee — the apex Sikh religious body controlled by SAD – as the spearhead of a shrill tirade pegged to the riots. The Akalis have another reason to milk the issue. A running animosity between Sirsa-based Dera Sacha Sauda, with a sizable following in the Malwa, and the Sikhs has cast a shadow on SAD poll prospects. In the 2007 Assembly elections, the Dera openly supported the Congress, leading to the SAD rout in its turf. Clearly despite the Congress backing off, the election heat in Punjab is poised to rise.

Shoe hits home after two days, Tytler, Sajjan out of poll race
Journalist Jarnail Singh’s size-9 Reebok shoe may have missed P. Chidambaram on Tuesday, but two days later, it brought down two Delhi political heavyweights, Congress MPs and candidates Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar.“Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar will not be the Congress candidates in the Lok Sabha elections,” announced Congress general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi on Thursday. Here is what he didn’t say: they had been asked to step down.But that was later in the evening. The day began with the run up to a Delhi court case on allegations of Tytler’s involvement in the 1984 riots. It was postponed to another date, amid protests and burning of effigies outside court premises.Outside courts again, claims and counterclaims flew thick. Protestors alleged being pushed around by Tytler’s men and the Congress leader alleged he was being targeted. News channels had a busy day.Later in the afternoon Tytler told a news conference at his house, “In my heart I know this incident has embarrassed my party and me and I would not like to contest the elections.” That was the first indication of things to come.

And then the Congress leader said he was leaving it to his party. His party, however, was not forthcoming immediately. Its leaders had been in a huddle for the last two days starting with the shoe throwing at its head office on Tuesday.The party had taken the position that its president would decide after she returned from campaigning down south. She returned Wednesday night, and consultations began in earnest. They had to close the issue quickly.“Sonia had assiduously built bridges with the Sikh community over the last few years,” said a source not authorised to speak to reporters, adding, “she was anxious to protect this relationship from further damage.”Something had to give here.The Punjab unit of the party chipped in, telling the central leader very bluntly: get rid of Tytler and Kumar. The party is likely to do well here in the elections and let’s please not do anything to spoil our chances. Former chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh, who is spearheading the Punjab campaign panel, told Delhi the resurrection of 1984 had upset the Sikh youth, who form roughly 65 per cent of the electorate in the state.If they dumped the Congress, Singh argued, it would be difficult to ensure the victory of the three GenNext candidates handpicked by Rahul Gandhi — Ravneet Singh Bittu, Sukhwinder Singh Danny and Vijay Inder Singla.Singh was not exaggerating. Desperately fighting anti-incumbency, the ruling Akali Dal had very quickly latched on to the shoe throwing incident -- deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal was almost constantly on news channels talking up the issue.Party seniors didn’t need any more convincing now. Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee and political secretary Ahmad Patel were entrusted with the task of talking to Tytler and Sajjan Kumar.While the shoe-thrower was protesting CBI’s clean chit to Tytler, Sajjan Kumar got pulled in because of allegations of involvement in the riots against him. “Mukherjee and Patel conveyed to them Sonia’s anxiety,” said a source.Kumar didn’t make any public statements, but Tytler did, saying he was leaving it to the party. And then later qualified it by saying his heart tells him not to contest. And he will not.Their replacements will be named shortly.

CBI clears Tytler in 1984 anti-Sikh riots case

2009-04-02T00:47:00.001-07:00

New Delhi: Congress leader and former union minister Jagdish Tytler was on Thursday given a clean chit by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in a case registered against him for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. De-sealing its final report in the case in a court in the Capital, the CBI pleaded that the case against Tytler be cancelled. The CBI is also hoping to quash the FIR in the 1984 riots case. Counsel for the 1984 riots' accused H S Phoolka said, "The CBI has given the benefit to Tytler as he is contesting polls this time. There might be serious flaws in their report therefore the CBI does not want the report to be shown." In an affidavit filed before the Karkardooma court in New Delhi last year, the CBI said: "We don't have any evidence or witness to file a case against Jagdish Tytler."
This echoed the Government's stand that Tytler cannot be prosecuted due to insufficient concrete evidence. The Nanavati Commission - probing the case - had stated that there was 'credible evidence' against Tytler, and that he 'very probably' was one of those responsible for orchestrating the attacks. Tytler had responded that the evidence in question was unreliable because it was a matter of mistaken identity. Speaking to CNN-IBN on Thursday, Jagdish Tytler said that he had been suffering for so long for no fault of his. "I have suffered enough now. I just want to be left alone. Let those who oppose me say whatever they want. I will continue to serve the people of the country," he stated. "The truth has now finally come out aided by the CBI," he added. The BJP has lashed out at the CBI saying that it is not the Central Bureau of Investigation but the Congress Bureau of Investigation. "To give a clean chit to a man who is in serious trouble shows the political convenience of the Congress. The Congress is bent upon destroying all institutions in India and is now trying to influence the judiciary," said BJP Spokesperson, Prakash Javadekar.

Varun Plays The BJP’s Communal Card

2009-03-22T22:48:00.000-07:00

Method in madness

Amulya Ganguli

Despite Varun Gandhi’s lineage, he is still a minor figure in politics. In fact, but for his genealogy, he would have been an even more insignificant person. His immediate background, too, is less exalted than that of the other members of the family. He belongs to a branch which can hardly claim to be the true heirs of the Nehru-Gandhi legacy. The reason is that Varun’s father, Sanjay Gandhi, the “wayward, uneducated, inexperienced boy”, in the words of his uncle, BK Nehru, is hardly a much admired person in Indian politics. Instead, the role of this enfant terrible was widely believed to be responsible for Indira Gandhi’s defeat in 1977 after two years of the Emergency.

Since Sanjay Gandhi’s fascistic tendencies were evident during this period, it isn’t surprising that both his wife, Maneka, and Varun, found refuge in the BJP which, too, exhibits similar traits. So has one of Sanjay Gandhi’s henchmen, Jagmohan. Sanjay Gandhi’s stint at the top was too brief to reveal his anti-Muslim sentiments although members of this community suffered the most during the sterilization drives as a part of his family planning initiatives. As a result, they turned resolutely against the Congress in 1977, especially in UP and Bihar from where the Congress, astonishingly, did not win a single Lok Sabha seat.

Stridently pro-Hindu

Since Maneka Gandhi, too, did not show any overt anti-minority feelings during her political career perhaps because she is a Sikh, it is difficult to say from where Varun has acquired his stridently pro-Hindu outlook, which has been disowned by his own party. It is possible that he sees his aggressive anti-minority posturing as the only way to make his presence felt. Besides, as the support extended to him by the Shiv Sena and at least two contributors to the saffron newspaper, The Pioneer, shows, his combativeness will have admirers even if, like Pramod Muthalik of the Ram Sene, he falls foul of the law. But illegality can yield dividends, especially in a party and a parivar where there are any number of hardliners ~ from Narendra Modi to Ashok Singhal ~ who make no secret of their antipathy towards what a saffron scribe called “non-nationalists”. It is not impossible that it is in the company of these hawks that the “inexperienced” Varun’s anti-minority sentiments were honed. After all, the essence of the Sangh Parivar’s worldview is what Varun said in his speeches in his constituency, Pilibhit ~ that the Hindus are under pressure from the unpatriotic Muslims, who invaded the country in medieval times, divided it in 1947 and now pose a demographic threat because of their increasing numbers. To buttress this last point, Modi coined the slogan, hum panch, hamare pachis, to underline the practice of the Muslims having four wives and not observing family planning. Varun’s supposedly doctored CD is not the only one which has drawn attention to the BJP’s venomous propaganda.

A similar CD was in circulation before the UP assembly elections of 2007. It was a typical potpourri of the BJP’s and the saffron brotherhood’s hate campaign. It features a saffron “masterji” saying that the BJP “is a party which thinks about the country, it thinks about the Hindu religion. The other parties are all agents of the Muslims”. There are scenes of slaughtered cows, of a Hindu girl being deceived into marrying a Muslim and a speech by a “social worker” who says that “the day is not far away when we will be afraid to even call ourselves Hindus and soon you will never be able to find a Sohanlal, Mohanlal, Atmaram or Radhakrishnan … we will only see Abbas, Naqvi, Rizvi and Maulvi”. The BJP, of course, disowned the CD even though it was released at a public function by Lalji Tandon, a prominent leader of the party in the state. The tactical retreat was not unlike its present ploy of distancing itself from Varun or from Pramod Muthalik earlier. The party with a difference has become a party of dissociation from its firebrands. There may be a method, however, behind this madness. Notwithstanding these subsequent denials, the BJP’s purpose is served by such CDs and speeches. They tell its core constituency that its heart remains uncontaminated by its tactical dalliance with “secular” allies of the NDA like the Janata Dal (United), which has predictably expressed outrage over Varun’s speeches.

Golwalkar’s view

As long as the central point of the BJP’s and the parivar’s remains Golwalkar’s perception of Muslims and Christians as Internal Threats Nos. 1 and 2 along with Savarkar’s view of these two communities as essentially alien, such inflammatory audio-visual means of propaganda and speeches by individuals like Varun will continue to be a feature of Hindutva politics. Even while pretending that it had nothing to do with such outpourings, the BJP cannot but note with satisfaction the voices of support not only from members of the extended parivar like the Shiv Sena, but also from those who express themselves, often in an offensive manner, on the Internet. To give one example, a contributor has said that “there is no question that Hindus are lambasted by the minority community in their own country. How else could an Italian head this huge nation? All because the selfish and egotistical founding fathers wrote a Constitution that benefited themselves and not the majority community. That was blatantly unfair. Varun (like I feel myself) has given vent to it”. Such comments probably act as a whiff of oxygen to the BJP and the parivar, sustaining their illusion that they are basically on the right track and that the only obstacle is the constitutional arrangement which prevents India’s conversion into a theocracy.

The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman.

Inside the Swat Valley

2009-02-28T23:35:00.000-08:00

The Devil In The Backyard

The Zardari Government is making peace with the Taliban which is hanging amputated bodies from electric poles. AMIR MATEEN analyses the dangers for Pakistan

THE ONE-TIME tourist heaven of Swat looks like a ghost valley today. The people have still not recovered from the gory nightmare that was unleashed by the local Taliban. The last one-and-a-half year has seen a population of 1.5 million people being held hostage by a ragtag force of some 2,500 Taliban. They are under the leadership of Maulvi Fazalullah, popularly known as Mullah Radio for his jihad-inflected sermons, aired through his illegal FM radio. Fazalullah’s men have fought bloody battles with the army over the past two years. They virtually took control of most of Swat last year. Over 1,200 civilians have died so far and around 350,000 hapless locals forced to leave through rough mountain terrain.
The rich have left for Peshawar — 70 miles away, and the richer for more posh Islamabad — 100 miles in the south. The poor, with no place to go, suffered the trauma that makes Hollywood horrors look like a picnic. Intelligence sources dubbed as ‘spies’ and government officials — particularly from law-enforcing agencies — were specifically targeted by the Taliban. They were abducted and maimed and their killing turned into a gruesome spectacle in order to send a message to others.
The reign of terror is symbolised by what has come to be known as Khooni Chowk — the Crossing of Blood. A band of Taliban would, late at night, block the central crossing in the city centre of Mingora, the district headquarters the size of Srinagar and no less beautiful. They hung amputated bodies — some headless — on an electrical pole in the middle of the crossing, with notes giving their name and details of their ‘misdeeds’ against Islam. The bodies were not to be removed before a given date. Anybody violating this dictat could do so only at the risk of being himself put up headless.
THIS SCENE — perpetuated for days and weeks — is not from the Wild West of the cowboys. It happened in the Swat valley, which once took pride in having the most peaceful and bettereducated residents not just in the frontier province alone, but all over Pakistan. The princely state — annexed by Pakistan in 1969 — had better schools, hospitals and police stations than anybody else. It had an airport, and attractions like ski resorts and trout fishing on the meandering River Swat, which used to attract hordes of tourists every year. No more.
A majority of the police force has either run away, resigned or simply not turned up for work. Local newspapers are filled with advertisements from policemen declaring that they have left their jobs, and hence they be spared “in the name of their small children.” A new force of 600 locals was recruited for special commando training to combat what is actually an insurgency. The story goes that 450 of them disappeared during the training itself, and another 148 did not appear on the date of joining. The two men left in the force have not ventured outside their office in uniform since.
This left the entire populace at the mercy of the wolves that are masquerading as saviours of religion. People have seen throats being slit. Those who violate the Taliban code are either lashed or hanged in public jirgas (gatherings). Events where masked gunmen with the latest weaponry went on the rampage were skillfully orchestrated, and then their videos released in order to instill fear in the public. This took a severe toll on the psyche of the public, already hard pressed thanks to unemployment and hunger.
Life has come to a standstill for 80 percent of the people whose earnings came from tourism. Orchids have become rotten in the absence of labour and markets; and the fields lie barren. People go without fire, food, and electricity for days. The only cinema in Mingora was forced to down shutters, television and music has been banned, and CD shops have been closed. Even barbershops were shutdown as shaving, according to the interpretation of the Taliban, is un-Islamic.
It has been particularly hard for women, children and the handicapped because of the problems of age or sickness. Over 200 schools have been blown up as they were giving “western education.” Girls are barred from schooling. Over 100,000 Swati girls stand to lose their chance of education and, consequently, any career or professional life. This is happening in a place where the ratio of women in literacy and the job market was one of the highest in the province. The new edict may allow girls an education till the fourth grade, but with a revised curriculum. Also, they must always wear scarves on their heads. In any case, it will take awhile as most schools have been destroyed.
Women have been rendered prisoner in their own homes as they are now barred from going out in public, something that even Saudi Arabia has not tried. The central bazaar for women — with items like cosmetics and bangles, when partially open — today gives an image of a haunted place without shoppers. But then, cosmetics are a lesser priority when your children sleep hungry. Women are not allowed to work. Even women doctors are not permitted to carry on with their jobs. Stories abound where women lost babies because of the non-availability of doctors. Many others have died because of the lack of medicines and medical treatment.
The question is — how did over a million people accept the inhuman dictates of a bunch of jihadi thugs who do not fit into any Islamic school of thought? Well, they have not. They voted liberal parties to power in the last election. But these parties did not have either the political muscle, or the will, to protect them from the evil of the Taliban.
But how did the Taliban gain ascendancy? The system of justice under the princely state was more efficient than what followed. The people, therefore, wanted Sharia courts to be established as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. But the Taliban, who had a different agenda, hijacked their demand. For ordinary people, in the absence of the writ of the state, it’s just a matter of choosing a lesser evil.
All hopes now hinge upon Maulana Sufi Mohammad, the father-in-law of Fazalullah. Sufi Mohammad is no angel himself. He is a radical cleric freed in 2008 after spending six years in jail for leading 10,000 Pashtun tribesmen to fight the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Nearly 7,000 died in the bombing and he ran back for his life. The people whose children he took with him after indoctrinating them, leading to their being killed, hate him. He has now been resurrected in order to persuade Fazalullah to accept the government’s offer of a ceasefire, which he has agreed to partially. How long this respite will last, only time will tell.
The ceasefire agreement with the Taliban has raised questions as to whether it is a victory for the Pakistan Government, capitulation before the Taliban who want to recreate a 1,500-year-old replica of Islamic rule, or a strategic retreat by the military.
IT IS ironic that Frontier Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti, the great grandson of the champion of nonviolence, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — the Frontier Gandhi — has signed the agreement. He has justified it saying, “I have done this to stop violence and to fulfill my electoral promise of restoring peace.” His uncle and Awami National Party Chief Asfand Yar Wali — whose party runs the troubled province bordering Afghanistan — is under attack from the Taliban. He survived a suicide bomb attack three months ago while most of his party members are on the run because of constant threats to their life.
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Government at the Centre is playing it safe. President Asif Zardari’s position is that he will decide when the agreement will come to him for his signature. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood has tried to pacify the Americans while on a tour of Washington, saying, “it’s a local remedy to a local problem.” The PPP has neither accepted the agreement nor rejected it. Obviously, the PPP Government would like to see what the outcome will be in a couple of months, if not earlier, before taking a stand. In the meantime, PPP spinmasters are arguing that the Sharia courts are not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of women or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
LIBERAL CIRCLES in Pakistan and abroad are fuming over what they call “the sellout.” Some, like human rights activist Iqbal Haider, have described it as a deal with the devil. “How can you sit with the very people who have maimed hundreds of people,” he protested. “It’s a matter of principle which should be supreme. These people should be tried for crimes against humanity.”
The liberals have a valid argument that the agreement will now be a model for the rest of the Taliban. They will demand similar Sharia in other parts of the province. “Now they know that militancy is the way to coerce the government into submission,” said senior analyst Saleem Khilji. They have a point, as the agreement extends the scope of their power. The government has conceded that the new Sharia will be extended beyond Swat to the other five districts of Malakand division also.
The Pakistan Army has taken refuge behind the government, saying that it is following orders to stay out till further notice. They should be the happiest lot if this agreement were to result in peace. They have taken the brunt of the fight. Media reports say army casualties number more than a hundred dead but the Taliban claims that it might be much higher.
The issue is that the Pakistan Army has been trained to fight with India, and it may not be comfortable with counterinsurgency operations. It does not have sufficient experience of that except for the Balochistan insurgency in the 1970s, unlike its Indian rival, which has consistently countered insurgencies in Kashmir, Nagaland and Mizoram.
The army will remain stationed in Swat to deal with the fallout. The underlying assumption is that either Sufi Mohammad will deliver peace or fight with his son-inlaw. This will be a tactical victory. Instead of the army fighting the Taliban, it would be the militants fighting each other.
But then there is a counter-theory — the two factions might use the time to regroup, consolidate their power and fight later with even more ferocity. There are already signs of this happening. An indicator is that the price of arms in the tribal belt has almost doubled because of the massive demand.
In any case, the agreement is simply not implementable. Each party has a different interpretation of it. The governments in the Frontier and Islamabad think that the Sharia court is old wine in a new bottle. Sufi Mohammad believes that his mandate is to provide Sharia courts where religious scholars will be independent judges and not advisers to the regular civil judges like in the earlier agreement of six years ago. “The choice of judges will be ours and they will be all-powerful,” said Maulana Izzat, spokes man of Sufi Mohammad, in a telephonic interview.
Fazalullah wants the complete domination of the Sharia, encompassing all sectors beyond the judiciary. “We shall run the entire area in accordance with the holy book, “countered Muslim Khan, another spokesman for Fazalullah. “We don’t accept any system but our own and will inshallah spread it to other parts of Pakistan very soon.”
The legal and administrative intricacies involved in merging the old system with the new are something beyond these clerics. The Taliban have simply ceased fire but not surrendered. Both sides are waiting for the next round to start with bated breath. It almost came to that when a newly-appointed senior district official was kidnapped by militants two days after the ceasefire. After a tense standoff lasting hours, the official, Kushal Khan, was freed.
Later, it was disclosed that his release had been the result of a swap: Pakistani authorities released two militants who had been picked up a day earlier in Peshawar. Next time around, it is possible that some freed militants like this might renew the fighting while both sides continue to sit in the trenches.
Swat is different from other trouble spots like Bahaur, Waziristan and Khyber. It is the only trouble spot that is not a federal (FATA) but a provincial tribal area (PATA). It is wrong to generalise about the Taliban and the Swat situation in particular.
FAZALULLAH, A barely-literate former lift operator, was an indigenous product. He does not come from the ranks of Taliban or Al-Qaeda, but was later accepted by them and adopted as the commander of the area looking after his hold in the area. It is only in Swat that schools have been closed in an organised manner, otherwise the Taliban have not done so in FATA, except for occasional episodes. The Taliban have generally refrained from killing hostages, except for spies or the recent Polish engineer in Waziristan. The Swat Talibans have slit throats of hostages and security forces with ruthless abandon.
Swat is the only place which has been completely taken over by the Taliban. This may be because of its geography — it is a bowl-shaped valley. The Swat terrain makes it strategically easier for Taliban to hold power against numerical odds. There is one major communication artery along the Swat River that could easily be blocked from anywhere. In Bajaur, Khyber and Waziristan, the Taliban are dominant, but they do not run those agencies. Swat is also the only hotspot that does not border Afghanistan. In fact, it remained aloof and generally peaceful during the war with Afghanistan.
Swat has a past of peace and culture where thousands thronged from all over Pakistan and abroad every summer. Its capital, Mingora, happens to be much bigger than any other town in any of the troubled agencies.
Also, it houses the elite of Pashtun tribes, and is the abode of the royal, sophisticated Yousafzais of Tana, whereas the other agencies have a history of warring tribes. The impact of Swat’s takeover, like in the classical Clausewitzian centre of gravity, has been immense on the psyche of Pashtuns.
If the impression goes out that it’s a victory for the Taliban, it will encourage militancy elsewhere, in the rest of Pakistan. It becomes more alarming when seen in the larger context where the Waziristan commanders, pro-Pakistan Mullah Nazir and anti-state Baitullah Mehsud, along with Haji Gul Bahadur, have patched up differences in Waziristan to become a formidable force; Bajaur Taliban now expect similar Sharia in their area, and Hamimullah is blocking NATO supplies in Khyber. The Taliban seem to be on the ascendant, which should be a source of worry for not just Pakistan, but also the entire region and the world.
If the social fabric continues to be torn apart as it has in Swat, this will lead to the rise of more non-state actors who are not under the control of anyone. Since all of these commanders are connected to each other, including the militants in Kashmir, the genie is threatening to become ever more dangerous. The question is not just about the outcome of the investigation into the Mumbai attack. A more serious question is: what will happen if there is another attack of a similar nature?

Mateen is an Islamabad-based journalist
WRITER’S EMAIL amirmateen@hotmail.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 9, Dated Mar 07, 2009

Full text of Obama's inaugural address

2009-01-23T08:23:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama, after being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the nation's first African-American president on Tuesday, delivered the following speech

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebearers, and true to our founding documents. So it has been.

So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land -- a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Don't Miss

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again, these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions -- who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them -- that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account -- to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day -- because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control -- and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort -- even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West: Know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment -- a moment that will define a generation -- it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed -- why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "

Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

enough is enough

2008-12-27T10:13:00.000-08:00

Why war is n’t an option
Barkha Dutt
I just got an email from a friend in Pakistan. He had written just five words: do something; stop this war. War? I wrote back arguing that there was no war to run scared from and that the illusion of an imminent catastrophe had been manufactured on the other side. Our dialogue collapsed in a dead-end, which may work well for TV talk but not in real life. Most Pakistanis I have been speaking to in the last one month are convinced that the
Indians are coming. And most Indians, with the inarticulateness that comes with rage, want the government to “do something”. We just aren’t sure what that “something” can or should be.
We are frustrated and angry that even a month after the Bombay attacks, there is no tangible shift in the way Islamabad is respo-nding. If anything, things have only got worse. Even the UN-pushed crackdown on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the ideolo-gical launchpad and political front of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba) has turned out to be cosmetic. And Masood Azhar — the terrorist who walked free in exchange for the safety of the IC-814 passengers — has vanished, after being declared under house arrest. The flip-flops are brazen enough to destroy diplomacy.
And yet, the truth — painful as it may be to families who have suffered directly in the Bombay attacks — is this: war is not an option; it is neither practical nor desirable. First, there are the commonsensical reasons to rule it out. A military conflict will not manage to eliminate the seeds of terrorism that are sown deep into the subsoil of Pakistan’s strategic architecture. Washington cannot be treated as the automatic deterrent to nuclear conflict; the stakes are too high, the game too risky. A civilian establishment that does not trust its own institutions to investigate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (the centrepiece of the PPP’s election campaign was the promise of a UN probe) will hardly be able to control rogue players with a mind of their own, in case of a war. Even surgical strikes (bound to escalate into a full-blown conflict) don’t have ready targets to plan with. Terror camps can be swiftly dismantled and resurrected at new locations once the conflict is over. A military conflict does not even guarantee that the Indian forces can come home with Dawood Ibrahim, Hafiz Saeed or Masood Azhar. So, what would we really achieve by risking the lives of our soldiers?
But for those who dismiss all this as arguments made by the fainthearted, there’s a more compelling reason not to consider war: India would be playing straight into the hands of Pakistan’s military regime. Talk to Pakistani commentators and they agree that a war with India strengthens the Pakistan army like nothing else has or could in the past year. Some even suggest that precision air strikes by India will present a near-perfect scenario for the Pakistan military. Islamabad will retaliate without immediately risking the fatalities of on-ground conflict; Washington will jump in within days and the military will be back in the centrestage of public approval. This, in a country, where just a few months ago, General Pervez Musharraf was pushed out unceremoniously and the army was blamed for everything from the rise of the Taliban to the price of onions.
Bhutto’s tragic assassination (blamed by her own people on elements in the security establishment) was meant to usher in a political revolution. Exactly a year back, in December, I remember sitting in the Bhutto House at Larkana, and feeling goosebumps when Bilawal Bhutto announced in a trembling voice that that “democracy” would be the “best revenge” for his mother’s murder. But we have seen that democracy being whittled down systematically. Many in Pakistan believe that sections of the ISI and the Army have moved in with quiet, but brutal aggression because President Asif Ali Zardari was moving too quickly in peace talks with India. The offer of a no-first use of N-weapons; the consent to start border trade across the line of control, the attempts to reign in the ISI and the willingness (at least on paper) to investigate its role in the Kabul bombings — none of this made Zardari popular with his own security establishment. And frankly, in the last month it has become clear that neither Zardari nor Nawaz Sharif is the author of this script any longer. The refusal to send the ISI chief to India, pushing Sharif to retract his statement on Pakistani involvement in the Bombay attacks, and now the artificial war hysteria created by moving troops and flying air force jets over residential areas — all have the imprint of a larger plan — one that goes well beyond the terrorist strikes in Bombay.
By whipping up the impression of imminent war, Islamabad’s security establishment is hoping to catapult itself back into the role of saviour. It isn’t my argument that India should be overly concerned about the inner failings of Pakistan’s experiment with democracy. Our decisions should be guided by self-interest. And so we must ask, does India want to strengthen the very section of the Pakistani power structure that it sees as innately hostile to us?
Yes, the domestic mood remains one of “enough is enough.” And contrary to the rather over-imaginative understanding of some TV-bashers that this was an exhortation to war, it’s a simple, effective phrase (first used passionately by Shobhaa De) to capture the mood of a country that is no longer willing to accept a system that lets us down and fails to protect us. But before we demand quick-fix solutions on moving against Pakistan, let us ask ourselves this: are we helping India? India must now look for an unconventional solution that lies somewhere between war and peace.
Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, English News, NDTV

Truth Behind Border

2008-12-14T05:04:00.000-08:00

Into The Heart Of Darkness

HARINDER BAWEJA visits Muridke, the headquarters of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and goes behind the mask of piety to discover the face of terror

YOU ARE in an educational complex but you are from India and you work for TEHELKA, so it will take you time to change your mind,’’ is what Abdullah Muntazir, (my guide and the spokesperson for the foreign media), threw at me within minutes of us reaching Muridke, believed worldwide to be the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT). It was perhaps, for the first time, that due permission had been granted to any Indian journalist to visit the sprawling campus that lies 40 kms out of Lahore. The barricade that leads to the complex is heavily guarded, and no one can enter without prior consent.
The guided tour took me through a neatly laid out 60-bed hospital, schools for boys and girls, a madarsa, a mosque, an exorbitantly large swimming pool and a guest house. Nestled between tall trees and a meshed wire boundary, the 75-acre complex has manicured lawns, turnip farms and a fish-breeding centre. The students who enroll in the school pay a fee while those who study in the madarsa and pass out as masters in Islamic studies can come for free. Learning English and Arabic from class one on is compulsory, as is a course in computers.
"Welcome to the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. You think a terrorist organisation will be based just a few metres away from the main Grand Trunk Road?’’ is the next loaded statement. The administrators of the complex, drawn from the LeT’s political wing, Jamaat-ud- Dawa, are clearly at pains to disassociate themselves from the group widely believed to be behind the terror attack in Mumbai on 26/11. Other foreign journalists were guided through the complex a few days before my visit. During their orchestrated tour, they saw students working in chemistry and physics laboratories, peering into microscopes and connecting electric circuits.
None of us went there thinking we would see firing ranges or target shooting in progress, but the tour itself is surreal, because even as you walk through the neatly trimmed lawns and veer left or right to see the hostel or the mosque or the hospital, the conversation itself is dotted entirely with words like terrorism, lashkar and in my case, Kashmir. Even though the gates have been opened — after clearance from Pakistan’s security agencies (read ISI) — to dispel the impression of Muridke being the training camp that "India has made it out to be,’’ the conversation is not about the school syllabus but wholly about how India is an enemy.
ADAY AFTER I visited Muridke, I met a family whose sister-in-law lives right next to the complex. "But of course it’s a training ground. You can hear slogans for jehad blaring out of loudspeakers in full volume and you can also sometimes hear the sound of gunfire,’’ members of this family confided. But during the two hours that I spent within the complex, there was enough conversation about jehad even if there were no signs of it being a sanctuary, not just for the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, but for Ramzi Yousef, an al-Qaeda operative, and one of the conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.
Kasav, the lone terrorist who was captured alive in Mumbai, is supposed to have studied here, according to his interrogators, and its time to ask some straight questions.
So did Kasav study here, in Muridke? Even if he did, we are not responsible for what any one of our students do after passing out.
Do you support the LeT? We used to. You used to? Yes, we were like-minded but the group was banned after Indian propaganda following the attack on its Parliament, which was done by the Jaishe-Mohammad and not the LeT. We used to provide logistical help to the Lashkar, collect funds for them and look after their publicity.
Did you also provide them with arms?
They must have bought weapons with the money we gave them. They were obviously not using the money to buy flowers for the Indian Army.
The Lashkar has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Red Fort in Delhi and the airport in Srinagar.
We do not consider Kashmir to be a part of India. It is a part of Pakistan. Those who attack the security forces are not terrorists, they are freedom fighters.
President Musharraf moved away from the position that Kashmir either secede or be given independence. He proposed joint control.
Pervez Musharraf did not enjoy any legitimacy. He had no business making such proposals.
Do you consider India an enemy?
Without doubt. India is responsible for the attack on Islamabad’s Marriot hotel, for the bomb blasts in Peshawar. Sarabjit Singh has been convicted of being a RAW agent.
Your Amir, Hafiz Sayeed, has given calls for jehad.
He supports the freedom movement in Kashmir. We think it is right. It is ridiculous to call him a terrorist. When India is even pricked by a thorn, the whole world stands up. Why did Condoleezza Rice not put pressure on India for handing over Narendra Modi after the Gujarat carnage?
Kashmir is no longer entirely indigenous. Foreign fighters like Maulana Masood Azhar were arrested in Anantnag.
He was a journalist and still is an inspirational writer. Anyone from here can go to Kashmir. We do not see it as part of India. Did you sanitise this place before bringing me in?
This is an educational complex and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a charitable organisation. There are very few people here because of the Eid break.
Does the ISI support you?
He just laughs.
THE JAMAAT-UD-DAWA, which was banned by the US in 2005 for being a Lashkar front, draws patronage from the ISI and though proscribed abroad, has a free run in Pakistan. It has branches all across the country and is as famous for the social work it renders, as it is infamous for its terror activities. It sees itself as a movement and not an organisation and has appeal to many in rural and urban areas. When the Observer correspondent went to Kasav’s village in Faridkot, just off a town called Depalpur close to the border with India, to establish if he indeed was a Pakistani, he was told that "religious clerics were brainwashing youths in the area and that LeT’s founder Hafiz Sayeed had visited nearby Depalpur. There was a LeT office in Depalpur, but that had hurriedly been closed down in the past few days. The LeT paper is distributed in Depalpur and Faridkot."
The Jamaat-ud-Dawa has a wide base and operates 140 schools and 29 seminaries in different towns and cities of Pakistan. According to the Jamaat’s website, "Islam does not mean following a few rituals like performing prayers, keeping fasts, performing the pilgrimage to the Ka’ba (Hajj), giving alms (Zakat), or donating to charitable works, but in fact, it is a complete Code of Life. That is why Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s struggle is not limited to any particular aspect of life only; rather, Jamaat-ud-Dawa addresses each and every field of life according to the teachings of Islam. Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a movement that aims to spread the true teachings of Islam, and to establish a pure and peaceful society by building the character of individuals according to those teachings." Its appeal extends to urban professionals like doctors who were out in large numbers in Muzaffarabad (the capital of Azad Kashmir or POK, depending on which side of the line of control you are on) in 2005, after a devastating earthquake. Unlike the Taliban, the Jamaat is modelled after Hamas and is not merely an army with gun-toting members but a complex and intricate organisation with a social and political agenda. It has a huge following and reports have often indicated that in its annual congregations, where Hafiz Sayeed gives a call for jehad, as many as 100,000 people are present in the sprawling Muridke compound.
IT IS groups like the Jamaat and the Jaish-e-Mohammad — started by Maulana Masood Azhar soon after he was set free in Kandahar — that both India and Pakistan are up against.
The complete U-turn, post 9/11 when General Musharraf lent complete support to George Bush, saw Pakistan take a slow but sure journey that has today placed it on a dangerous crosshair. While Musharraf joined the war against terror — forced to by Bush who had infamously said you are either with us or against us — he also got isolated from his own people who took to the streets, openly protesting his support of America that was bombing and strafing civilians, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. The last straw on the camel’s back — to use a cliché — came when his own army stormed the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in mid-2007. Reports of machine guns being used against innocents who got trapped in the Masjid, converted many within the army and the ISI and those who had retired from these outfits. It was the tipping point for former ISI chief Lt Gen Assad Durrani, who says, "It was the most blatant homage paid to the Americans. The mosque is located under the nose of the ISI headquarter and you cannot first allow it to become a fortress and then fire on people who were willing to surrender."
The storming of the Lal Masjid was a tipping point in more ways than one. If the release of Masood Azhar and the subsequent formation of the Jaish saw the advent of fidayeen attacks in Kashmir, the Lal Masjid operation led equally to the birth of intense attacks by suicide bombers. The suicide attacks were not just targeting civilians, they were seeking men in uniform and the figures, in fact, tell the story. The first half of 2007 saw 12 such attacks all over Pakistan, between January and July 3, and an estimated 75 people were killed. But after the Lal Masjid operation which reduced large parts of it to rubble, 44 suicide attacks took place between July and December, killing 567 people, mostly the members of the military and paramilitary forces, ISI and the police. December also saw the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a grim reminder of the fact that the militants had declared a war against their ex-masters. The attack on Islamabad’s Marriot Hotel, the city’s most high-profile landmark, only confirmed the fact that terror can strike at will, any time and anywhere. It confirmed also that terror was not restricted to Pakistan’s tribal belt alone. President Musharraf himself had, in fact, also survived three assassination attempts and now lives under extremely tight security. The terror threat in Pakistan, can, in fact, be gauged from the fact that both President Asif Zardari and the Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, in a complete first, offered Eid prayers at their respective residences on December 9.
The wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan does not just testify to the revival of al Qaeda and the Taliban networks but as Ahmed Rashid, strategic writer and author of several books on the jehadi networks, says, "The army is embroiled in fighting these forces in the Frontier and one-third of the country is not even in the state’s control. This is hardly the time to pick a fight with India."
THE RATCHETING up of tension and animosity between India and Pakistan after the Mumbai terror attack on 26/11, points to another dangerous faultline — while the Pakistani Army joined the global war against terror, it never completely gave up its support to the jehadi network that is active on its border with India. Even after Lashkar and Jaish were banned, neither were their back accounts frozen, nor was there any attempt at forcing them to shut shop. The Army and the ISI continued to support fronts like the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which does more than just equip men with arms. It motivates and indoctrinates minds, and as Rashid points out, "Musharraf used to place Hafiz Sayed and Masood Azhar under house arrest for Western consumption. He may have stopped infiltrating them into Kashmir too under international pressure, but there was no attempt to stop their activities in Pakistan after they were banned. They were just allowed to hang loose." Concurs former interior secretary Tasneem Noorani, "There was no effort to mainstream the radicals."
Kasav’s journey from a remote village in Faridkot to Mumbai is a testimony to this. So is his revelation to his interrogators that he was trained by a ‘Major’. Zardari may have been right when he attributed the Mumbai attack to ‘nonstate actors’ because the Major does not necessarily have to be a serving officer employed with the ISI. "Retired ISI officers are helping the Pakistani Taliban and they have become more Lashkar than the Lashkar,’’ is how Rashid puts it but any number of strategic and security analysts will testify to this dangerous trend — to how ex-ISI officers are still in business because they have now attached themselves as advisors to militant organisations like the Lashkar and the Jaish. Admits one such analyst, who prefers not to be named, "You don’t need large training camps. Ex-servicemen are imparting arms training within the compounds of their homes. Different officials are attached with different groups."
The switch from one alias to another — Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Markaz-e-Toiba, Markaz-e-Dawah-Irshad, Jamaat-ud- Dawa — speaks of the Establishment’s (the Army and ISI combine are referred to as the Establishment in Pakistan) more than subtle support of groups that are used against India. The long-standing relationship between the Establishment and the India-bound militants is now under pressure. The overriding message from America after the Mumbai attack is for these groups to be reined in. This is testing not just the army’s carefully crafted support for the militants but has also focused attention on yet another faultline — the equation between the Establishment and the civilian government.
Committed to better relations with India, Pakistan’s top-most civilian representatives responded instinctively to the horror in Mumbai, in keeping with what Zardari had told the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, held a few days before the gun and grenade battle at Nariman House and the Taj and Oberoi hotels. In what took the Indian Government by surprise, Zardari committed Pakistan to a no-first-use of nuclear weapons. It was the first major securityrelated statement to come from Pakistan’s Government after the February 18 election and more than just surprise the Indian Government, it caused unrest amongst its own Establishment. The next statement, made by Prime Minister Gilani — and confirmed through a press release issued by his office — pertained to the civilian government agreeing to sending its top-most ISI officer, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha to India on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s request.
The sequence of events following Gilani’s offer and Zardari’s quick retraction, saying they had agreed to send a director and not Director General Pasha, in fact speaks of the internal battle of supremacy between the Establishment and the civilian authorities, especially on the crucial issue of national security, which the army believes to be its exclusive domain. As Imtiaz Alam, a peace worker and head of the South Asian Free Media Association, who had dinner with Zardari a day after the Mumbai attack put it, "Zardari is very firm on terrorism. He thinks democracy is a better weapon but the terrorists have succeeded in creating a psychological gulf between India and Pakistan. Instead of Pakistan fighting the jehadis, it has become a fight between India and Pakistan."
Senior journalists in Pakistan admit that briefings from the ISI changed the post-Mumbai discourse. Reacting perhaps to the loud, jingoistic demands on Indian television channels for action against Pakistan, the ISI told a select group of journalists that India had in fact ‘summoned’ their chief. In these briefings, the ISI is also surprisingly and shockingly supposed to have reffered to Baitullah Mehsud — Benazir Bhutto’s assasin — as a ‘patriotic Pakistani’. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa Amir, Hafiz Sayeed — with a clear nod from his handlers — appeared on one news channel after another, making the same points: that the list of 20 most wanted which also includes him, was old hat, that India was playing the blame game without evidence, that India had its own band of ‘Hindu terrorists’ and India should give freedom to Kashmir and end the matter once and for all. The leak soon after, of the hoax call, purportedly made by Minister of External Affairs Pranab Mukherji to President Zardari, sealed the debate — India bashing was back in business. The jingoism overtook the more important debate of the threat Pakistan itself faced from terror networks flourishing on its soil.
PAKISTAN’S NEWS channels went on overdrive and as some even blared war songs, the question that gained importance through all the din, was — who really runs Pakistan? Who is in control?
The answers to the questions are both easy and complex. Mushahid Hussain, Chairman, Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate, is clearheaded on the answer: "War on terror, national security and relations with India, Afghanistan and China are the domain of the army. Thanks to India, the army has been rehabilitated and the war bugles are all over. No one person, no one institution is running Pakistan. Musharraf ran a one window operation and the army and the ISI used to report to him, but now decision making is murky and that is causing confusion. The hoax call and the DG ISI controversy are symptomatic of that."
THERE ARE other examples. Only a few months ago, Zardari quickly retracted on his effort to bring the ISI under the control of the Interior Ministry. And even as the Pakistan Government’s response to Indian pressure to rein in the terror networks, plays itself out on a day-to-day basis, it is evident that the civilian authorities have had to embrace the Establishment’s point of view vis-a-vis India. Therefore, the talk that India should provide concrete evidence. Therefore, Zardari’s statement that the guilty — if found guilty — will be tried on Pakistani soil. That the 20 most wanted will not be handed over. Even on sourced reports, put out in the local media, that Masood Azhar had been put under house arrest, Prime Minister Gilani went on record to say that no such report had come to him yet.
If India believes that Pakistan’s response has been poor — two Lashkar men, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and Zarrar Shah have been arrested in Muzaffarbad — it is because the government here is tied down by the Establishment and pressure from its own people. It cannot be seen to be buckling under pressure either from India or the US.
Some moves seem to be on the cards, including the banning of the Jamaat-ud- Dawa. But Lashkar was banned in the past, as was the Jaish. Prime Minister Gilani has committed to not allowing Pakistani soil to be used for terror attacks, but then Musharraf had made the same exact promise on January 12, 2002 soon after Parliament was attacked in New Delhi.
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has gone as far as to say that "Pakistan needs to set its own house in order’’but he is in the Opposition and he can afford to make such statements. If Pakistan has begun to resemble a house of terror, it is because the army and the ISI are yet to change their stance, not just vis-a-vis India but vis-a-vis the terrorists they create and support. Until then, the sprawling compound in Muridke will continue to remain in business. If the Jamaat-ud-Dawa does get banned, all it will need is another alias.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 50, Dated Dec 20, 2008

Major election boost for India's Congress party

2008-12-08T06:10:00.001-08:00

NEW DELHI : India's ruling Congress party has scored unexpected wins in a string of state elections, officials said Monday, defying predictions of a voter backlash after the Mumbai attacks and an economic downturn.
Election Commission officials said the governing party had chalked up victories in the capital area New Delhi and in the remote northeastern state of Mizoram as results from five state polls held over the past month came in.
Official figures also showed Congress well on track to wrest power from its main rival, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the northern desert state of Rajasthan.
The polls -- which have seen straight fights between the Congress and the BJP -- are viewed as a key indicator of voter intentions ahead of national elections due by May 2009 at the latest. The BJP, however, was likely to retain its hold over the central states of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, media projections said.
BJP president Rajnath Singh described the projected Delhi results as "shocking as we thought we would win."
The party also conceded defeat in Rajasthan, with incumbent chief minister Vasundhra Raje saying she respected "the people's verdict" and promising to "play the role of a constructive opposition."
The results are an important boost for Congress, which leads the federal coalition government but has been on the ropes over the economic slowdown and punishing inflation.
The government's record on national security has also come under the spotlight following the Islamic militant attacks in Mumbai, which left 172 dead, including nine gunmen, and exposed India's intelligence failings.
Definitive results were expected later Monday, but supporters of Delhi's Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit were already celebrating outside her official residence -- distributing sweets and dancing to drum beats.
"Many thanks to the people of Delhi who supported us and our slogans of development and progress," a smiling Dikshit told cheering colleagues.
"It's an outright rejection" of the BJP playing up "the terror card," she said adding: "The people of Delhi have given a fitting reply."
During the more recent polls -- held as Mumbai was still under a state of siege -- the BJP had painted Congress as being "soft on terror."
Congress party spokeswoman Jayanti Natarajan admitted the Mumbai terror attack had been a "worrying factor" for party strategists.
But another Congress spokesman Tom Vadakkan said the results "showed that terror is a national issue and not an issue patented by one party."
Political analyst Rasheed Kidwai described the expected Congress victory in Delhi as "a very, very remarkable achievement."
"Bucking anti-incumbency is a big thing, but the Delhi chief minister has also beaten the BJP's twin campaign planks -- price rises and terror," said Kidwai. (AFP)

Bombay Attacks

2008-12-07T01:29:00.000-08:00

The rampaging elephant

Vir Sanghvi, Hindustan Times
I wrote last week that I had never known such anger in urban India as we have witnessed after the Bombay attacks. Over a week after the attacks ended, the fury has not dissipated. Rather it has spun almost entirely out of control.
I have no problems with anger. It is often the precursor to change. Unless Indians make it clear that they are mad as hell and are not going to take it any longer, the system will never change.
My problem is with misdirected anger. Over the last ten days, the great Indian upper middle class (and especially those who live in South Bombay) has resembled nothing as much as a marauding elephant on a pointless rampage. Anger has overcome reason. The right targets are missed. And genuine grievances are trivialised when vapid Page 3 morons go on television and talk of sending more Indian soldiers to their deaths while they themselves sit back and wait for the re-opening of Wasabi.
Rarely have I heard as much nonsense as has been spouted over the last week. God knows, I was born into the South Bombay elite. The institutions that were attacked mean as much to me as they do to anybody else. (Just see my story on the Taj in today’s Brunch if you don’t believe me.)

Now the anger is so diffused and so unconstructive that I doubt if it will achieve anything more. So, what went wrong? Why did we suddenly lose our focus...

But I’m still appalled by the kind of rubbish that is emerging from the mouths of the Frangipani-Vetro set: don’t pay your taxes; give up on democracy; hand the country over to the army; refuse to vote; carpet-bomb Pakistan; worry about the Indian Muslims in our slums who fly Pakistani flags; hide at home till the anniversary of the Babri Masjid has passed; never question the police and para-drop Raj Thackeray into Pakistan. (Frankly, I have to concede that the last one does have a certain appeal....)
When the attacks began, I applauded the anger. It did make a difference. Nobody ever loses his job in India because of failure. But such was the public rage that three heads promptly rolled: the Union Home Minister, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra and the Deputy Chief Minister.
But now the anger is so diffused and so unconstructive that I doubt if it will achieve anything more. So, what went wrong? Why did we suddenly lose our focus and start striking out wildly in all directions?
My theory is : impotence.
Absolute power, as we know, corrupts. But so does absolute impotence. And the current rage seems directionless and random mainly because it stems from our impotence.
The ‘Do-something-now!’ anger has given way to the hysterical rage that comes out of frustration.
The frustration exists on many levels but the most important one is class. One of the problems with universal franchise is that an educated person has exactly the same one vote as an illiterate. This means that the middle class — visible, articulate symbols of the Indian story — can write articles (like this one) or clog TV channels but we can never ever bring down a government.
We simply do not have the numbers.
Even in big cities such as Bombay, no constituency (not even South Bombay) can be swung by middle class votes. Politicians need the poor to get elected.
You could argue (as I do) that this is a good thing: it makes India a fairer society. But it does mean that the middle class has zero political relevance. It is heartening to see 200 people gather at the Gateway. But Bombay is a city of 13 million. The 200,000 wouldn’t even show up on an electoral map.
It is significant that even as the middle class railed against politicians, voter turn-out reached record levels in such states as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and even Delhi. Though the middle class wanted to have nothing more to do with the political system, Indian democracy continued to flourish.
At some subliminal level, we recognise our political irrelevance. When we complain about vote-bank politics, about elections being decided by people in the slums etc. what are we really saying? We are saying that others control India’s political destiny. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
That frustration explains our anger against politicians. It explains why we don’t want to vote. It explains why we want to withhold our taxes. It explains why we regard politicians on par with terrorists: ‘Never mind those who come by boats,’ runs one widely circulated SMS, ‘worry about those come up by votes.’
Hence the anger of the rampaging elephant: it is an impotent rage.
The other primary cause of our frustration is that we do not know how to avenge the horrors of Bombay. And that accounts for much of the fury.
When the US had to respond after 9/11, it knew where to go. Osama bin Laden was being given shelter by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Americans asked the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. When the Taliban refused, America invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban. Once Kabul fell, America had closure of a sort: 9/11 had been avenged.
But what can we do? The attacks appear to be the work of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. The LeT was set up in connivance with the ISI to foment trouble in Kashmir, and while it may once have had official backing, nobody seriously believes that President Asif Ali Zardari and his party either support it or have any control over it.
However, Pakistan has a more complex power structure than India. The army does not necessarily listen to civilian presidents. The ISI reports to the army but doesn’t necessarily tell the chief everything. And there are vast private armies controlled by retired generals and former ISI officials which have links with the Lakshar.
The most likely explanation for the Bombay attacks is that the Pakistan army and ISI were coming under increasing pressure from the Americans to crack down in Pakistan’s tribal areas where bin Laden and his men are believed to be holed up and needed a diversion. It is not politically expedient for the Pakistani army (or any Pakistan government) to kill Pakistanis in the tribal areas at the behest of Washington or even to hand bin Laden over.
So, the Pakistan Army needed a new front. Already troops have been moved from the border with Afghanistan to the Indian border. The Pakistanis have told the Americans that they cannot proceed quickly with the operation in the tribal areas because of the threat of a retaliatory Indian strike in the wake of the Bombay attacks.
In such a situation, what can New Delhi do?
If we attack Pakistan, we play the Pakistan Army’s game: the Pakistanis know that the world will intervene to stop two nuclear powers from fighting before any serious damage is done to Pakistan. If we destablise Zardari, we hand Pakistan back to the army.
One option is a surgical strike aimed at training camps in Pakistani Kashmir. But this is no more than symbolic. Contrary to the popular image, these camps are not well-equipped military bases. They are makeshift operations run in schools and college buildings over the weekend. Take one out and they’ll just move elsewhere. Plus, we run the risk of killing civilians.
So there is no easy retribution available, no obvious means of revenge and no prospect of closure. That accounts for another level of impotence. We feel that terrorists have had the audacity to walk into our greatest city and shoot people at will — and we are unable to do anything about it.
The frustration is understandable. There are no quick fixes. But on both scores, there are long-term solutions available and we must work towards them. The problem with our political system is that parties have no mechanism to allow talent to rise through the ranks. So Indian politics is a squalid, corrupt family business. I found it strange that nobody in Bombay made this point. Instead, they listened to young dynasts who appeared on TV to lecture us. Such is our class bias that if politicians speak good English we think they are okay. And politics never changes.
Similarly, the only way to fight terrorism is through covert operations and better intelligence, not through carpet-bombing. Our intelligence agencies are demoralised and faction-ridden. They need more money and better leadership.
Sadly, we are not making any of these points or thinking constructively. We are just flailing about angrily in all directions.
As long as public anger is random and unfocused, nothing will change.
And the terrorists will strike again.

Exiled rebels

2008-11-13T00:51:00.000-08:00

By Gurpreet Singh
The recent request for amnesty for Sikh rebels settled outside India by the country’s National Commission for Minorities (NCM) has raised hopes among blacklisted members of the community in British Columbia, and across Canada. These Sikhs have been denied entry to their home country for indulging in “anti-national” activities since 1984, the year in which political events in India galvanized the Sikh separatist movement across the world. As a result, the Indian government prepared a “blacklist” of Sikhs suspected of being involved in separatist activities in order to deny them entry to the country for security reasons.
NCM member Harcharan Singh Josh recently recommended that those Sikhs who “have realized their faults” and want to return to the “mainstream” shall be allowed to visit their homeland for the first time in nearly 25 years.
Although no official record is available to suggest how many Sikh rebels are on the blacklist, these migrants are now primarily settled in Canada, the U.S., Britain, France and Germany and number around 15,000, according to Josh.The now defunct South Asian Human Rights’ Group (SAHRG), which campaigned for the blacklistees’ cause, estimates that between 70 to 80 Sikhs living in Western Canada continue to be denied a visa and an Indian passport by the Indian government.
Among them is Surdev Singh Jatana of Abbotsford. He was associated with the now banned International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF). Jatana claims that he was never involved in violence, but was in the forefront of peaceful protests.“The situation has changed now and I wish to return to the mainstream,” Jatana told the South Asian Post.
Jatana, who is a former employee of Canada Post, became a member of the militant ISYF group following Operation Bluestar in June of 1984. There were angry protests in B.C. and across North America following the infamous military operation, which was launched to flush out extremists who had stockpiled weapons inside the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. The government-backed military operation resulted in massive destruction to the temple complex.
The army operation was linked to the Oct. 31, 1984 assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards. A wave of anti-Sikh violence subsequently swept India, alienating the Sikh community from the Indian mainstream and leaving nearly 3,000 innocent Sikhs dead.
The army operation and the subsequent anti-Sikh pogroms had a far reaching effect on the Sikh community in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, with a number of emotional Sikh men joining a movement for Khalistan, a separate homeland for the Sikhs.
Even in B.C., Sikh protesters stormed the Indian Consulate in downtown Vancouver in the weeks following the initial troubles in India.
Jatana came to Canada in 1969 and visited India twice before 1984. He says Operation Bluestar changed his life. He could not visit his ailing mother, who died in 2001.
Though he was granted amnesty in 2003 and was allowed to visit India following negotiations between the SAHRG and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party government, he was later blacklisted again and couldn’t visit India at the time of his brother’s death in 2004. The story of Kuldip Singh Malhi is similar. An editor of Surrey-based Phulwari, a Sikh cultural magazine, he has not been able to visit India since 1981. Malhi participated in the 1984 protest rally in Vancouver.
“My close relatives were also denied a visa because of my participation in the anti-India rallies,” he said.Like Jatana, Malhi was also associated with the ISYF and was once accused of assaulting a moderate Sikh in Surrey – although he was acquitted by the B.C. courts. His daughter is getting married in July this year and his family plans to visit India for shopping.“I won’t be able to join them although I wish to visit the place of my birth,” he lamented.SAHRG leader Harpal Singh Nagra recalled that the BJP government allowed 22 Sikhs to return to India in 2003.“Most of them had participated in the protest rallies and had nothing to do with violence, except three convicts, who were denied visas at the last moment,” he told the South Asian Post.
Since Operation Bluestar was blamed on the Congress Party, its opponent, the BJP has tried to woo the Sikh minority for political survival in Punjab. The BJP is a coalition partner in the current Punjab government led by the Akali Dal, the mainstream political party of the Sikh-dominated province.
Ironically, these overtures suffered a major jolt after the Congress regained power in India with Manmohan Singh, the country’s first Sikh Prime Minister. Singh rejected a demand to scrap the blacklist.
There are some die hard separatists, however, who are not impressed by such campaigns and do not even wish to apply for a visa to enter India. “It’s all drama,” said Satinderpal Singh Gill, a former member of the Panthic Committee, an umbrella group of the Sikh militants. “The Indian government continues to discriminate against the Sikhs.”Gill has not visited India since 1983. His father passed away in March this year, but he still did not apply for a visa. “Since the tenth master of the Sikhs had lost his father and four sons in his war against the Islamist Empire, we shall also be determined to suffer personal losses instead of begging for the mercy of the Indian state,” Gill opined.
Harcharan Singh Josh said in his amnesty-request report to the Indian government: “The migrants admitted that being disturbed by the Bluestar operation and the 1984 (anti-Sikh) riots in India, they joined extremist groups and terrorist camps.”
But many, he suggested, were simply young men caught up in the times.
“Now they are well settled in these countries and are financially supporting their families in India. They are separated from their families for the last 24 years and want to come back home,” he said.
Kashmir Singh Dhaliwal, the moderate president of Vancouver’s oldest Sikh temple on Ross Street, said that he welcomes the amnesty initiative, but only for those men who have “realized their mistakes.” He cautioned against a general pardon for those who continue to indulge in anti-India propaganda and politics of violence. The Indian government is currently reviewing the amnesty request.

Khalistani cause not forgotten in B.C
A decade of Sikh militancy began in the Indian border state of Punjab in the early 1980s and officially ended in 1993. The violence during this period claimed more than 25,000 lives.
The problem began with political and religious demands that brought a sense of alienation among the Sikhs. The full scale terrorist violence for the achievement of a separate homeland for the Sikhs was also supported by Pakistan, the country next door. With the return of normalcy, several top Khalistani ideologues have already returned to India.
Among them was the late Jagjit Singh Chauhan, who was running a Khalistan government-in-exile in the UK and opened a Khalistan consulate in Vancouver. Wassan Singh Zaffarwal, another top notch militant leader, has also returned to India, as has Didar Singh Bains, another Khalistani ideologue from the U.S.Although many Sikhs in Western countries have bid goodbye to the Khalistan cause, Indian officials believe a small section is still active. Indeed, a low intensity campaign for Khalistan continues in B.C. and other parts of Canada.
The pro-Khalistan management of the Dashmesh Durbar Sikh temple in Surrey recently organized special prayers for the assassins of the former military chief of India, A.S.Vaidya, who led Operation Bluestar against the holy Golden Temple. The two assassins, Harjinder Singh Jinda and Sukhdev Singh Sukha, were hanged in 1992.
The father of a Sikh prisoner who allegedly murdered a Punjab police spy was also honoured on this occasion. Hem Singh came from the U.S. to accept the “award” on behalf of his son, who allegedly burnt to death Ajit Singh Poohla, a Punjab police agent who was detained in Amritsar jail on human rights’ violations.

Singer Hans Raj Hans is SAD candidate for Jalandhar LS seat

2008-11-09T06:09:00.001-08:00

Charanjit Singh Atwal (Fatehgarh Sahib),
Sukhdev singh Dhindsa (Sangrur),
Ratan Singh Ajnala (Khadoor Sahib)
JALANDHAR: Prominent Singer Padam Shree Hans Raj Hans on Sunday joined Shiromani Akali DAl (SAD) and party president Sukhbir Badal on Sunday announced Hans' candidature for Jalandhar (Reserve) parliamentary constituency"Hans Raj Hans has formally joined SAD today and he will be party's candidate from Jalandhar (reserve) constituency", Sukhbir, accompanied by Hans, announced at a Press Conference here. Hans has earned fame due to his voice at both national and international level and his joining SAD would not only fetch win for the party from Jalandhar but would definitely have positive impact on all 13 constituencies of the state, Badal claimed. Sukhbir also announced that till now four candidates have been selected including Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal (Fatehgarh Sahib), former Union Minister S S Dhindsa (Sangrur), and sitting MP Ratan Singh Ajnala (Khadoor Sahib) apart from Hans Raj Hans (Jalandhar). Remaining names of candidates would also be announced very soon, he added. Apprehending that parliamentary election would be held in the month of February, Sukhbir said that party was fully geared up to defeat the Congress in the state. Pointed out that BJP had rejected SAD's demand of 15 assembly seats in Delhi election, Junior Badal said "SAD-BJP enjoys strong relationship and it does not matter how many seats SAD is contesting but it is significant that it is for the first time SAD is contesting in Delhi assembly polls on its own symbol" On four seats in Delhi assembly elections SAD was contesting and on the remaining seats BJP has fielded its candidates, Sukhbir said adding that it was first time that BJP has aligned with any other political party to contest Delhi assembly elections.

Black in White House

2008-11-05T22:37:00.000-08:00

How Barack Obama defied history

To measure fully the historical achievement of Barack Obama's victory it is worth recalling what America looked like in 1961, the year of his birth।

By Nick Bryant, BBC News, Washington
Back then, much of the American South remained segregated, the races separated from the cradle to the grave. Black people - or Negroes as they were known then - were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated school systems and buried in segregated graveyards.
Handed down in 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown decision, which called for the integration of southern schools, had been met in many southern communities with a campaign of "massive resistance". For segregationist die-hards it became the twisted metaphor of the age, as they fought to uphold a system of racial apartheid that was known by the deceptively friendly aphorism, Jim Crow.
Washington DC was regarded still as a hardship posting for African diplomats, despite the efforts of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to desegregate the nation's capital.
Restrictive covenants prevented them from living in the most fashionable parts of town, and they were denied service in the high-end barber shops.

Distance travelled
When they made the journey to the United Nations in New York, they travelled a road, Route 40, which was lined with segregated motels, diners and restaurants.
Back at the start of the 1960s, America's first black presidential aide, a former public relations man called E Frederic Morrow, published a memoir of his years working under Dwight D Eisenhower.
It was titled Black Man in the White House. It revealed how he was never allowed to be left alone in the same room as a white woman, such was the fear that he might sexually molest her.
On becoming president in 1961, Jack Kennedy made a series of senior black appointments. Still, the young president's most valued African-American aide was a man called George Thomas, whose job each morning was to lay out his clothes.
Leaving others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy, Barack Obama has not spoken much about the struggle for black equality, nor the tumultuous decade into which he was born.
Go through his speeches, and you will find little mention of the civil rights era.
For to become a history-defying candidate he has been something of a history-denying figure. The strategy throughout has been to de-emphasise his race.
A quirk of scheduling and a quantum leap of history meant that Mr Obama delivered his acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
But even then, Mr Obama did not mention Dr King by name, referring to him instead as the "young preacher from Georgia".

Black and white
Back in June, on the night when he finally saw off the challenge from Hillary Clinton, his celebration speech made no reference to his historic racial first, and noticeably he dedicated his victory to his white grandmother. Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama has emphasised his whiteness as much as his blackness. The president-elect understood one of the great paradoxes of the civil rights era. While it helped pave the way for his ultimate success, it also made it more difficult for northern candidates, like him, to win the presidency.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he told an aide: "We have lost the south for a generation". But he had miscalculated.
The once solid Democratic South - the Democrats used to be an unhappy alliance between Northern moderates and progressives, and southern segregationists - started to go reliably Republican in presidential elections.
Prior to 1964, the Democrats won six out of eight presidential elections. After 1964, they lost seven out of 10.

Achieving the impossible
The civil rights era was responsible for the great historical anomaly of US post-war politics: the process through which the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, established a stronghold in the states of the Old Confederacy.
It is no coincidence that every Democratic president since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has hailed from the south: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and, the die-hards would contest, Al Gore. The new law not only demolished segregation, but re-drew the US political map.
So it is worth remembering that Barack Obama will not only be the first African-American president, but the first Northern Democrat to serve in the White House since Kennedy.
To achieve this racial first represents the most extraordinary of achievements.
Since the end of Reconstruction - the period in the aftermath of the US civil war - there have been just three black US senators.
Only two states, Massachusetts and Virginia, have elected a black governor. With the election of a black president, what many considered the politically impossible has now become real.
On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of his dream for America, with the brooding statue of Abraham Lincoln offering the most glorious of pulpits.
On 20 January 2009, Barack Obama will appear on the west steps of the US Capitol, at the other end of the Washington Mall, and seal his historic triumph with just 35 words: the presidential oath of office.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality

Eight Indian Canadians elected

2008-10-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

Toronto : Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party Tuesday returned to power with a larger tally but short of the 155-mark for a simple majority in the 308-member parliament, even as the number of Indian Canadians in the house went up from seven to eight।The ruling Conservative Party, which held 126 seats in the dissolved House of Commons, won 142 seats, 13 short of the majority mark.
The main opposition Liberal Party, which held 95 seats last time, was set to get only 75 seats this time. However, the smaller New Democratic Party (NDP) made major gains, securing 38 seats.
The regional Bloc Quebecois won 50 out of the 75 seats in French-speaking Quebec.
Costing $300 million, Tuesday’s exercise was the 40th election which was held a year ahead of the schedule by the prime minister with a view to securing a majority to implement his agenda. All the sitting seven Indian Canadian MPs were returned. In fact, the new House will have an eighth Indian Canadian MP this time - Tim Uppal from Alberta province.
In the Toronto area, all the three sitting Indian Canadian MPs - Ruby Dhalla, Navdeep Bains and Gurbax Malhi (all of the opposition Liberal Party) - were returned with a comfortable majority.
Dhalla won the Brampton-Springdale seat for the third time, beating Parm Gill of the ruling Conservative Party and Mani Singh of the NDP.
Malhi, who in 1993 became the first turbaned MP in Canada, won for the sixth time from Bramalea-Gore-Malton. Bains also won easily for the third time in Mississauga-Brampton South. In British Columbia province, former Canadian health minister Ujjal Dosanjh won narrowly in Vancouver South. Nina Grewal of the ruling party also retained Fleetwood-Port Kells seat for the third time. The highest-ranking Indian Canadian in the current government, Deepak Obhrai, also won his East Calgary seat.
Obhrai, who was a parliamentary secretary in the outgoing government, may be elevated to a minister this time. “He deserves a higher position and we will urge the PM to elevate him,” top Conservative backer and business leader Hemant Shah, who campaigned with the prime minister and Obhrai, told IANS. “The return of Stephen Harper augurs well for India as he wants to speed up trade ties with the country,” he said. The sitting Liberal Party MP, Sukh Dhaliwal, defeated Sandeep Pandher in Newton-Delta in British Columbia.