The Struggle for Kashmir

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the Hurriyat Conference in Indian-administered Kashmir, was placed under house arrest today in India's latest move in its long colonial adventure there. I interviewed him in 2007 while reporting from the region and, at the request of a Kashmiri friend, repost my article from that time here today. To anyone who may read this, Kashmir remains the most beautiful place I have seen on this earth, and the story there is not at all what we have been lead to believe. Visit it soon, if you can. MD

The Struggle for Kashmir

By Michael Deibert

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the World Policy Journal.

In the bloody annals of the struggle for the Kashmir Valley, few chapters are as wrenching as that of the “disappeared.” Some 8,000 persons have been arrested or seized, the majority by Indian army and police units, never to be seen again. The conflict has thus far claimed at least 40,000 lives (local human rights groups put the number much higher), left tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands displaced, and pitted the Indian state against Islamist militants, historically aided by India’s nuclear rival Pakistan. Amid this bitter conflict, another dark chapter has begun to surface, after nearly two decades of international silence and official denial.

In Ganderbal, a town in the heart of India’s Kashmir Valley, a visitor superficially encounters a winter idyll: rushing mountain streams ringed with snow-covered hills. But the sensation is fleeting.

“We have so many cases of people who have been disappeared, who have been killed, whose names are never known,” says Abdul Aziz, a 26 year-old merchant, standing with a group of men under a gray sky, garbed like the rest, in the region’s distinctive gown-like shirt, called a pheran. As he speaks, a horse-drawn cart pulls fire wood and produce down the road. “They are killed as militants, but they were not militants.” Steps away from the storefront where Aziz and a dozen others are gathered, there are three rises of freshly turned earth. These graves hold the bodies of three unknown men, say Aziz and the villagers, buried there by Indian security forces.

“Police or military arrest an innocent person and they label him as a Pakistani militant, as a foreign militant, as a local militant, and then they kill him,” says Gulam Hassan, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, as he observes the scene. “This is against the constitution, against the law, and against all humanity.”

When India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, vowed “zero tolerance” for the killing of suspected rebels in government custody while attending a May 2006 conference with local political leaders in Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, many hoped a new day had dawned for human rights in the region. India has engaged in intermittent peace talks with Pakistan since 2003, and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late 2006 proposed a four-point formula which, he said, could form the basis of a solution of the Kashmir dispute. (Most salient among them, for the first time there would be no Pakistani claim to Indian-controlled Kashmir or a demand for full independence for the region.) These moves seemed to augur a more peaceful future.

This January, in what many interpreted as another hopeful sign, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the spiritual leader of Kashmir’s Sunni Muslims and chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, which has historically advocated autonomy for the region, told a crowd in Islamabad, Pakistan, that he was calling for an end to armed struggle as a means of ending Indian rule of the region. “We are not prepared to sacrifice any more of our loved ones,” he announced

After a similar declaration five years ago, Abdul Ghani Lone, then leader of the Hurriyat Conference, was gunned down by unknown assailants. Mr. Farooq’s own father, Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, was slain in a similar manner in May 1990. But the politicians’ words have yet to filter to ground-level. A special investigating team sent by the Indian government has thus far arrested 11 policemen from Ganderbal—including the senior superintendent and deputy superintendent—for the alleged killings of civilians in staged gun battles with the security forces, here described as “encounters.” At least four bodies have been exhumed from graves as part of the investigation.

Police officers in Ganderbal said that they thought the stories of disappearances were exaggerated. “That’s not the entire police force, only one or two people may have done it,” said A. M. Reshi, the on-duty Ganderbal police station house officer. “I am of the opinion that the police, on the whole, are working on a good way, as per procedure, as per of the law of the land, as per the constitution.” A. R. Khan, the new police superintendent of Ganderbal, declined to be interviewed for this report.

How It Began

The roots of the Kashmir crisis stretch back to the twilight of Great Britain’s colonial rule and partition of India and Pakistan, when a Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, pleaded for Indian assistance to fend off an invasion of Pakistan-backed tribesmen entering Kashmir in 1947. He allowed Indian troops to rush to his aid, and signed a document agreeing to become part of the Indian state. Kashmiris, 12 million of whom make up the only Muslim-majority state in India, where a promised a referendum on the status of the region which was never held. A 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution posited that in a plebiscite, Kashmiris should only have the option to accede to either India or Pakistan, denying Kashmiris a vote for independence, the long-cherished goal of many. Despite later wars, the 1947 armistice border between Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir has remained largely along the contours one sees today, and is know as the Line of Control.

Though demarcating separate sections controlled by two separate armies, the Line of Control has never been recognized as an international border. India and Pakistan have fought successive wars along the frontier, the most recent in 1999. The Indian government refers to its portion of the territory as Jammu and Kashmir, referring as well to neighboring Jammu state, which falls within Indian territory, while the other side of the Line of Control is dubbed Pakistani Occupied Kashmir (POK ). The Pakistani government refers to its portion of the captured territory as Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir.

When 1987 legislative elections seemed likely to result in a victory for a coalition of Islamic and secessionist parties under the umbrella of the Muslim United Front (MUF), the Indian authorities responded with mass arrests of MUF candidates and party workers. This was followed by credible and pervasive allegations of vote rigging, and the awarding of the election to a rival, less radical, coalition. Many Kashmiri youths who had previously sought to change the status quo through electoral means felt they had no alternative but to turn to the gun, with Pakistan’s intelligence services—particularly the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency—more than happy to provide training and weapons. The dispute flared into open insurrection.

The Indian government faced large-scale protests and a sustained campaign of terrorism, including the murder of political leaders and mass-casualty civilian attacks, on a scale not seen before. In two incidents in 1990 alone, Indian police shot and killed at least 35 demonstrators attempting to cross Srinagar’s Gawakadal Bridge, and then opened fire and killed at least 21 at the funeral of Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq. Three years later, 37 people were killed when India’s 74th Battalion Border Security Force opened fire on a crowd estimated at 10,000 marching to protest extrajudicial killings in the town of Beijbehara. For their part, Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), which India has long accused Pakistan of supporting, retaliated with the December 2000 attack on the 17th century Red Fort in India’s capital, New Delhi, in which three died; a 2001 suicide attack on India’s parliament which left 14 dead; and, the Indian government charges, last summer’s bomb attacks on commuter trains in India’s economic capital, Mumbai, in which 187 people were killed. Fatal attacks by Islamic militants against members of the local Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and National Conference Party (NCP) because of their participation in Indian electoral politics are now routine. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, called Pandits, have been driven from their homes.

Many fear that if the opportunity for a lasting settlement to the Kashmir problem is not seized during the present era of relative détente, the region will have lost its last, best chance for peace. “This is a golden opportunity which needs to be taken now, it should not take years,” says Mehbooba Mufti, president of the PDP. Mufti’s party came to power as part of an elected coalition government in Kashmir in 2002. The post of chief minister (the Indian equivalent of governor) currently resides with Ghulam Nabi Azad, of the ruling national Congress party, which favors resolving the crisis in Kashmir within the Indian constitutional framework. “So many people have been martyred, so many people have lost their lives, so many homes have been destroyed, they would like to have something out of it,” Mufti contends. “If we don’t give the Kashmiris something today, this problem is going...to manifest again into some type of
gangrene.”

Though India, a dynamic, hopeful country, is undergoing an economic boom that is the envy of other emergent nations, Kashmir remains a shaming stain. “The Indian government has ended some practices such as indiscriminate firing upon unarmed protesters,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But they have begun this system where soldiers just kill suspected militants, completely against the laws of war.”

In a September 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report condemning what it called “patterns of impunity” in Kashmir and neighboring Jammu state, and called for a “credible and independent” investigation into all disappearances and staged killings since the conflict began. Part of the problem, according to Ganguly, is a system of payouts and promotions whereby soldiers are rewarded for killing suspected insurgents.

Likewise, human rights monitors have pointed to Section 45 of India’s criminal procedure code, which protects any member of the armed forces from arrest for “anything done or purported to be done by him in the discharge of his official duties except after obtaining the consent of the Central government.“ Section 197(2) of the same code makes it mandatory for prosecutors to obtain permission from the federal government to initiate criminal proceedings against any public servant, including armed forces personnel.

The fate of Kashmir remains an intensely divisive issue in modernizing India. Facile political definitions become blurred as Indians talk about the fate of the restive region. “Kashmir could be solved tomorrow. If the Kashmiris wanted to join the Indian union, they would prosper like never before,” says Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian and author of the just-published
India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. “Independence or joining Pakistan are no solutions...and chasing this fantasy of independence will lead to the sacrifice of another generation of young men.”

Many Kashmiris, however, find such arguments unpersuasive. “For me, that’s a colonial way of looking at things,” says Idrees Kanth, a 28-year-old Kashmiri graduate student in New Delhi. “That was precisely how the British rationalized their rule in India.” Ideas like nationalism are “very penetrative,” Kanth believes, even to the Left and the intellectual class. “But, watching them during an India-Pakistan cricket match, you should see how they cheer.”

The Voices Seldom Heard

This past February, in the Lal Chowk neighborhood of Srinagar, a once-lovely city on Dal Lake now ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers, hundreds of Kashmiris stage a sit-in protest for three days against the human rights situation in the region. Beneath a tent, festooned with images of the dead and Urdu script quoting the Koran, is Yasin Malik, a secessionist rebel who underwent a transformation while in prison and now leads a non-violent, Ghandian movement called the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF ). He lies on a mat during the second day of a hunger strike.

He threatens to fast “unto death” if the human rights situation in Kashmir does not improve. “The mothers and sisters want to know where their children are," said Malik. "If they have been killed, give us their bodies.” Nearby, sit relatives of the disappeared, many holding photos.

“I joined this organization because my son, Javid Ahmed Ahanger, was taken by national security personnel in August 1990,” says Parmina Ahanger, the 47-year-old head of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, a Srinagar-based organization. “I sent a complaint into the court and to the police. They established that he had been taken, but they pleaded their inability to act as the officers involved in my son’s abduction were of very high- ranking positions.”

Another woman, 50-year-old Rahti Razak, speaking through her tears, held up a photo of a young man with an impressive mane of black locks. “My son was taken from his bedroom when he was sleeping with his one-year-old son and wife in 1997. They came into his room, dragged him out by his hair and took him away,” she says. “He was abducted by the Special Operations Group (army and local police). I have been going all over this valley, to Uttar Pradesh and other places, but I have not been able to locate him.”

There are many such stories. Safiya Azad, whose haunting dark eyes are visible beneath her black burqa, tells the story of her husband, Himaynu Azad. “My husband was about 29 when he was arrested by Special Battalion 137 in 1993,” she says. “He was a political activist, and was connected with the militants. But even if he was a militant, they have punished the whole family. We’ve gone everywhere, to all authorities, we have put in reports with several police stations. They say that he escaped from their custody. We have a right to know what happened to him.”

As another family member of one of Kashmir's disappeared takes to the microphone and begins yet another impassioned appeal for justice, Yasin Malik rises wearily from beneath his blanket to say some final words to a visitor. "In Kashmir, there is no democracy," said Malik. "The government of India in Kashmir is existing in bunkers, and they're running their democracy through the barrel of a gun."


Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).

Women’s untold stories: An interview with Taslima Nasrin

5 November 2009

Women’s untold stories

By Michael Deibert

Le Monde diplomatique

(Read the original article here)

The Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin, 47, has the European parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and the Unesco Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence. Nasrin is an outspoken feminist and secularist, and a stern critic of the role of religion in the oppression of women and the poor. She worked as a physician in Bangladesh’s understaffed public hospitals before her exile in Europe and the US in 1994.

Since she published her first book Shikore Bipul Khudha (Demands) in 1986, Nasrin’s works, including Lajja (translated into English as Shame), have offended Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh, and the government has banned some of them. In 2004 she settled in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, which has a Bengali-language intellectual tradition. There she ran into trouble with Indian fundamentalists. In 2007 she was assaulted while attempting to speak at a book release event in Hyderabad; among her assailants were members of India’s Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen party, including Indian lawmakers. In Kolkata, religious decrees called for her death and there were violent protests. Nasrin was therefore forced to move to the capital, New Delhi, before once again seeking exile in Europe in March 2008.

Michael Deibert spoke to her in Paris.

MD: Can you tell me what inspired you to become a writer?

TN: I studied medicine, my father was a doctor, and he inspired me. I wanted to be an artist, but when I studied medicine, I really liked it. I always believed in signs, and I had a rational, logical mind, so I became a doctor. I had a practice in public hospitals, but unfortunately I had to quit my job because the government asked me to stop writing if I wanted to continue working in public hospitals, they didn’t like it. As a doctor, I could treat the patients, but as a writer my work was a prescription for a sick society. Lots of people were influenced by my writing, they became agnostic or atheist or secular, and also very aware of their rights and freedoms.

MD: How would you describe the political and social situation in Bangladesh today?

TN: The situation is ever worse. All the politicians use religion for their own interests. They want to get votes from ignorant masses. They don’t think of improving women’s conditions, or economic conditions, or social conditions, even though 80% live below the poverty line, and not many women have access to education or politics. Whoever comes into power, man or woman, from whatever party, they are corrupt, they are hypocrites, and they don’t do anything for women’s equality. They keep Muslim religious law, which is oppressive to women, only to please the fundamentalists, but don’t take action against them even though they are a big threat to the progress of the society and to the equality of women. Half of the population is female, but women don’t have jobs and are forced to stay at home. This economic condition is not good for the country.

MD: How would you characterise the reception your books received in Bangladesh?

TN: People either loved me very much or they hated me very much; there was no middle ground. I got a lot of support and solidarity from the people who were truly secular and humanist. As long as I was writing about oppression of women or criticising traditional customs and culture, I got lots of support. But when I criticised Islam, then I lost support.

It was very difficult to criticise Islam in a Muslim country. Of course, I don’t just criticise Islam, I criticise all religions. But when I criticised Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism for oppression of women, I had no problem; nobody came to kill me. When I criticised Islam, they issued fatwas and put a price on my head. And the government threw me out.

MD: Can you describe the circumstances of your exile?

TN: It happened in 1994. I was in hiding in Bangladesh; the government filed a case against me, claiming that my books hurt people’s religious feelings. I had to go into hiding because prison was not safe for me – my lawyer told me that I must not be arrested because the police might kill me. It was difficult. I got support from western countries, from the European parliament, and from the US. I was granted bail and I had to leave. From then, I moved around in Europe, but life was never easy: I was a Bengali writer, not a writer who writes in a European language, so it was very difficult.

Exile was like waiting at a stop for a bus to get home. After 10 years the bus came, but I couldn’t go back to Bangladesh, so I went to the Bengali part of India, where I could speak the language, where we had the same culture and where I had my publisher and friends. I settled there in 2004. But after three or four years I was attacked by Muslim fundamentalists in India, and 10,000 people came on to the streets and demanded my deportation. I was physically attacked in 2007 in Hyderabad; before that I had been attacked in 1993 in Bangladesh at a book fair, where they destroyed a shop and burned my books publicly.

I always had police protection in India. But in Hyderabad, the organiser who invited me to release my book there didn’t provide police protection. After the programme I was about to leave, but 100 or so Muslim fundamentalists started screaming at me in Telugu (a local language), which I don’t understand, except (for the prophet’s name) Muhammad. They started throwing whatever they could find, chairs and things, at me. I thought I would be killed. I was very sure about that. I was really, really scared. I didn’t want to lose my life in that way. The police saved me. Some people tried to close the doors, but they were breaking down the doors and shouting that they would kill me. It felt like a decade passing.

Later I heard they were members of parliament present, but nobody was punished. They said: “We are sad we couldn’t kill her today, but next time we will kill her.” That was broadcast and no one was punished for that.

MD: What was your status in India?

TN: I had a residence permit. When I came back to Kolkata, where I was living, the Chief Minister of Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, was constantly asking me to leave the state, and sent policemen to tell me to leave the state and even the country. I said “no,” because I knew leaving the country meant the West, and India was my adopted country. I didn’t want to leave. So the government put me under house arrest in Calcutta, I wasn’t allowed to leave. Then violent protests started and they bundled me out and put me in a cantonment in New Delhi, where I was also under house arrest. The Foreign Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, came to me and said that I must leave. I told him I would not leave: if they wanted to put me in prison, fine, I was not leaving. He was very, very angry.

I finally had to leave in March 2008 because my health was getting very bad. I asked my friends to bring all my belongings from Kolkata to Delhi, and the government put them in storage. I don’t know where the storage is. (The Indian government) gave me a residence permit on condition that I don’t live in the country, so it’s a meaningless permit.

MD: How did you arrive in Paris?

TN: Paris is the first city of my life outside of the Indian sub-continent. I came here a long time ago when I was invited to talk about press freedom. My books were published in French. I was invited by FNAC, and by the Nouvel Observateur.

MD: Why do you think it’s important to have a discussion about the role of religion in public life?

TN: I have seen how women suffer because of religion, and because of religious law; if we can have secular law, and a uniform civil code based on equality, then women wouldn’t suffer so much. My writing is not only about religion; it also criticises anti-female traditions and culture.

When I was in India, I wrote that Hindu culture is very discriminatory against women. Nobody punished me for that. Yet they branded me as anti-Islam. But I am not anti-Islam, I’m a secular humanist. Women suffer and people hate because of religious faith. That should end. There should be no Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu law. This is not secularism, this is not democracy, and women do not have equal rights.

I continue to write because lots of people encourage me to go on writing, and to tell their untold stories. They say they get strength from me. And it is important to me to give strength to vulnerable, weak people.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press)

A note on violence at Jawaharlal Nehru University

In early 2007, while reporting on the conflict in India-controlled Kashmir, I sat at a small tea shop in Srinagar discussing the political trajectory of this troubled region with two friends, a Kashmiri attorney named Malik Aijaz Ahmad and a student named Idrees Kanth. I saw in Kashmir, as I have in other countries such as Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire, how the majority of the populace was caught in a vicious war of attraction between opposing sides with very little recourse or protection. It this experience witnessing the situation in Kashmir that led me to write my first long-form feature for the World Policy Journal, the flagship publication of the New York-based World Policy Institute, where I have recently been named a Senior Fellow.

During my time in India, I also became aware of the country’s complicated religious and ethnic dynamic, that on one hand saw frequent and repeated episodes of discrimination and violence against the country’s Muslim minority, but also that representatives of that community could often behave in ways that reeked of intolerance. A recent email from Idrees, studying at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, demonstrates vividly to me that this phenomenon has not abated and that, in fact, violence, even in a university setting, is a fact of life for some Indian students. I print Idrees Kanth’s email, with his permission and in its entirety, below. Note: The ABVP that he refers to stands for the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an extremist Hindu youth group.

MD

******************

Dear All,

We want to bring it to your notice the constant physical and psychological violence that many of us Muslim students have been experiencing at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi over the last two years. Recently on On 17th March a Muslim student Masihullah Khan [ M.A. French] was brutally assaulted by a group of ABVP/RSS students inside Lohit hostel in full view of the Senior Waden and fellow residents. Despite that the administration did not deem it be a serious offence and let them off with very mild punishments, which were then revoked. All that was left of the punishment was hostel transfers, and even those were not carried out.

Exactly a month later on 17th April the same group of students assaulted me [Idrees Kanth] badly and further threatened me of dire consequences. Even after this, the administration on one ground or other ['humanitarian considerations' is what the administration said] has been protecting them making us feel not only very vulnerable but traumatised. Such an attitude of the administration has only emboldened these hooligans who are now openly targeting us.

It is a common knowledge among students in JNU that the administration is completely right wing. In the past if by any chance a Dalit or a Muslim student was involved even in a minor act of indiscipline, the student was severely punished and even rusticated.

We therefore, appeal to you all to build an opinion on such a stark and open communal policy of the JNU administration and the growing communal violence on the campus. We are being constantly threatened, intimidated, abused, physically beaten etc etc. We feel completely helpless !!!

Thanks,

Idrees Kanth

Notes from a southern country

We are settling into life here in Sydney, amidst temperamental weather that provides us with sunshine and blue skies in the afternoon and sweeping, chilly winds in the mornings and evenings. Lorikeets serenade us in the garden out back, we get to know the local butcher, the grocer, the coffee vendor and the like, and, from the perch of a place that I never thought I’d live, I discover the convict history of Robert Hughes, re-discover the songwriting of Paul Kelly and the music of the Warumpi Band, and become enthused with the idea of tracking my way across an immense and sparely-populated continent and elsewhere along the Pacific rim. Across a churn of water, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and beyond .

The world is throwing us some curveballas these days. The events in Mumbai, with their apparent links to Kashmir, continue to reverberate, as I read my good friend Mira Kamdar’s heartfelt and heart-rending article about the deaths of her cousin Reshma and Reshma’s husband Sunil at the Oberoi hotel in last week’s Washington Post. Back in my native land of the United States, factory workers, in a show of unity that I strongly support, are occupying the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, with president-elect Barrack Obama saying that “The workers are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned. I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.” In Miami, a city where I lived briefly, the situation has gotten so bad that the group Take Back the Land is relocating homeless people illegally into foreclosed homes. From this quiet street in Sydney, it appears that there still is much to do to make the world whole again, if it ever was.

Christmas approaches these palm-dotted shores, and much work awaits.

Thoughts on Mumbai from Sydney

I woke up today to blue skies in Sydney and rolled out of bed with a receive-and-transmit section for my new Australia book already in my head. After a bit of writing, I logged on to the internet to find that unspeakable horror had been visited upon Bombay, known better known as Mumbai, while I slept, with places that I knew intimately targeted in an apparently tightly-coordinated series of terrorist attacks that at this writing have killed at least 80 people.

I lived in Mumbai - which I always preferred to call Bombay - for the first few months of 2007, and became quite fascinated the city, which was at once engaging intellectually and visually even as its pollution was often wretched for the health and the grinding poverty on display often brutal to the soul. Yet I have such fond memories of my walks around my old neighborhood of Colaba, of the chai I would have at a Parsi café in the Fort Area, with it great book stalls, and of strolling through the always-crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) as I would head to visit friends out in Bandra, or to the Dharavi slum for reporting work. Despite my keen awareness of the inequalities in India, and the not-infrequent scapegoating of religious and ethnic minorities that the chauvinistic Hindu right often engages in, I was never made to feel anything less than welcome there, and was greeted with great warmth and hospitality by my friends in the city.

And now I read that the Taj Mahal hotel, which I frequently walked by and in whose lobby I paused from time to time, has been turned into a place of slaughter, that, in Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where I remember poor families with their belongings tied together with rags waiting to take a train and beggars asking for alms, people have been mowed down for some sort of obscene motive, for some absurd political or religious end. Could the weathered pages of the Koran or the Ramayana or the Bible or the Talmud ever condone such actions of cowardice? Is their God so feeble that he would approve of leveling an assault rifle at a defenseless person? Would anything that cowardly be worth worshiping?

I think of these questions, having confronted religious and political fanaticism in various forms in various countries throughout my career as a journalist. Though it is still early, I wouldn’t be surpired to find out that the perpetrators of this crime are cut from the same cloth of those who often (though not always) commit extreme acts in this context: impoverished, disenfranchised and poorly educated, heads filled with visions of glory and martyrdom by someone who always remains in the shadows, and does well to protect his own family from either slaughter or martyrdom.

I think of the people in the city - that panoply of faces from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Kashmir and elsewhere that I met - as I sit here on this sunny morning in Sydney. I can still smell the channa masala and hear the clink of the glass of cane juice as a vendor scoops it out for a street boy to slake his thirst.

Bombay, meri jaan, I hope that you recover.

The case of Altaf Ahmad Khan

It is easy to destroy someone’s life and reputation. It is much harder to give such things back.

On my daily perusal of news this morning, the sky still hovering black over Paris, I came across the story of Altaf Ahmad Khan. On 7 January, the Times of India reported the following:

In what could be a pointer to the terror build-up in the state, Kerala cops on Saturday night arrested a Srinagar resident for his alleged links with Pakistan-based Hizb-ul Mujahideen. Altaf Ahmad Khan — wanted in several terror cases in Jammu & Kashmir — was held from the tourist town of Kumili in Idukki district where he was working in a shop, police said.

Terrible, the casual reader might say, that Kashmiri militant groups who have committed such acts as the December 2000 attack on New Delhi’s Red Fort , in which three people died, and the 2001 suicide attack on India’s parliament which left 14 dead, would set up shop in the Indian state known for its tropical Malabar Coast, one of the country’s main tourist attractions. In a follow-up article, the Times of India announced that “security in Kerala assembly was stepped up on Friday following an anonymous letter threatening to blow up the building to avenge the arrest of a Hizbul Mujahideen (HuM) terrorist in Idukki district,” going on later in the article to note that Altaf Ahmad Khan was “a Srinagar resident with alleged links to Pakistan-based HuM.”

All of this would be all well and good except for the fact that, as of yet, Altaf Ahmad Khan is apparently not, in fact, wanted for any terrorist activity at all in Jammu and Kashmir. This is a fact that the Times of India apparently feels no need to correct even given the attestation by Senior Superintendent of Police in Srinagar, S A Mujtabah, to the Greater Kashmir website, that “We have written to Kerala police that Altaf Ahmad Khan is not required by Jammu and Kashmir police and is not involved in any activity.” In fact, more than any great coup on the part of Kerala’s law enforcement agencies, the arrest of Altaf Ahmad Khan appears to be little more than the latest indication of a pattern of harassment of Kashmiri merchants in the state, a pattern I recall continuing from at least this time last year when I was living in Bombay and read about Kashmiri immigrants being harassed as “terrorists.”

I have hoped for a greater engagement with the complex political and ethno-religious dimensions of modern India by the international media, many of whose members seem as if they can barely be bothered to move from their desks in New Delhi. Having reported from places like Haiti over the years, where I have seen both mainstream journalist and shrieking activist types fall victim to the same newcomer arrogance, I have never thought that repeating one’s own opinions, without vigorously challenging them with boots-on-the-ground, enterprising journalism, is any way to go about what I still believe can be a fairly important and influential profession.

But I must say, particularly as I read this news about the casual defamation of an (apparently) blameless man, it did nothing to dissuade me of the notion that the local Indian press also has done a pretty underwhelming job of covering the country and its political and social developments, particularly in its constant uncritical repetition of the Indian government line when it comes to writing about "militants" in Kashmir. As I wrote in my article The Dead and the Missing in Kashmir, published in the Spring 2007 issue of the World Policy Journal and the product of many hours interviewing around the state, the Indian government's portrayal of the complex, violent conflict there has been so awash in lies and deception over the years that, in my view, it represents a terrible failure on the part of many sectors of the Indian press that they remain so silent on it.

Much of the pedestrian spleen-venting that does make into the (particularly) U.S. press as commentary on coverage of India (such as Samanth Subramanian's lazy, haphazard article in the recent New Republic) hardly helps matters, in my view, and is one of the reasons that the stereotypical images of India continue to dominate as opposed to measured, critical pieces on such subjects as the reelection of the xenophobic demagogue Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat or the murderous actions of the government of West Bengal against the farmers of Nandigram, to say nothing of the country’s dazzling modern culture and intellectual life, which goes far beyond simply Bollywood to include thinkers running the gamut from Bangladeshi émigré writer Taslima Nasreen to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and beyond.

There are notable exceptions, of course, journalists who do a far better job writing about India’s complexity than most. I unfailingly learn things from reading local commentators like my friend Dilip D'Souza and Humra Quraishi, as well as nominally "foreign" journalists such as the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta, whose reporting has increasingly impressed me over the last year. Asia Society fellow Mira Kamdar, whose book, Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming the World, I reviewed in the Miami Herald last year, also does a good job about educating folks on the nuances of India’s current milieu in two languages (English and French).

Even given these exceptions, though, as someone who consumes literature on India despite my geographic distance and recently finished reading Sanjib Baruah's excellent India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, I wish that that some of the nuance that I find in academic texts such as Baruah's would filter down to the local and international media coverage of India

All journalists, local and foreign, can do better in covering the nuances of modern-day India, and I think that beginning to take the reputations of even humble shopkeepers like Altaf Ahmad Khan as seriously as we do those of politicians and titans of industry would be a good way to start. It is the least we owe to the people who entrust us to tell their stories.

2007: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year was a fairly interesting one for me, from a reporting perspective and otherwise, and saw me traveling to six countries on three continents.

Beginning in the slums of Bombay and the hills and valleys of Kashmir, continuing on through electoral politics and civil unrest in France and extending to the cocoa fields and rebel roadblocks of Côte d'Ivoire, it was a period during which I felt, as acutely as ever, the importance of the role that a journalist serves as witness and recorder of the struggles of the disenfranchised and how, in our ever-more fraught and divided world, that role of illuminating our common humanity as people - despite transitory national, linguistic, religious, racial or economic differences - is as important now as it has ever been.

What follows is a review of nearly all the articles I've published this year, spanning a number of subjects across the globe.

Here's to hoping for a gentler, more humane and healthier 2008, with greater freedom married to a greater sense of local and global community for all concerned.

Much love,

MD

Côte d'Ivoire: A Call for Solidarity in Resolving Fate of Missing Reporter for the Inter Press Service (December 14, 2007)

The Bitter Taste of Cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire for the Inter Press Service (December 3, 2007)

Interview with France Kassing on Davis, California’s KDVS radio (December 3, 2007)

Blood Diamonds No Longer Congo-Brazzaville's Best Friend for the Inter Press Service (November 30, 2007)

France's Troubled Suburbs Erupt Again for the Inter Press Service (November 29, 2007)

Update on Riots in France on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show (November 29, 2007)

Riots Rage in Paris Suburb After Police Collision, an interview with Robert Siegel on National Public Radio's All Things Considered (November 27, 2007)

In Ivory Coast, a Fragile Peace Is Framed by Promises Unfulfilled for the Washington Post (November 16, 2007)

On Lyrical Terrorists for Countercurrents (November 10, 2007)

Project May Boost Biofuels in East Africa for the Inter Press Service (October 30, 2007)

"We Don't Believe Gbagbo Will Organise Transparent Elections" An Interview with Alassane Ouattara for the Inter Press Service (October 23, 2007)

Puma pounces for Foreign Direct Investment magazine (October 03, 2007)

Burma: Criticism of Total Operations Grows for the Inter Press Service (October 4, 2007)

North Africa a Launch Pad For Auto Markets for the Inter Press Service (September 25, 2007)

'Silicon Ribbon' Pops Up Across the Maghreb for the Inter Press Service (September 29, 2007)

Trade-Africa: Improved Regional Integration Still Key For Success for the Inter Press Service (September 25, 2007)

France: Two Years After Riots, Little Has Changed for the Inter Press Service (September 24, 2007)

Sarkozy Hedges Free Market With Government Control for the Inter Press Service (September 15, 2007)

France: New Employment Law Sets Stage for Showdown for the Inter Press Service (September 3, 2007)

African Countries Stand Up to EU for the Inter Press Servce (August 28, 2007)

L'Affaire Libyenne Shows a New Policy for the Inter Press Service (August 27, 2007)

France: Differences Arise Over Education Law for the Inter Press Service (August 27, 2007)

In Defense Of Taslima Nasreen for Countercurrents (August 11, 2007)

France: Sarkozy Charges Ahead for the Inter Press Service (July 30, 2007)

Russian Roulette: A Review of Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia for the Miami Herald (July 29, 2007)

For Jazz Musicians, a Paris Tradition Continues for the Inter Press Service (July 25, 2007)

Hope, Concern Greet China's Growing Prominence in Africa for the Inter Press Service (July 23, 2007)

Following Oil Boom, Biofuel Eyed In Africa for the Inter Press Service (July 13, 2007)

France: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities for the Inter Press Service (June 29, 2007)

G8: Few Concrete Steps Proposed for Darfur for the Inter Press Service (June 27, 2007)

New Plans for Niger Basin for the Inter Press Service (Jun 26, 2007)

France: Immigrants Uneasy over Proposed Policies for the Inter Press Service (June 19, 2007)

Haiti-Dominican Republic: Film on Plantations Spurs Backlash for the Inter Press Service (June 4, 2007)

Trade-Africa: Europe Looks to Encourage Diaspora Investment for the Inter Press Service (May 31, 2007)

West Africa: Currency Integration Still A Few Years Off for the Inter Press Service (May 30, 2007)

An Appeal to Decency on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent: An address delivered to the Journalists & Editors Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean delivered at the Biscayne Bay Marriott Hotel in Miami, Florida (May 12, 2007)

Underreported: An Update on Kashmir on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show (May 03, 2007)

The Dead and the Missing in Kashmir for The World Policy Journal (Spring 2007)

Politics-Sudan: "Do Something Now, Because People Are Dying Every Day" for the Inter Press Service (April 30, 2007)

Haiti: A Literary Icon for "Les Damnés de la Terre" for the Inter Press Service (April 11, 2007)

Haiti/Democratic Republic: Exhibit Reveals a Bitter Harvest for the Inter Press Service (May 13, 2007)

Kashmiri Separatist Seeks End To Armed Struggle for the Washington Times (February 25 , 2007)

Haiti : The terrible truth about Martissant for AlterPresse (February 13, 2007)

The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) calls for action on the Jean-Rémy Badio killing press release (January 30, 2007)

Haiti’s Mythical Man: The Novelist Madison Smartt Bell Humanizes the Person Behind the Legend of Haiti’s Independence for the Miami Herald (January 21, 2007)

Politics-US: Ailing Health System Defies Easy Fix for the Inter Press Service (January 3, 2007)

The fields of Nandigram

I have been following with concern in recent weeks the situation in the Indian state of West Bengal. Home to the world’s longest serving democratically elected communist government - the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM) - the region recently saw terrible state-sponsored violence last month in the form of a raid by Communist party cadres against the village of Nandigram, which resulted in the deaths of at least six people, the raping of several women, the burning of peasant homes and the flight of thousands of villagers into exile. This appalling display came about as a direct result of the CPIM’s desire to convert the Nandigram paddy fields to a special economic zone for an Indonesian-owned petrochemical complex.

Having reported on the brutal treatment of Haiti's peasants on that country's Maribahoux plain (evicted from some of the best farmland in the nation in 2002 to make way for a free-trade zone by the ostensibly-populist government of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide), it would seem that Nandigram would be yet another case of a self-appointed political elite professing progress on one hand while trampling on the rights of the very people - the poor- that they claim to advocate for with the other. The sympathies of thinking, democratic progressives like myself could rest nowhere else than with the villagers victimized by the CPIM government. Indeed, as my friend Dilip D'Souza pointed out in a recent blog posting, “sensible, responsible thinkers on the left are appalled by the crimes of Nandigram, exactly as sensible, responsible thinkers on the right were appalled by the crimes of Gujarat 2002.”

Such simple humanity evidently still manages to escape sector of the international left, though.

In an open letter in The Hindu portentously addressed “To Our Friends in Bengal,” a handful of Western-based “radical” intellectuals lectured, not for justice, but rather, for “reconciliation” between the victimized peasants and the CPIM government, as if victimized and victimizers were operating on a ground of moral equivalency.

“The balance of forces in the world is such that it would be impetuous to split the Left,” the letter lectured the families of the dead and the raped, and the Indian left as a whole. “We are faced with a world power that has demolished one state (Iraq) and is now threatening another (Iran). This is not the time for division when the basis of division no longer appears to exist.”

The letter’s signatories counted among their number the usual assortment of cause-du-jour affluent commentators on world affairs, all making comfortable livings for themselves adopting “radical” positions while making sure to steer well clear of the line of fire.

There was Michael Albert, the founder of the frothing internet publication ZNet. There was Tariq Ali, the lavishly wealthy political dabbler and unreadable author of bad poetry. And, of course, never one to be left out of a poorly thought-out social critique, there was Noam Chomsky, who apparently also likes to dip his toes in Indian regional politics when not waging campaigns against books he doesn’t like or lauding revisionist histories in the 1990s Balkan wars.

Again, my experience in Haiti taught me a little something about dealing with this current of thought, where “solidarity” becomes a byword for lack of transparency, lack of accountability and lack of debate about the best means to help poor people create a better life for themselves. Alas for Haiti, many of its most articulate progressive intellectuals write with proficiency only in French, thus often not being able to contribute in any expansive way to the debate of the fate of their country in the English-language media, while many genuine English-proficient progressives with knowledge of the country, through either fear of reprisal or lack of interest, remain silent. In India, however, the democratic left said “not so fast.”

Responding to Chomsky et al on the Nandigram missive, an open letter by a group of Indian progressives including Arundhati Roy, Mahashweta Devi and Sumit Sarka, patiently explained that the CPIM, in their view, “today is to stand for unbridled capitalist development, nuclear energy at the cost of both ecological concerns and mass displacement of people…and the Stalinist arrogance that the party knows what ‘the people’ need better than the people themselves.”

“Moreover” the letter went on. “The violence that has been perpetrated by CPIM cadres to browbeat the peasants into submission, including time-tested weapons like rape, demonstrate that this ‘Left’ shares little with the Left ideals that we cherish.”

The Chomsky et al signatories responded to this with another open letter, which appeared to backtrack a bit from the initial, unequivocal call for unity, but this was not quite enough for Sumit Sarkar, who, in the pages of The Guardian, took the signatories of the initial letter to task for their authors had an "ignorance of what is happening in India. They have no idea of the on-the-ground facts."

As a progressive committed to trying to create a more just, equitable, healthy and humane planet, I was heartened to see the vigorousness with which India’s progressives responded to the attempted hijacking of the dialogue on the Nandigram debate on the world stage by a powerful self-fashioned intellectual elite, epitomized by the signatories of the initial letter. With genuine solidarity with oppressed peoples, with vigorous on-the-ground investigative reporting and with a continuing engagement in bringing the voices of the disenfranchised to the attention of a world where strident currents of both the left and the right have vested economic interests in ignoring them, I believe that, in time, the peasants of Nandigram, like the peasants of Maribahoux, may at long last see justice, and a government that genuinely represents and responds to the needs of its long-suffering people.

Taslima Nasreen forced into hiding

News reaches me via an article in The Guardian and via a rushed instant message conversation with the author herself, who is in hiding, that the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has been driven from her home in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, by the violent protests of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind group, claiming that she had insulted Islam in here new book, Dwikhondito (Split in Two).

Readers of this blog and my other writing will recall that, this past August, Ms. Nasreen - a recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thoughts from the European Parliament (1994), the Hellman-Hammett Grant from Human Rights Watch (1994) and the UNESCO Prize for the promotion of tolerance and non-violence (2004) - was physically attacked at a book release event in Hyderabad, India by members of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) party, including Indian lawmakers.

It is a depressing development of intolerance in a region of India that has always prided itself on being on of the great intellectual bastions of that great nation, birthplace of the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the film director Satyajit Ray, In response, Narseen has consented to delete the controversial passages in her book, something that I am sure any writer is loathe to do under public pressure

The decision must be doubly bitter for an author who, in her home country of Bangladesh, saw her books banned, her passport seized, her life threatened and was eventually forced to seek exile in Europe and the United States before settling in Calcutta. Criticizing the victimization of her country's Hindu minority and of women, and calling for a more moderate, humanistic and less extremist approach to faith in South Asia in general, is evidently not a path not endorsed by all.

Though Maulana Mahmood Madani, general secretary of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, has called on protests against Nasreen to stop if she withdraws the “objectionable” passages, the Milli Ittehad Parishad, an umbrella alliance of 12 Muslim groups including Jamait Ulema-i-Hind, still intends to meet on Sunday to discuss their further plan of action.

Events such as this in India, whether coming from the camps of Hindu extremists or Muslim fundamentalists, make a mockery of the concept of free speech and minority protections, when mob rule and violence become an accepted mode of public discourse and addressing one’s grievances.

The reaction the Indian government to all of this? In a statement, India's External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said the following: "We have never refused shelter to those who seek our protection, and the same applies to Nasreen...(But) those given shelter in India have always undertaken to eschew political activities in India or any actions which may harm India’s relations with friendly countries. It is also expected that the guests will refrain from activities and expressions that may hurt the sentiments of our people."

What kind of a defense of freedom of speech is that? In effect, it tells writers “Say what you want, just nothing too challenging,” when the purpose of writers, if they have any purpose, is to always challenge, push and provoke beyond merely entertaining.

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,“ said the British author George Orwell said in his preface to Animal Farm, a book that got him mercilessly vilified by the British left for its scathing satire of the Stalinist Soviet Union, Those words ring as true in our polarized world today as they did in 1945.

Hopefully, despite the increasingly shrill minorities on the right and the left; among the Christians, Hindus, Muslims; Americans, Indians, French, Russians et al, the bravery of genuine free thought and the wisdom of moderation will prevail and, I hope, that writers like Taslima Nasreen will continue to challenge and provoke us through these dark and difficult times.

The Dead and the Missing in Kashmir

My article The Dead and the Missing in Kashmir: The Struggle for Kashmir, was originally printed in the Spring 2007 editor of the World Policy Journal. Based on my February 2007 visit to Kashmir and interviews conducted both there and in India's financial capital of Bombay (Mumbai), I believe it remains an important examination of some of the significant factors in the conflict there. As the World Policy Journal website is available to subscribers only, I wanted to reprint the article, in its entirety, on a special blog so as to give the general public a chance to have access to the information contained therein. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

In defense of Taslima Nasreen

Even as I was perusing my friend Dilip D’Souza’s well thought-out and persuasive rational argument on Kashmir, however, the faces of intolerance and intimidation in India were busy revealing themselves a thousand miles to the south of the lily-speckled Dal Lake, when members of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) party, including Indian lawmakers, attacked the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as she attempted to speak at a book release event in Hyderabad, India.

Nasreen, as some readers may be aware, is the celebrated author whose works such as Lajja (Shame) have attracted the ire of Muslim fundamentalists in her home country, leading this former physician in Bangladesh’s understaffed public hospitals to have her books banned, her passport seized, her life threatened and, eventually, being forced to seek exile in Europe and the United States before settling in Kolkata (née Calcutta), where she now resides. Her crime? Daring to write of the struggles of women in Bangladeshi society, criticizing the victimization of that country’s Hindu minority and calling for a more moderate, humanistic and less extremist approach to faith in South Asia in general. For this, Ms. Nasreen has been awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thoughts from the European Parliament (1994), the Hellman-Hammett Grant from Human Rights Watch (1994) and the UNESCO Prize for the promotion of tolerance and non-violence (2004).

As an author of strong political convictions whose own public readings have occasionally been interrupted by largess-bloated, despot-involved lawyers and the like, it's hard not to reflect on how minor my own inconveniences have been in comparison to having tens of thousands of fanatics pouring into the streets demanding that I be killed, as has happened to Ms. Nasreen in her native country in years past.

"I was wondering how they would kill me. Would it be with a knife or a gun? Or would they simply beat me to death.?” Ms. Nasreen is quoted is saying in the Hindustan Times. “They had encircled us. After I escaped from a back door and took shelter in a room, they even broke down one of the doors. I thought I would be dead,…If I have returned alive to Kolkata it is because of mediapersons who fought those men for half an hour and got injured to save me."

The Indian author and lyricist Javed Akhtar, himself a Muslim, has spoken out bravely in Ms. Nasreen’s defense, stating that "the incident was outrageous and shameful. In a civilized society, you have a right to approve or disapprove of anything… What is the difference between (the attackers) and the Hindu fundamentalist organizations.” As someone who has often spoken out against Hindu chauvinism in India, I couldn't' agree more.

Others, however such as Delhi Minorities Commission Chairperson Kamal Farooqui, have called for Nasreen to be expelled from the country and on live television, a Muslim cleric issued a fatwa that someone should “blacken her face,“ for insulting Islam, a euphemism whose suggestions of violence can only be guessed at.

Over a decade ago, another writer who had been the target of murderous religious fanaticism and who at the time was just beginning to emerge from seclusion - Salman Rushdie - was the speaker at my graduation from Bard College in upstate New York. Speaking of the demands for adherence to this or that hierarchy that had been made of him throughout his life, he addressed the issue of fundamentalism and freedom of expression thusly:

It is men and women who have made the world, and they have made it in spite of their gods, The message of the myths is not the one the gods would have us learn - that we should behave ourselves and know our place - but its exact opposite. It is that we must be guided by our natures. Do not bow your heads. Do not know your place. Defy the gods. You will be astonished how many of them turn out to have feet of clay. Be guided, if possible, by your better natures.

Indeed, and be guided, hopefully, to a more just and tolerant world.

An electoral solution for Kashmir

I was very happy to learn this week that the Indian journalist Dilip D’Souza was awarded first prize by the India National Interest website for his compelling essay Free to Choose India, a well-informed and argued article advocating an electoral solution to the conflict in Kashmir.

In the essay, D’Souza posits that the only solution to the now 20 year-old armed conflict in India’s only Muslin-majority state would be to do the following:

Hold a referendum to let Kashmir’s people decide their future…Announce that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir will vote in the referendum, meaning also what we Indians call Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Announce too that it will be held among all the people who call that state home, including the three hundred thousand who were driven into camps in Jammu and Delhi. Third, remind the world about the terms of the UN resolution that first urged such a referendum (47 of 1948)…Saying that Pakistani forces must withdraw from Kashmir as a first step towards holding the referendum.

The situation in Kashmir is indeed a complicated and bloody one, as I found when I visited the region in February of this year (a trip on which some of Dilip’s contacts in the region proved to be of invaluable assistance), however I think that an electoral solution, following two decades of conflict that seem to have gone nowhere, indeed remains the only one.

The roots of the conflict go back to the twilight of Britain's colonial rule of India and Pakistan, when Pakistan-based tribesmen invaded Kashmir in 1947 and the region’s Hindu maharajah, Hari Singh, sought Indian assistance while also signing an agreement to become part of India. The Kashmiris were promised a referendum on the status of the region, but it was never held.
The 1948 U.N. Security Council resolution that Dilip refers to specified that in a plebiscite, Kashmir should only have the option to join either India or Pakistan, blocking independence or semi-autonomy, a long-cherished goal of many Kashmiris. After subsequent wars, the border between Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir has remained largely at the present Line of Control.

In 1987, when it seemed legislative elections might be won by a collection of Islamic and secessionist parties called the Muslim United Front (MUF), Indian-administered Kashmir carried out mass arrests of MUF candidates stealing the election and leading some young Muslim Kashmiris to opt for armed conflict, with Pakistan only too happy to offer training and equipment.

The bloodshed since has been pervasive. In addition to those killed, tens of thousands have been injured and hundreds of thousands, including many Kashmiri Hindus, have been displaced. An estimated 8,000 people have been "disappeared" by Indian security forces. The people of Kashmir remain caught in a geopolitical struggle between two of South Asia’s most heavily-armed nation with neither country seeming to have the best interests of the region’s long-suffering people at heart.

For all of these reasons, the idea that Kashmiris should have the opportunity to definitively decide their own status via the long-delayed referendum is one that should be seen as worthy of support both in India and abroad.

For more background on the conflict, please see my February 2007 article in the Washington Times, Kashmiri separatist seeks end to armed struggle, (reprinted here on the Indian Countercurrents website), my article The Struggle for Kashmir (Continued), published in the Spring 2007 edition of the World Policy Journal, Humra Quraishi’s excellent 2004 book Kashmir: The Untold Story (Penguin Global) or Dilip D’Souza’s own New Glory: Peace as Patriotism (WISCOMP, 2005).

India, justice delayed…

Bombay’s trinubals surrounding the 1993 explosions that killed 257 persons in India's commercial capital took on a farcical, show-trial element today, as an apparently vindictive judge, PD Kode of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) court, sentenced Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt to six years of “rigorous imprisonment” for possessing a 9 mm pistol and an AK-56 rifle given to him by members of Bombay’s underworld at the height of the riots that preceded the 1993 terror attack.

One might be able to take such an unduly harsh sentence seriously (Dutt already served 16 months in jail in connection with the charges) had any attempt been made to bring the politically powerful who orchestrated large parts of the 1992/93 bloodshed to account.

It is hard to forget, of course, that, following the destruction of Babri Mosque in northeastern India by Hindu extremists in December 1992, Mumbai was engulfed in ghastly rioting that left over 2,000 dead , many of them Muslims targeted by Hindu mobs that a government commission later found were affiliated with the stridently sectarian Shiv Sena political party.

The Shiv Sena (or Army of Shiva, referring to Shivaji) was formed by Bal Thackeray in 1966, promoting themselves as Bhumiputra or "sons of the soil," while propagating that native Maharashtrians (those born in Maharashtra state and speaking the Marathi language) deserved greater rights in their eponymous state (of which Bombay is a part) than "foreigners," which in this case meant basically Muslims (the Shiv Sena also promoted the rather exceptionalist Hindutva philosophy) and "southerners" (those from south India).

The Srikrishna Commission Report on the violence, released in 1998, stated unequivocally that “from January 8, 1993 at least there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organizing attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of several leaders,’ singling out Thackeray for special condemnation.

To date neither Thackeray , nor any of his deputies, has ever had to answer for the terrible crimes they oversaw against their fellow citizens of India. Much as a shameless demagogue such as Narendra Modi - chief minister of Gujarat state who (at best) stood by in 2002 as 2,000 (most Muslim) citizens were slaughtered and now stands accused of involvement in extra-judicial police killings - has never had to appear and authoritatively answer the charges against him.

Pompous judges like PD Kode, evidently drunk with power, can satisfy themselves with sentencing private citizens to harsh stretches of prison time, I suppose. But until they muster up the courage to start hauling the political leaders who have contributed to so much division and destruction in India in recent years into the dock, their statements about the rule of law in India are as transient, transparent and feeble as the breeze blowing through the banyan trees on a hot Bombay day.

A nod to the resourceful women of India

Two very different women drew notice for two very different types of protests in India this week

In the southern Indian state of Karnataka (of which Bangalore is a part), J. N. Jayashree, wife of a state bureaucrat named M. N. Vijayakumar who has spoken out vigorously against corruption in the government there, started a blog as a way to spread the word about the pilferage currently plaguing Karnataka . Raising her husband’s international profile in the face of the recent murders of whistleblowers such as Satyendra Dubey and Shanmughan Manjunath was another motivation.

It is, I think, a quite brilliant move and one the should be copied in other places with high-levels of corruption such as Haiti and Guatemala, where honest civil servants and officials often speak out against or take action against corrupt colleagues, officials and business interests at great peril to their own lives. The borderless internet serves as an ideal vehicle to tell the world about what is going on in countries such as these, from the ground level to an international audience, such as Ms. Jayashree is doing, and it would seem to be able to help, flooding the deeds of dishonest with day. Let’s hope that her example catches on.

Many hundreds of miles to the north, in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat state, a young woman named Pooja Chauhan , fed up with harassment and abuse by her husband and in-laws and exasperated with police indifference to her travails, stripped down to her underwear and marched through the conservative city in protest.

Evidently sufficiently shamed, Rajkot police then arrested Pooja Chauhan’s husband, Pratapsinh Chauhan, as well as her in-laws for alleged harassment and physical abuse. Subsequently the subject of much ugly speculation and innuendo, Pooja Chauhan told reporters this week simply that "I am not mad. Just because I threw away my clothes, no one can call me mad. I know what I am doing and for what reason, All I want is justice.”

I hope that she gets it, and that J. N. Jayashree and Pooja Chauhan succeed in forcing India’s largely male political class into taking a more aggressive approach to investigating and punishing claims of both corruption and domestic abuse. Their steps are very courageous in a time and place where it is physically dangerous for them to be taken at all.

Good luck, ladies.

The Struggle for Kashmir (Continued)

My article The Struggle for Kashmir (Continued), based on my visit to the conflict zone in February of this year, has just been published in the Spring 2007 edition of the World Policy Journal.

Featuring interviews with such pivotal figures in Kashmir’s recent political history as People's Democratic Party (PDP) president Mehbooba Mufti, Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKFL) chairman Yasin Malik, Indian historian and author Ramachandra Guha and Parmina Ahanger, head of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, the article takes a long and uncompromising look at the situation on the ground in Kashmir today and the role that India and Pakistan have played in fostering it.

It also looks in depth at the effects on human rights and individual liberties in the region as a result of Section 45 of India’s criminal procedure code - which protects any member of the armed forces from arrest for “anything done or purported to be done by him in the discharge of his official duties except after obtaining the consent of the Central government” - and Section 197(2) of the same code, which makes it mandatory for prosecutors to obtain permission from the federal government to initiate criminal proceedings against any public servant, including armed forces personnel.

The article is also, I hope, a tribute to the resilience, hospitality and beauty of the thousands of ordinary Kashmiris, as beautiful even as their spectacular homeland, who, as one Kashmiri I met told me, “are very moderate people not the Taliban projected by media.”

Quite so.

For those interested, here also is a link to an interview I did regarding the situation in Kashmir with talk-show host Leonard Lopate on WNYC in New York this past May.

An update on the situation of the Lepcha of Sikkim

While a virtual mainstream news blackout continues to exist with regards to the hunger strike of many Lepcha, the indigenous inhabitants of India’s Himalayan state of Sikkim, against a hydro power project planned along the Teesta River in Dzongu, some enterprising journalist from a website called Asian News International has shown more initiative than all my colleagues in the Western media and written a serviceable summary of the situation here.

As I wrote in response to a posting on the issue on Dilip D'Souza’s Bombay-based blog, being a working journalist who has covered economically disadvantage, politically tumultuous countries in the past (Haiti, Guatemala), I grow weary of the excuses of my colleagues that editors and the like won't "let" them cover certain stories (though I have encountered the hubris of desk-bound editors decided what stories are and aren't worth covering myself in the past).

Perhaps I grow increasingly curmudgeonly in my old age, but I think my colleagues in the international media need to show a little more enterprise and a little more backbone to make sure the stories of people like the Lepcha (or the rural peasantry in Haiti, or the indigenous communities in Guatemala, etc) are given some kind of a platform in the international dialogue, and a little less time worrying about the creature comforts of their personal lives or ease of professional advancement.

Simply put, one is worth fighting for, and one isn’t.

Palabras Prohibidas

The closer they came to the promised land, the more they felt the net tightening around them.

So writes perhaps Haiti’s greatest author, Jacques Stephen Alexis, at the conclusion of arguably his finest novel, Compere General Soleil, translated masterfully into English as General Sun, My Brother by the American professor Carrol F. Coates.

Alexis was depicting the struggles against tyranny, both political and economic, of a desperately poor worker and former restavek (a child from a poor family who goes to work in rich households as a kind of indentured servant) named Hilarion Hilarius, his lover Claire-Heureuse, their young baby and their friends and relatives in 1930s Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as they are preyed upon by the ravenous opportunists of the political and economic classes that control both countries.

Alexis knew of what he wrote. A committed left-wing activist during the dictatorship of Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier (and indeed, long before), Alexis helped form the Part d'Entente Populaire (Party of Popular Accord) in Haiti 1958, serving as the country's representative to the Thirteenth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow the following year, as well as traveling to the Conference of Communist Worker's Parties in Beijing in November 1960, where he met the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. Setting sail from Cuba with a group of supporters on an ill-fated expedition to oust Duvalier on April 22, 1961 (the writer's thirty-ninth birthday), once ashore in Haiti, Alexis and his group were seized by Haitian soldiers, with the writer was eventually stoned to death by a group of peasants and street children at the urging of the local army and Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's feared paramilitary henchmen.

Francois Duvalier succeeded in silencing the voice, if not the legacy, of Jacques Stephen Alexis.

In the present day, there are still those who, if perhaps not disposed to immediately take the step of publicly, physically murdering their opponents, seek to do as much through vilification and character assassination.

I have seen this first-hand in India, where supporters of that country’s hegemony in the restive Kashmir region have often sought to cast independence activists there, and indeed, most of the population, in the role of some sort of quasi-Taliban because of the unconscionable acts of a handful of violent jihadists. And, of course, I have seen it in Haiti, where individuals who have risked their lives to build a better country than the one that Jacques Stephen Alexis left behind are still regularly maligned by a privileged few with little knowledge and even less ethical and intellectual integrity,

As such, freedom of speech, especially when it’s the freedom to speak words that the powerful or the intolerant don’t want to hear, has always been an issue near and dear to my heart. And so, in that spirit, I ask you to read and meditate on a recent article I wrote for the Inter Press Service about a new film called The Price of Sugar, and a Paris conference, which deals with the state of Haitians laboring in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. It is a film that has sparked considerable controversy, and one whose message it would appear is very unwelcome in certain quarters in the halls of the powerful of Haiti’s’ neighbor to the East.

“Body blows wear them down,” a pugilistically-inclined friend once wrote to me, of those who would seek to scuttle an open and honest discussion of what transpires under cloaks of plotting and dissembling surrounding places such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. “Though not as glamorous, they’re better for real challengers. Work the ribs. The arms will drop!"

While less inclined to view any discussion in terms of a take-no-prisoners kind of combat, I would just suggest that, as George Orwell once wrote in his preface to Animal Farm (which saw Orwell vilified by the British left for daring to criticize the Stalinist Soviet Union), if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Bombay, Meri Jaan

Sometimes nostalgia bubbles up at the most unexpected and inexplicable moments. For instance, this week, as a stretch of fairly glorious spring weather (blue skies, warm days) has descended on New York City, I have felt drawn to the memories of some of my days in Bombay earlier this year, and particularly to the smog-choked, very-crowded lanes of the Fort Area, where I spent much of my time.

With vendors from Sikkim and other remote parts of India clogging the sidewalks, the friendly Nepalese man who would sell me a Diet Coke on hot days, the busy restaurants and sweets shops churning out mouth-watering vindaloo, channa masala and nan (with the Parsi café where I often had breakfast opting for simpler fare of eggs, bread and excellent chai) and the Great Britian-on-ayahuasca architecture of Victoria Terminus and the General Post Office rising in the background, Fort was my first taste of Bombay, and it remained a seductive blend. With the exception of the slum of Dharavi (population 1 million), I don’t know if I have ever seen a part of the city more thoroughly representative of the vast polyglot of modern India, with the tongues of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil (and many others) all represented in its lanes.

And then there were the bookstores. It seems to be a well-kept secret, but Bombay is about the greatest place to buy English-language books that I’ve ever found, with dozens of open-air stalls and an equal number of fine bookshops selling new books for as little as 100-200 rupees (about US$3-$6).

Though some favored the more politically-minded Bookzone, I myself was quite taken with the Strand Book Stall, first pointed out to me by my friend Ashim Ahluwalia. Almost hidden among a warren of alleys the Strand is still a favorite of the Bombay literary cognoscenti . Founded in 1948, and much like the eponymous-though-unrelated Strand here in New York City, the Strand in Bombay has become something of a ritual for bibliophiles in the city and, unlike the New York version’s increasingly rapacious pricing (which make it not much less expensive than an ordinary bookshop and significantly more expensive than online buying options), Bombay's Strang has kept its prices modest enough that strapped-for-cash readers can enter knowing that they will be able to leave with something eminently worthwhile. It was in the lanes of Bombay that I discovered the work of Mohsin Hamid, Humra Quraishi and Kalpana Sharma, all significant contributors to my yet-ongoing Indian education.

Remember Gujarat

Five years ago this spring, in the India state of Gujarat, something dark and terrible took place that appears to have passed from the world’s consciousness and conscience with little long-lasting impression, swept away in the tide of violence and blood emanating daily from other parts of the world, chiefly Iraq.

In Gujarat, on 27 February 2002, 59 people were killed when a fire swept through several compartments of the Sabarmati Express train as it was returning with Hindu religious pilgrims from the town of Ayodhya. Ayodhya itself, some readers will recall, was where, in December 1992, the destruction of a 500-year-old Mughal-era mosque by Hindu zealots set off spiraling riots around India and, particularly in the country’s economic capital, Bombay, riots that, by early 1993, had left more than 2,000 dead, the majority of them Muslims targeted by Hindu mobs. In March 1993, in what is seen as a response by Muslim extremists, 13 bombs exploded nearly simultaneously around Bombay, killing 257 people.

So when that fire - a tragedy that an inquiry committee lead by Justice U.C. Banerjee concluded in early 2005 was an accident - swept through the Sabarmati Express, it carried with it not only the heat of oxidation but also the scorching power of terrible history.

Between February 28 and March 2 2002, Human Rights Watch later concluded, “thousands of attackers descended on Muslim neighborhoods, clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist groups, and armed with swords, sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by voter lists and printouts of addresses of Muslim-owned properties-information obtained from the local municipality.” Some 2,000 people, again the vast majority of them Muslims, were slain, and some 100,000 were left homeless.

But there is more. Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and a member of then then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with no evidence, claimed publicly at the time that the killings were an “organized terrorist attack" and threw the Gujarat state government's support behind a call for a general strike to protest the deaths. Even more pointedly, Gujarat’s state police were under instructions from the Modi administration not to act firmly against anyone participating in attacks against Gujarat's Muslim population. Human Rights Watch wrote that “the groups most directly involved in the violence against Muslims include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP), the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that heads the Gujarat state government.” An account of the destruction in some detail can be found in Asia Society fellow Mira Kamdar’s new book, Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming the World (Scribner). The Indian journalist Dilip D'Souza has likewise been remembering Gujarat's carnage in frequent postings on his blog from Bombay.

What, one may ask, was the official sanction against Narendra Modi (who continues to make speeches in Gujarat fanning anti-Muslim sentiment) and his subordinates for their role in the slayings of so many of their fellow citizens? Was Modi relived of his post, hauled before a tribunal, punished and sanctioned and sent to prison?

The United States revoked Modi's tourist visa, citing the provisions of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 which forbid foreign government officials who are "responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom" from being eligible for a visa to the U.S., and later denied him a diplomatic visa, as well. Mr. Modi is apparently still a welcome visitor in Europe, though.

And in India itself, where the government of Prime Minster Manmohan Singh frequently proclaims his administration’s commitment to the rule of law and credentials as the safeguard of India’s secular democracy? Silence. A silence, as the Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, slain seven years ago this month, might say, to awaken the dead, the dead of Gujarat still awaiting justice.

Many years earlier, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, surveying the often pointless destruction of the Irish civil war, penned the following lines in his poem, The Stare's Nest by My Window, which seem like an eloquent meditation with which to conclude this posting.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
no clear fact to be discerned…
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Five years on, remember Gujarat.