Ensure recognition of all community, individual forest rights of STs, OTFDs; single, married women

February 20, 2019

Civil rights organizations Community Forest Rights-Learning and Advocacy process (CFR-LA) All India Forum for Forest Movements (AIFFM) and Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM) have worked out a Citizens’ Charter on forest rights vision and promise of FRA. Its demands are proposed to be placed before the political parties for the upcoming elections. Seeking broader consensus, following is the text of the charter

The Forest Rights Act (FRA) was enacted in 2006 to undo the historical injustice against Adivasis and other traditional forest-dwelling (OTFD) communities by recognizing their pre-existing rights over forest land and community forest resources. The FRA provides for democratic governance of forests by vesting the rights and authority to manage and conserve forests in the Gram Sabha and forest dwellers. The law also recognizes and vests rights over community forest resources (CFR), individual/common rights over forests for cultivation and habitation, ownership and control over minor forest produce (MFP).

FRA expressly recognizes women as equal participants in decision-making in the Gram Sabha, and their equal ownership in individual and community forest resources. For pastoral and nomadic communities, particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs), and displaced communities, the FRA recognizes rights over seasonal use, habitats and in-situ rehabilitation respectively.

DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL OF FRA

At the minimum, FRA has the potential to secure rights and livelihoods of at least 20 crore STs and OTFDs over 40 million ha (50% of India’s forest land) covering 177,000 villages. The majority of districts with a high number of villages eligible to claim CFR are located in tribal majority and poverty stricken regions, and face conflicts over land and resources. Evidence from the ground shows that rights holders have used FRA effectively for:

Transforming forest management to meet local livelihood and cultural needs;
Democratizing environmental protection by relying on traditional knowledge and customary conservation practices;
Securing gender justice and rights of women over land and forest;
Ensuring food security and poverty alleviation;
Addressing land and resource conflicts; • Moving towards meeting India’s international commitments for climate change mitigation, eg AICHI targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

CURRENT STATUS OF IMPLEMENTATION

As per MoTA, individual and community rights have been formally recognized over 10- 13% of minimum potential area up to 2018, although this data has many discrepancies. An earlier assessment by CFR-LA in 2016 showed that the extent of recognition of CFR rights is over a mere 3% of the potential area.

ISSUES AND CHALLENGES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF FRA

Institutional challenges

Obstacles by forest bureaucracy and lack of political will: There are numerous reported instances of the forest department raising illegal objections to claims, not cooperating with Gram Sabhas in verification proceedings, imposing joint forest management (JFM) scheme on areas claimed under FRA, refusing to sign titles approved by District Level Committees (DLCs) and carrying out evictions where claims have been filed but not yet processed. Further, despite being the nodal ministry for FRA, MoTA has been marginalized by the MoEFCC in the formulation and implementation of policies relating to forests and forest rights. The absence of political will at the centre and state levels also ensures that the circulars and guidelines issued by MoTA on FRA are scarcely implemented. Nodal agencies at the state level continue to lack basic institutional support, capacity and human resources for the discharge of their functions. There are only minor investments into building capacities and efficiency of nodal agencies.
Non-recognition of authority of Gram Sabhas and rights of women, OTFDs, PVTGs and other vulnerable groups: About 50-60% IFR claims have been arbitrarily and illegally rejected in different states. Lands used for activities ancilliary to agriculture have not been recognized. Numerous titles impose illegal conditions on the exercise of rights by Gram Sabhas, or are issued over a smaller area than is claimed, or do not clearly demarcate the land leading to conflict. Women continue to be marginalized from decision-making in Gram Sabhas and FRCs, despite their right to full and effective participation in these bodies, and their traditional leadership in conservation. Many titles have not been issued jointly in the names of both spouses or single women in female-headed households. Instead, women remain most vulnerable to harassment on account of false cases of forest offences for collection of MFP, and to sexual violence and atrocities in the exercise of their rights. OTFDs have been mostly excluded due to misinterpretation of the provision relating to their eligbiity and the onerous evidentiary conditions imposed for establishing habitation and dependence of OTFDs on forests for three generations. At the same time, PVTGs, pastoral and nomadic groups face serious danger of loss of life, culture and livelihoods without secure rights and titles over their habitats and seasonal land use.

Conflicting laws and policies

Large-scale forestland diversion and illegal exemptions in clearance processes: Between June 2014- May 2018, MoEFCC has issued Stage-I and StageII clearance for more than 6,000 new projects over 124,788 hectares, out of which mining and linear projects constitute 25% each (CSE 2018). The MoEFCC has issued a number of Guidelines and Circulars exempting compliance with FRA and free, prior, informed consent of Gram Sabhas in clearance for linear projects and prospecting of minerals. Further, there is routine lack of compliance with statutory processes under the Forest Conservation Act, LARR, Coal Bearing Areas Act etc. in granting approvals for new projects or regularizing old ones. These bypass necessary safeguards for environmental protection, as well as rights, livelihood and consent of affected peoples, leading to human rights violations and impoverishment.
Evictions from Protected Areas and mass atrocities: Efforts to coercively evict forest-dwellers have escalated in recent years, through the illegal declaration/ extension of protected areas (wildlife corridors, tiger reserves etc.). Statutory processes under the FRA and Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA) requiring exploration of strategies for co-existence and community conservation, recognition of rights, consent of Gram Sabha to relocation and rehabilitation packages, among others, are rarely complied with. There are reported instances where Gram Sabha consent has been forged, and the forest department has imposed unreasonable and illegal restrictions on exercise of rights, including collection of MFP, cultivation and free movement of rights holders, especially OTFDs and PVTGs. These are accompanied by routine atrocities and violence, as women face physical, verbal and sexual harassment from the forest department in their exercise of rights, and dispossession through fencing and destruction of common lands.
Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 and Rules, 2018: The CAF Act and Rules operate on the flawed assumption that forests destroyed for non-forest purposes can be replaced through plantations in others areas. CAF leads to largescale land and forest rights violations, atrocities upon adivasis and forest-dwelling communities as plantations are routinely set up on forest and common lands. It also causes environmental destruction (70% of CA is of commercial monoculture plantations) while failing to control the accelerated rate of forest diversion, and harms local livelihoods with disproportionate hardship on women. CAF violates the FRA, PESA and Fifth Schedule by failing to provide for the free, prior and informed consent of gram Sabhas despite major objections by forest rights groups.
Creation of Land Banks: Land banks, proposed both for industrial and CA purposes, illegally usurp common lands, revenue forests and degraded forests over which forest-dwellers have legal rights. On 8 November 2017, MoEFCC issued Guidelines for the creation of land banks for compensatory afforestation for easier and speedier forest clearances, while violating FRA, PESA and Fifth Schedule.
Draft National Forest Policy 2018: The draft NFP 2018 reverses decades of significant gains in democratizing forest governance under the existing NFP 1988, FRA and PESA. The 2018 draft regresses to colonial-era forest management by reintroducing a focus on increased privatization, industrialization and diversion of forest resources, and encouragement to monoculture plantations. Further, the draft proposes to subsume the statutory authority of gram Sabhas to manage and govern forests under the FRA by creating a parallel ‘Community Forest Management’ Mission within the failed framework of Joint Forest Management (JFM).
Non-implementation of minimum support price for MFP: Although Central government has professed support to guarantee MSP for MFP owned and collected by forest-dwelling communities, significantly low volume of funds have been released, and no action barring a few notifications has been taken.
National REDD+ strategies: The national REDD+ strategies promote massive monocultural plantations through the forest department and private sector involvement, expansion of protected areas, and inclusion of new areas for carbon sequestration such as grasslands, mangroves, coastal sea grasslands etc., with only vague references to safeguard mechanisms for ensuring protection of rights of local communities. They also promote JFM as the preferred institutional mechanism, raising concerns over the impact on communities dependent on them, and with the authority to manage these resources, such as pastoral communities.

DEMANDS

Ensure recognition of all community and individual forest rights of STs and OTFDs, including the rights of single and married women, PVTGs, nomadic and pastoralist tribes, displaced communities.
MoTA to launch national Mission for FRA implementation (Van Adhikar Abhiyan)
Review functioning of institutional mechanisms under FRA to ensure they are properly constituted, have adequate representation of women, and are effective
Review all rejected and pending claims, and those approved conditionally or over smaller area than is claimed
Make available gender-disaggregated data on the status of claims, titles and composition of authorities Recognize and protect authority of Gram Sabhas to govern forests, with the full and unrestricted participation of women
Ensure compliance of all Forest Department Working Plans with the CFR Management Plans of Gram Sabhas, and scrap JFM Committees/Van Suraksha Samitis undermining the authority of Gram Sabhas
Ensure free, prior and informed consent of Gram Sabhas on all matters relating to the management, protection and conservation of community forests
Direct state governments to withdraw all forest offence cases and other retributive measures criminalizing exercise of rights by STs and OTFDs
Allocate all funds for forest development and management to Gram Sabhas, and ensure convergence of all relevant government schemes (MGNREGA, PDS etc.) with FRA
Cancel leases on forestlands granted to Forest Development Corporations and implement MSP for MFP owned and controlled by Gram Sabhas Repeal all laws and policies conflicting with FRA and undermining the authority of Gram Sabhas.
Constitute a High Level Empowered Committee headed by MoTA, with members from MoEFCC, MoRD, MoPR, NCST, NHRC and non-official members, to review all conflicting enactments, policies and guidelines issued by MoEF, MoRD and other ministries to ensure compliance with FRA. Repeal CAF Act, withdraw MoEFCC guideline for creation of land banks, draft NFP 2018 and National REDD+ strategies.
Ensure notification of all tiger reserves, tiger corridors, wildlife sanctuaries and Ecologically Sensitive Zones comply with FRA and WLPA 2006
Suspend all relocations and evictions until forest rights are properly and lawfully recognized; free, prior, informed consent of Gram Sabhas obtained; and past and ongoing relocation processes reviewed for FRA compliance. Ensure proper compensation for recognized forest rights and existing assets under LARR whenever relocation from PAs does take place
Integrate FRA in all targets and commitments for achieving international conservation and climate change mitigation goals, including those under the AICHI targets and Other Effective Area Based Conservation Measures (OECMs) under the Convention on Biological Diversity Ensure compliance of forest land diversion processes under all enactments with FRA and the statutory authority of Gram Sabhas by obtaining their free, prior and informed consent
MoTA should actively engage with MoEFCC, Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in all present and future forest clearance processes to ensure compliance with FRA and Forest Conservation (Amendment) Rules, 2016
Review all forest diversion since 2006 for compliance with FRA and Rule 2 (b) of Forest Conservation (Amendment) Rules, 2016; identify violations and recommend action, including withdrawal of clearance where diversion has been recommended without free, prior and informed consent of Gram Sabhas
Authorize the FAC to directly receive consent/ non-consent from Gram Sabhas Reform the forest bureaucracy to serve the rights of forest-dwelling communities by respecting MoTA’s mandate related to forest rights
Direct forest bureaucracy to provide proactive support for rights recognition and FRA implementation in co-ordination with MoTA and state nodal agencies
Build capacities of forest department to respect and incorporate rights of use, management and conservation of STs and OTFDs over forests
Direct state governments to ensure accountability of forest department for FRA and human rights violations, atrocities and violence against women, STs and OTFDs in the exercise of their rights

Courtesy: Counterview.org

Mamata demands Modi government’s ouster for failing to prevent terror attack

February 20, 2019

Kolkata, Feb 18 (IANS) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday slammed the Modi government for politicising the Pulwama terror attack and demanded its ouster for failing to take precautionary measures despite an intelligence alert of a possible attack.
Banerjee also accused the RSS and the BJP of trying to incite communal violence in her state.

“So many jawans have been killed. We seek punishment for the perpetrators, but responsibility for the negligence must also be fixed. There should be an investigation into the incident,” said Banerjee while speaking to reporters at the state Secretariat.

Alleging that last month an American intelligence advisory had warned of communal violence in India in the name of elections, the Chief Minister asked, “Why was action not taken despite this intelligence report?”

“Why was a convoy of 78 vehicles transporting over 2,000 troopers allowed to go together, when the government had information about a possible attack? Why were precautionary measures not taken? Why have so many people died?” asked Banerjee.

Banerjee said following Thursday’s terror attack, the Opposition has stood behind the government without asking any question.

“We have kept quiet, but we have seen Modiji and Amit Shah delivering speeches daily. And the waythey are speaking, it seems as if they are the only patriotic leaders in the country. This is not right,” she said.

“Modiji must tell us what action he has taken between the attacks in Pathankot and Pulwama. What action has he taken in the past five years?” she asked, adding, “If he cannot take control of the political situation in the country, he should resign”.

Courtesy: Two Circles

Mapping the American War on Terror – Now in 80 Countries, It Couldn’t Be More Global

February 20, 2019

In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding.

When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).

As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?
The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.

The U.S. is fighting its global war on terror in 40% of the world’s nations

(Stephanie Savell, Costs of War Project, originally published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine)

This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.

Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.

Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.

In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.

Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”

Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agentsworked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?

Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.

The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others). According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”

In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.

A Vast Military Footprint
As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.

Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.
In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.

Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.

To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”

A Better Grand Plan
How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.

After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemenrepresents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.

On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has not debated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddledreactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.

With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.

In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.

All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.

Stephanie Savell, a TomDispatch regular, is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. An anthropologist, she conducts research on security and activism in the U.S. and in Brazil. She co-authored The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Courtesy: Counter Current.org

Did Akbar really examine paintings every week? All the World’s a Mughal Stage

February 20, 2019

Somok Roy in conversation with Mika Natif

Mika Natif at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU

Traditional scholarship has viewed South Asian art under the shadow of a European “influence”. In sharp contrast, art historian Mika Latif’s imaginative work on Mughal courts, Akbari paintings and eroticism in the arts of the Islamic world, offers new ways to read artistic dialogues across cultures. Her recent monograph, Mughal Occidentalism (2018), published by Brill, is a detailed study of Mughal paintings, which challenges the conventional classification of material culture on regional, communal, dynastic, or temporal identities.
In an interview with Somok Roy, Mika Natif reflects on the world of Mughals, teaching humanities, and ‘recasting’ women in the histories of early modernity.

Mughal Occidentalism (2018), published by Brill, focuses on Mughal-Renaissance cultural exchanges

Somok Roy: In Mughal Occidentalism (Brill, 2018), you locate the relationship between Mughal art and European art, in trans culturalism, which is different from the traditional idea of a dominant European “influence”. Why do you think that this shift is necessary, and how did you read visual material differently to avert this notion?
Mika Natif: I believe that the shift in perspective was necessary in order to emphasize the agency of Mughal artists and patrons regarding the artistic relationship between European and Mughal painting. It seems that nobody was truly asking the question of why in the 1580s-1590s the Mughal elites – patrons and artists – would be even interested in incorporating Renaissance and Christian materials into their own creations, and what would these images mean for them.

Until very recently, the art historical discourse was shaped by a Eurocentric, not to say chauvinistic, agenda. Scholars have regarded the phenomenon as an “influence” of European and Catholic art on Mughal painting. The term “influence” alludes to imbalanced power relationships in which the “influencer” appears active and powerful and the party being “influenced” is passive and therefore weaker. My intervention challenges such a paradigm that casts these Mughal paintings as essentially derivative of Renaissance art and I move away from binary views of artistic exchanges. In the book, I demonstrate how these innovative visual changes were grounded in the new Mughal policy of sulh-i kull (‘universal conciliation’ or ‘peace with all’) and the formation of a multivalent empire with global aspirations.

SR: Your emphasis on parsing, selection, adaption and repurposing restores agency to the Mughal patron and artist. This positions Mughal visual culture as an intellectual tradition in its own right, and the ateliers as a site of knowledge production. Are there textual sources that refer to these practices, and do we see a similar reworking of the “oriental arts” in the courts of early modern Europe?
MN: Mughal textual sources can be allusive sometimes, and I often find myself reading between the lines. On the other hand, we should examine them critically and not accept immediately everything they say at face value. Ideally, as an art historian, I try to create a balance between textual and visual sources and pay attention to the ways they support or contradict one another. For example, Abu’l Fazl, the court chronicle, describes the ways in which paintings were inspected and evaluated every week by the Emperor and the head of the royal library. From his description we may learn of the close attention to details under which works of art were scrutinized. Did Akbar really examine paintings every week? Most likely not. After all, there were times that he was on the move, dealing with military campaigns or suppressing rebellions in the empire. However, Abu’l Fazl’s description of this close examination correlates to what I see within the works of art themselves: great attention to details that can only be achieved through intricate processes of parsing and selecting.
As for similar processes on the European side, the works of Rembrandt are a good example. Gary Schwartz gave a fascinating paper on his “Mughal series” a few months ago.

SR: In your book, you define “Mughal Occidentalism”, with reference to “international cosmopolitanism and a politics of cultural superiority on the part of the Mughals.” While scholars like Ebba Koch have written on Mughal cosmopolitanism in material culture, the politics of cultural superiority of aesthetics in a global/transcultural context seems like a new area of enquiry. Could you elaborate on the specificities of the cultural competition?

Jahangir with a globe- a favourite self-image of Mughal sovereignty and transculturality of the emperor. This painting is housed in the Chester Beatty library, Dublin.

MN: Mughal claims of cultural superiority can be seen in textual sources, as has been demonstrated by the works of historians Muzaffar Alam, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Corrine Lefèvre. These attitudes are also visible in several incidents linked to paintings. For example, when Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador under King James I, visited Jahangir’s court, he brought a painting as a gift. When he was asked and then failed to identify some of the figures in the picture, the Ambassador was reprimanded by the Mughal Emperor. On another occasion, Jahangir put Roe’s cultural abilities into test. He showed the Englishman five images, one original and four copies, of a European painting that Roe himself brought as a gift to Jahangir, and asked him to identify the original. Roe, of course, failed to do so, to the delight of the Mughal Emperor.

Other modes of artistic competition can be seen in the works of Abu’l Hasan, Ruqaya Banu, Nini and others.

SR: Both “Orientalism” and “Occidentalism”, like anyother ‘ism’, have been in the eye of the storm in the academy for years. How have your colleagues and fellow art historians responded to “Mughal Occidentalism”?
MN: So far [I] have been getting wonderful responses from colleagues in various fields. I think that the book bridges a gap in scholarship on pre-modern South Asia and initiates a new dialogue between Renaissance specialists and historians of Islamic art.

SR: Coming to your fascinating work on micro-landscapes in Mughal paintings, especially from the Akbari atelier, would you tell us how you began working on background narratives and receding landscapes?
MN: When you spend so much time looking at illustrated manuscripts and paintings from the Akbar period, one cannot resists delving into the amazingly intricate and idyllic landscape features that appear in so many pictures from the 1580s-1590s. And then it makes you think about what is represented in these panoramas? Who are these figures? And geographically and temporally speaking, where all of this is located?

Sādi in a rose garden with his friend, painted by Govardhan, from a Gulistān manuscript. Natif reads homoeroticism in the metaphors and visual translations of Persian poetry. The folio is currently in the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian.

SR: In your study of landscape narratives, you draw beautiful connections between man and nature on one hand, and the notions of civility, justice and akhlaqi literature on the other. How does the idyllic, agrarian village, and the urbane Mughal metropolis come together in Akbari paintings?
MN: In the landscape painting, Mughal artists were masterful in portraying harmonious and balanced settings of the built world and the cultivated natural realm, related to Mughal urbanism and garden tradition. From a reading of Mughal literary sources about cities, topographical descriptions, and poetry in praise of urban centers, a geographical identity is revealed, which is manifested in the creation of micro-architecture landscapes in paintings. The particular time in which these vignettes appear, the 1590s, has a direct link to the crystallization of Akbar’s policy of the sulh-i kull and his striving to achieve balance and harmony among all subjects in the empire. These idyllic and intricate urban landscapes in the background of paintings reflect the Mughals’ sense of pride and ownership toward Hindustan and the reaffirmation of their just rule.

SR: You have also made significant contributions to the literature on sexuality and eroticism in art. At a time when global movements to acknowledge and decriminalise queerness and multifaceted sexualities is taking place, how does writing on premodern sexualities aid or enrich contemporary movements? Do you believe that academics have a greater responsibility leaning towards activism, especially if their research resonates with contemporary concerns?
MN: I hope that learning about pre-modern eroticism and sexuality and their role in art, poetry, literature and beyond, would help to contextualize and normalize such ideas. I also would like to believe that studying the Humanities may bring openness and tolerance towards others. This is where I see the role of academia in becoming a responsible and active agent with regard to contemporary concerns.

SR: As a specialist of ‘Islamic art’, who focuses on the transcultural worlds of ‘Muslim societies’, what does teaching art history mean to you in an age of seemingly ceaseless strife and disharmony? Do you see art history, and more importantly the act of teaching, as powerful engagements to battle the divisive hatred poured by the state and media?
MN: I am a great believer in education and learning. I think, as human beings, we are constantly in a state of learning. This is not something that stops once you graduate from school or university. Learning is a central part of living in the world, being open to great ideas, innovations, technology, and even smaller niches like cuisine and cinema. Teaching students to adopt this perspective and become critical thinkers is crucial, and I strive to do that through art history.

SR: In India, the ruling government is propagating a virulent form of nationalism, that is exclusive and predatory to say the least. A project of rewriting of the nation’s history based on notions of purity and indigeneity, and a complete erasure of hybridity or diversity is being orchestrated. Why, do you think, ‘transculturality’ poses an alarming threat to totalitarian politics, and how can academics and scholars make a public intervention at this point, outside the university departments and academic circles?
MN: Thinking about the Mughals and their policy of sulh-i kull, I believe that accepting ideas of transculturality means being self-secure, self-assured and comfortable, without feeling threatened by the existence of others or “otherness”. Hence, transculturality comes from a position of great strength. It is also the place in which curiosity and inquisitiveness, which are notable signs of intelligence, come into play.

SR: Your current book project focuses on the portraits of Mughal women, c.1590-1660. We have recently seen a proliferation of works on Mughal women and gender politics, for instance the writings of Lisa Balabanlilar and Ruby Lal. How did you decide to work on women’s portraiture, and what should we look out for in your upcoming book?
MN: It’s actually very simple. In the last chapter of Mughal Occidentalism I focused on portraits of the Mughals. My initial thought was to include a section on female portraits and their relationship to European art. However, as work progressed, I realized that this was a bigger and more complicated issue that requires its own publication. There is a lot of “house cleaning” to do, and the topic is very exciting and timely. I am having a lot of fun with the material!

Mika Natif teaches art history at the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.

Somok Roy studies History at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. His research interests include early modern court cultures, the histories of desire and sexuality, and performance in Mughal India.

Courtesy: Indian cultural Forum

Save Education: 15,000 Teachers and Students Across India Unite

February 20, 2019

The teachers representing primary schools and universities traveled great distances from various states to protest the attack on higher education.

Indian universities are witnessing an attack on their fundamental structure in an unprecedented manner, with the Modi government unleashing a series of policy changes and ‘reforms’ in the education sector.

The teachers representing primary schools and universities traveled great distances from various states to protest the attack on higher education.

Courtesy: https://www.newsclick.in/

Journalists threatened and abused after numbers leaked online

February 20, 2019

Several Indian journalists, known for their liberal and secular views, became victims of doxxing when their numbers were leaked and circulated, allegedly by right-wing social media trolls. Barkha Dutt, Abhisar Sharma, Rajdeep Sardesai and many others, have since then received threats of violence and abusive messages on their phones. Is this a conspiracy against media persons who believe in defending India’s pluralism and democratic values?

Firebrand journalist Abhisar Sharma who is best known for speaking truth to power on his show Suniye Sarkar started receiving threats via calls and text messages when his number was made public, allegedly by a group of right-wing social media trolls.

The messages not only questioned Sharma’s patriotism, but also threatened his family with violence. Sexually derogatory language was used for the women in his family and one of the trolls threatened to rape his little daughter!
But this only made Sharma more determined to fight back and he filed a formal police complaint, following which two men were arrested.

But Barkha Dutt, who returned to television news with her show Democracy Live on HTN recently, had much worse luck. While Dutt is not new to trolling, this time she was targeted more viciously on account of her gender, given how the perpetrators now had access to her personal number and did not face privacy challenges like those on social media. Frustrated by the constant onslaught of abuse, including pictures of genitals, Barkha tweeted this:

Subsequently in a series of tweets, she also made public all the numbers of people who harassed and abused her. But Twitter authorities allegedly threatened to take action against her, locked her account and forced her to delete some of the tweets including the image of the genitals. Shocked, Dutt tweeted:

Interestingly, even though Sharma had also tweeted numbers of people who had harassed him, he was not asked to take down the tweets and they are still visible on his page!

In fact, one of Dutt’s harassers was allegedly caught only because police were investigating Sharma’s complaint! At the time of publishing this story, Barkha Dutt was still getting threats! She urged the police to take action.

This apathy is reserved only for women journalists. Winner of Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Award for her book “I am a Troll” Swati Chaturvedi has faced intense trolling. But things got ugly when she received a death threat on Twitter in November 2018. However, no action was taken prompting the UN to write to the government of India.

Meanwhile, Rajdeep Sardesai, whose number was also made public tweeted the following:

Journalists with strong voices of dissent and a large social media following are perceived to be threats to a proto-fascist regime. All these threats are, therefore, a coordinated attack to silence Abhisar Sharma, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and other journalists who value our Constitutional values such as equality, secularism and social justice… men and women who are not afraid to question those in power or expose their wrong doings.

We need to stand by them if we are to preserve not only Press Freedom, but also the larger ideas of Freedom of Expression and the Right to Dissent. After all Dissent is the lifeblood of Democracy.

First published on https://cjp.org.in/

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From hinterlands to the frontline, this is how a soldier’s life begins and ends

February 20, 2019

The jawans that were killed on February 14 were underpaid and under-resourced as is with many who join CRPF. They mostly come from hinterlands to man the frontlines and be the first responders to insurgency. How does CRPF recruit its soldiers and what do they get for putting their lives in danger?

In the next few months, about 22,000 new people will be recruited for various ranks in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF,) exams for which begun three days before the Pulwama attack in which about 40 CRPF personnel lost their lives when an SUV containing explosives rammed into their convoy in Jammu and Kashmir.

The CRPF is India’s largest paramilitary force and its primary role is assisting Indian states and union territories in police operations to maintain law and order and counter insurgency. It also plays a big role in India’s general election and comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The jawans that were killed on February 14 were underpaid and under-resourced as is with many who join the force. They mostly come from hinterlands to man the frontlines and be the first responders to an insurgency.

Soldier’s Background
The army and the paramilitary forces recruit people who want to commit themselves to protect India’s sovereignty and to do that, they have to pass gruelling physical tests besides having mental fortitude for the most dangerous and stressful job there is.

India gets most of its recruits from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and the Northeast. Most of them come from farming or labour backgrounds.

The 40 CRPF jawans that were killed on February 14 belonged to 16 states of India. Majority of them were from Uttar Pradesh. 12 jawans from UP were in that bus besides five from Rajasthan, four from Punjab and a couple from Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and one each from Jharkhand, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and even Jammu & Kashmir.

Many came from farming backgrounds while many had fathers who were either auto drivers, truck drivers, priests or daily wage labourers. Before they joined CRPF many were hawkers, folk singers and labourers themselves but joined the force to bring their families out of poverty.

Many of them were either recently married or had plans to get married this year. Some had left their pregnant wives to go on duty and most TV channels covered young children crying over their father’s remains wrapped in the tricolour, often clueless about what was happening around them. Many jawans were even planning their children’s marriage this year or were thinking of retirement.

Mounting losses
CRPF lost more men in Kashmir in 2019 than the last four years put together. And we are only halfway through February.

In 2010, 76 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force were killed in a Maoist attack in Chhattisgarh. The same year saw a second deadly attack on the paramilitary force in the same state, with at least 26 jawans killed. The next deadly attack would also occur in Chhattisgarh in 2017 when at least 26 Central Reserve Police Force men were killed. Losses dipped to nine in 2015, only to rise again, Scroll reported.

CRPF: The poorer cousin of the army
In a report by Reuters, former senior officials from CRPF said that the force is not appreciated as much, poorly paid and under-resourced when compared with the army.

CRPF has been tasked to be the first responder in insurgent situations. This is the primary task,” said Pranay Sahay, a former CRPF director general, in the report.

They fight alongside the army, yet they are paid less and get fewer benefits and less training, former officials said.

A low-ranking army soldier typically receives one-and-a-half times the pay of a CRPF officer of equivalent experience, said Ranbir Singh, general secretary of the Confederation of Ex-Paramilitary Forces Welfare Associations, a difference which is also reflected in their pensions, the report added.

Living conditions are poorer, a sensitive issue when so many of the police are so far away from home, former officers said. Suicide rates are much higher than in the army, they added.

“The housing satisfaction level in the CRPF is the poorest, probably around 13-14 per cent,” Sahay told Reuters. Many had to pay for private accommodation for their families because the CRPF could not provide a decent alternative, he added.

The caste question
The Indian army and paramilitary forces, like others in the west and east that don’t have compulsory conscription, has over the years faced a huge problem in recruitment. The middle classes and upper middle classes of urban India, who dominate the discourse of pseudo and hysterical supra-nationalism, rarely lose their children on the borders.

The army and paramilitary forces claim that their recruitment processes are merit-based and believe that the introduction of reservations and quotas in the armed forces will affect the morale of soldiers and it would cease to be a level playing field. Then why is it that the forces continue to induct north Indians in such high numbers?

Rajput Regiment, Jat Regiment, Rajputana Rifles, Maratha Light Infantry, Madras Regiment, Mahar and Gurkha Regiments. These are some of the names of Indian Army regiments. They announce the caste hierarchy before introducing patriotism or valour.

The reason is that India still follows a colonial method of recruitments which has never been reformed.

The British recruited to the Indian Army on the basis of their categorisation of certain ethnicities and castes as supposedly warrior material or “martial” and others as being “non-martial”.

In 1933, Lt Gen. Sir George MacMunn reckoned that of the 300 and odd million people of India then, “only 35 million belonged to the martial races and of them, only three million were males between twenty and thirty-five years of age. Recruitment from martial races became the norm since then.

At the time of independence, “half of India’s senior-most officers came from one single province, Punjab,” points out Steven I Wilkinson in his book, Army and Nation. Punjab comprised only 5% of the population of newly created India. Wilkinson reminds us that armies with a “high internal cohesion” have a greater capacity to intervene in domestic politics – or stage coups, wrote Dr Menaka Guruswamy who practices law at Supreme Court of India.

“It was the mutiny in 1857 which triggered caste-based induction in the Indian Army. It is a well-documented fact that the stated British intent was to divide the army into martial and non-martial races, wherein they defined non-martial as a class who did not have the qualities to make good leaders. Since the mutiny rose from the east and south, it was natural for the British to strike them off from roles in the army. It was the north which got rewarded for its martial heritage and the tradition of contribution to the military service,” News18 documented.

Wilkinson wrote that by the beginning of the 1970s, India doubled the number of ‘martial class’ units. “The Punjab Regiment that recruits mainly Sikhs and Dogras, has gone from five to 29 battalions since independence,” Wilkinson wrote. The Rajputana Rifles (mainly Jats and Rajputs) has increased from six to 21 battalions in the same period.

The recruitment based on caste and ethnicity was started by the British to divide the society and resultantly quash the repeat of revolts and it is still being practised.

The lack of reform of the colonial recruitment policies reflects poorly on the crafting of a professional fighting force. It may contribute to the high vacancy rate that plagues the officer cadre of the Army. It enforces a division of labour in the army that is located in caste when it comes to tasks like cleaning. It reinforces that which the Constitution abhors – the caste system, Guruswamy added in her report.

The Central government’s contention at the Supreme Court in 2012 was that this is a natural force multiplier. If this is indeed so, it posits a more dramatic challenge to our basic understanding of “We, the People”. This means that we cannot be bound to each other and we will not stand up for each other unless we are of a common caste or ethnicity. This contradicts the Constitution’s conception of India, she wrote.

The system trickled down to recruitments in paramilitary forces after their formation.

Compensation for Pulwama soldiers
Members of the slain jawans’ families have demanded a permanent solution for these issues. Though they have been promised jobs and compensation, they are adamant in claiming that no amount of compensation will bring their loved ones back.

Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu today announced Rs. 5 lakh to the families of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawans.

On the other hand, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Edappadi K Palaniswami announced government jobs to one family member each of the 2 CRPF jawans from the state who lost their lives in the attack. TN govt announced a compensation of Rs. 20 lakh each to the families of the jawans.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh has announced financial assistance of Rs 25 lakh each to the next of kin of the CRPF jawans from Uttarakhand killed in the attack, besides a government job to one member of each family.

Odisha government has announced an ex-gratia of Rs 10 lakh each for the families of two slain CRPF jawans from the state, who were killed in Thursday’s terrorist attack.

The Uttar Pradesh government also announced an ex-gratia of Rs. 25 lakh each to the families of the 12 CRPF jawans of the state killed in the terror attack in Pulwama, an official said. The government will also provide a job for one member of each soldier’s family besides naming the link road in their native village after the martyrs.

Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das announced an ex-gratia of Rs 10 lakh for the family of a CRPF jawan from the state. The CM also promised a government job to a member of CRPF jawan Vijay Soreng’s family.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has announced Rs 12 lakh compensation and a government job to the next of kin of the four CRPF jawans from the state who died in the Pulwama terror attack.

The Madhya Pradesh government announced compensation of Rs 1 crore to the family of Ashwini Kumar Kachhi, a CRPF jawan from the state who was killed in the attack. CM Kamal Nath paid tribute to him and said, “The martyr’s family will receive Rs 1 crore in compensation, a house, and one family member will be offered a government job.”

Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb announced compensation of Rs 2 lakh and the Maharashtra government announced Rs 50 lakh for the families.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot revised the compensation and relief package for the family members of the five soldiers who were from Rajasthan. The government will provide either Rs. 50 lakh cash or Rs. 25 lakh cash and 25 bigha land on the Indira Gandhi Canal Project or Rs. 25 lakh with a housing board residence. The state government will also provide a government job to a dependent of the soldier, scholarship for children and Rs. 3 lakh to parents, besides other facilities.

Paramilitary forces put themselves in the line of fire every day for the citizens of India. These brave men and women guard the nation and protect us at the cost of their lives and the knowledge that their families will have to live in uncertainty. The sorrow from this tragedy has gripped the nation and tribute to those who lost their lives have been constantly pouring to remind us of our collective loss. What we as citizens can do is honour their memory and what they stood for when they took the oath to protect the country.

(Compiled by Preksha Malu)

Cow Vigilantes Enjoy Impunity under the BJP Govt: HRW

February 19, 2019

The Indian government should prosecute mob violence by so-called “cow protection groups” that have targeted Muslims, Dalits and other minorities in the five years since the Hindu supremacist BJP came to power in 2014. It is the complicity by local officials and police inertia which has meant dozens of vigilante murders of religious minorities in India have gone unprosecuted and unpunished over the last four years, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released recently.

The report quoted studies showing that between May 2015 and December2018 at least 44 people, including 36 Muslims, were killed in attacks over beef consumption and the cattle tradeCows are honoured by Hindus as selfless nourishers, and the embodiment of the Hindu principle of non-violence. But the zeal to “save” cows is a modern phenomenon. As has been well documented, many Hindus in Kerala and Tamil Nadu eat beef; so do members of less-powerful castes in need of a cheap source of protein. Dalits, India’s most maligned caste, are tasked with disposing of dead cows.Dalits all over the country, even in Gujarat consume beef.

“According to a survey by New Delhi Television, there was a nearly 500% increase in the use of communally divisive language in speeches by elected leaders – 90% of them from the BJP – between 2014 and 2018, as compared to the five years before the BJP came to power,” the report, released on February 19, said.

About 90% of these attacks were reported after the BJP came to power in May 2014, and 66% occurred in BJP-run states, the report stated.“Calls for cow protection may have started out as a way to attract Hindu votes, but it has transformed into a free pass for mobs to violently attack and kill minority group members,” said MeenakshiGanguly, south Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

The report looks in detail at 11 vigilante attacks and reveals why the perpetrators have not been punished. In one case, the statement in which the accused men confessed to the killings was not recorded by the police.In several others, the mobs enjoy local political patronage, which can intimidate the police into inaction.

In one case of outright complicity, the murder of a Muslim man by a mob in June 2018 was described by in police records as a “motorbike accident”.

“In almost all of the cases, the police initially stalled investigations, ignored procedures, or even played a complicit role in the killings and cover-up of crimes. Instead of promptly investigating and arresting suspects, the police filed complaints against victims, their families, and witnesses under laws that ban cow slaughter,” the report said.

Human Rights Watch said state governments must send the message that lynchings will be firmly punished. To prevent further mob violence they must also ensure prompt police action against any perpetrators, safeguard victims and witnesses, and, if possible, try the cases in fast-track courts.

“Thus far, several states have designated officers and issued circulars to police officials on addressing mob violence. However, most of the court’s other directives have yet to be complied with,” the report said.

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From hinterlands to the frontline, this is how a soldier’s life begins and ends

The jawans that were killed on February 14 were underpaid and under-resourced as is with many who join CRPF. They mostly come from hinterlands to man the frontlines and be the first responders to insurgency. How does CRPF recruit its soldiers and what do they get for putting their lives in danger?

Cow Vigilantes Enjoy Impunity under the BJP Govt: HRW

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