ISIS: From Physical Caliphate to Virtual Jihad

November 13, 2017

The Islamic State is increasingly going on-line to ensure its survival.

Islamic State information on a hand-held device (via LobeLog)

Cyberspace is the ideal platform for terrorists because, unlike conventional warfare, barriers to entry into cyberspace are much lower. The price of entry is an Internet connection. The surreptitious use of the Internet to advance terrorist group objectives has created a new brand of Holy War—“virtual jihad”—that gains thousands of new adherents each day. Long after the current terrorist groups have ceased to be a major threat from a physical perspective, they will remain omnipresent in cyberspace, promoting a virtual caliphate from their safe haven behind computer keyboards around the world. Islamic extremists are natural candidates to transition to a virtual world that offers them automatic citizenship beyond the nation-state.

Since the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) was founded, its leaders have deftly and continually rewritten the narrative to claim that the group’s desired caliphate exists, has a specific location, and maintains a defined group of adherents. Unconstrained by the absence of a definitive Quranic guideline for what constitutes a caliphate, IS created its own self-promoting doctrine. The group expanded its caliphate narrative to include a wide range of options for participation: membership included everyone from the passive observer reading a blog or curiously following a Twitter feed to the keyboard jihadist editing Rumiyah or hacking a website to the real-world operators attacking a nightclub or running down holiday celebrants with a delivery truck.

IS has successfully exploited the sociopolitical environment and young adults’ obsession with technology to establish a growing community of devotees in the ungoverned territory of cyberspace, ensuring its ability to continue to coordinate and inspire violence well into the future. IS has found its own salvation via the Internet, particularly since it has already passed the peak of its real-world power.

IS has also capitalized on the world’s evolving propensity to integrate online activities with real-world activities. Social media has had an incredible multiplying effect on radical messaging, and IS has had great success publishing online, which has resonated particularly well with disenfranchised Muslims and youths, inspiring some to act on inspiration and guidance received online. IS has exploited their search for meaningful identity by promising to restore their dignity so that they may find personal fulfillment and purpose.

The virtual world is in some ways more compelling than the real world, because storylines can be artfully crafted for maximum appeal, while omitting anything that may be perceived as negative. A promise is much easier to make online, as is the vision of fulfilling aspirations. The IS has created virtual messaging that is wildly at odds with the reality of life as an IS fighter on the ground. Cyberspace has enabled IS to turn tactical defeats on the battlefield into glorious martyrdom operations that highlight the bravery and commitment of its fighters. The loss of territory and the deaths of key leaders have served to feed propaganda efforts that are used to prove the resiliency of the caliphate.

Since all that is required to be a virtual planner is an Internet connection and good encryption, they can operate from anywhere, although being geographically dispersed carries heightened risk of detection in some nations. The virtual planner model has revolutionized jihadist external operations. IS has taken advantage of recent advances in online communications and encryption so that the group’s top operatives can directly guide lone attackers, playing a central role in the conceptualization, target selection, timing, and execution of future attacks. Virtual planners offer operatives the same services once provided by strictly physical networks. They seamlessly execute the group’s guiding strategy and maximize the impact and propaganda value of attacks waged in its name, while avoiding many of the risks typically associated with physically training operatives, such as being tailed or getting caught returning to a home country.

Integrated into the group’s geographical command structure, virtual planners function much like theater commanders but in the cyber realm. IS virtual planners are also assigned areas of responsibility according to their nationality and linguistic skills, and are tasked with actively recruiting and handling attackers from these areas.

The advancement of Internet-based communication and the explosion of social media have enabled the planner to reach a larger audience than ever before. By building an “intimate” relationship with a potential attacker, the virtual planner provides encouragement and validation, addressing the individual’s doubts and hesitations while generating confidence and a strong desire to carry out an attack. Virtual planners can replicate the same social pressures that exist with in-person cells. Individuals can simply wander into searchable online networks rather than identify with and be socialized by covert in-person networks. Unlike with physical networks, the virtual planner model does not risk the capture or punishment of the network’s key operatives.

Individuals inspired by IS can directly reach out to virtual planners for guidance and assistance in carrying out attacks. In addition to recruitment and operational guidance, virtual planners can bring disparate individuals and cells together to form larger attack networks. IS virtual planners allow the group to effectively seize ownership over what would previously have been considered lone-wolf attacks. Virtual planners transform these individuals into ambassadors for the IS global brand at relatively low cost. Virtual planners help maximize the psychological and reputational impact of violence committed in the IS name, further enticing other potential devotees to join its cause.

The success of the virtual-planner model underscores the ongoing process of organizational learning by jihadist groups. But the model also has disadvantages, such as the inability to provide in-person training or be optimally nimble during an attack to modify plans as circumstances change. Cells directed by virtual planners are also at greater risk of being detected by Signals Intelligence, despite advances in end-to-end encryption. Nonetheless, the virtual planner approach is a low-cost, high-reward strategy with enormous destructive potential, especially as IS and other terrorist groups continue to refine the model.

Adaptations to jihadists’ modes of operation have continually outpaced states’ ability to effectively counter them, and will likely continue to do so. Virtual jihad has not only gained prominence and credibility as an alternative to traditional conceptions of jihad but has also progressively outpaced physical jihad. Although physical jihad continues to appeal to a great many actors, virtual jihad has supplanted traditional notions of jihad for a new generation of adherents who are either unwilling or unable to engage in physical violence themselves. The rise of the virtual jihadist has assumed an important (perhaps irreplaceable) role in rejuvenating the concept of jihad and facilitating the dissemination of its “counterculture” narrative to new audiences for many years to come.

Daniel Wagner is author of the new book Virtual Terror, founder of Country Risk Solutions, and managing director of Risk Cooperative. Giuseppe Del Vecchio is a research analyst with CRS.

Originally published in Lobelog.

Is Christianity finished as a source of inspiration for progressive social change?

November 13, 2017

Whatever the emerging world becomes, it will need a new consciousness to guide it, especially if we want that world to be a good one.

Credit: Pixabay/Stocksnap. CC0 Creative Commons.

“Were Christians to be in a position to exert enduring cultural influence, the results would likely be disastrous or perhaps mostly so.” This is the judgment of University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, who coined the term “culture wars” in the 1980s, but it’s a sentiment that’s shared by many on the left.

Given their flawed thinking about public life, says Hunter—“based on both specious social science and problematic theology”—there seems to be little future for the Christian faith as a motivating force in progressive politics in the USA and beyond. But is this judgment correct?

To put this question in context, the American Century is over. The institutions that sustained the modern industrial world (including many of the mainstream Christian churches) are rusting out, their legitimacy crisis dragging on like a festering wound since the Sixties.

Whether we like it or not, we are emerging into a different world. It feels strange to us. We can’t see it clearly at this point, or even know what to call it. But whatever the emerging world will become it will need a new consciousness to guide it, especially if we want that world to be a good one.

Finding and articulating that new consciousness in order to re-imagine our societies is one of the central challenges of our times—supporting the growth of a wider, public sensibility and a progressive way of life in which peace, justice, love, hope and human flourishing can grow. To meet this challenge, I think we’ll need to draw on imaginative resources wherever we can find them.

So it’s at least worth taking another look at Christianity’s faith and practice, history and global diversity, theological ideas and spiritual traditions in order to see whether any of these things might offer us these kinds of resources. Can Christianity be critical enough of itself and of society to be a productive source of change? By this I don’t mean that Christians should simply criticize. We’ve had enough cranky, reactionary rhetoric from the uniquely American religious right in recent years to last a lifetime.

But keep in mind that as recently as the Sixties, Christian public identity in the US was claimed by the moderate-to-progressive Protestant ‘mainline’ denominations—the religious center-left. Progressive theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox, and activist clergy like Martin Luther King Jr and William Sloane Coffin, were all well-known, consequential public figures.

Their intellectual and moral tradition was rooted long ago in the eighteenth-century in what historian Amy Kittelstrom calls the “American Reformation” in her recent book, The Religion of Democracy. Kittelstrom describes this period as one of fascinating intellectual ferment during which New England pastors and theologians started to mix Reformation Protestantism with the values of the Enlightenment.

This experiment produced a new liberal faith; a new liberal intellectual culture fostering democratic values such as liberty of conscience, equality and social progress; and the first stirrings of protest against slavery and in favor of women’s rights. These church leaders, says Kittlestrom, “were the first people in the world to call themselves liberals.” Their ideas were crucial to the development of social consciousness in the USA well into the twentieth century.

Kittelstrom connects distinctly American traditions like Transcendentalism—white America’s first truly new spirituality; Pragmatism—its first unique philosophy; and Progressivism, fueled by the Social Gospel, to the spirit of the American Reformation and its fusion with democratic society. The American Reformation’s intellectual influence, writes historian David Hollinger, “was—and continues to be—a world-historical event, or at least one of the defining experiences of the North Atlantic West . . . from the eighteenth century to the present.”
This diverse, open and inclusive mainstream version of Christian faith has faded out in the last 50 years, to be replaced by an inexperienced reactionary rump with neither the historical memory nor the cultural skills to articulate a coherent public faith, or even to grasp how society is changing. The now long-forgotten ‘death’ of the Protestant mainline churches, as Catholic sociologist Joseph Bottum reminds us, is more consequential than we might think. Bottum laments losing a venerable, crucial, moderating voice in civil society as “the central historical fact of our time”—and a significant source of our present political and cultural confusion.

But can Christian faith today offer a critique of our current way of life, in the same way that, say, feminism or critical race theory can? Is it able to provide a progressive resource for creating a new public consciousness and form of life as societies sail into uncharted waters?
Nearly everyone outside the white, Euro-American dominant society feels written out of history, but where do we turn for an alternative point of view to correct this situation? We turn to post-colonial writers certainly, including Christian theologians from Latin America, Africa and Asia. We look to the East for new varieties of religious consciousness, and to pre-colonial indigenous cultures for alternative modes of life. And we look to pre-Western pagan values that underpin eco-spiritualities and new religious movements.

But all these resources only go so far in helping us with our own critical self-understanding. How can we in the West understand ourselves—on our own terms—from the perspective of our own history? One way to do this is by re-telling our own story from our own beginnings, without prejudice to the ancient and Medieval Christian roots that predated the modern period.

This is already being done by some of the most influential philosophers of our generation. For example, Charles Taylor, an early leader in multicultural theory, has helpfully traced the rise of modern consciousness from theological as well as philosophical roots in his magisterial Sources of the Self.

Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben (a radical leftist, and an atheist as far as I know) is another. He argues that to understand Western thinking we need to pick apart modern thought to uncover its theological underpinnings, and he publishes copious theological writing. “I think” he says, “that it is only through metaphysical, religious, and theological paradigms that one can truly approach the contemporary—and political—situation.”

Another voice in the mix is Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosophical rock star of the Marxist left who publishes frequently with theologians, even claiming that “to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.”

These are not endorsements of actually-existing Christianity by any means, but they represent a rich intellectual search for philosophical alternatives that are rooted in the ground of Christian theology and practice.

In addition, the Western perception of Christianity is more than a little myopic. It’s easy to forget that 33 per cent of the world’s people—2.4 billion individuals—identify as Christians. Jesus still has more followers than Facebook, and most of them live lives far different from those in the West. Pentecostal Christians alone now outnumber Buddhists worldwide. As Philip Jenkins pointed out some years ago in his seminal book The Next Christendom, to overlook the rise of Christianity in the global South—which now constitutes 60 per cent of world Christianity—is to miss the most profound social revolution of the twentieth century.

Why don’t we see this clearly? In part it’s because many of us live in an ‘already-been-Christian’ context. Christian tradition has been in our background for so long that it’s almost second nature to be critical of it, and many of us assume that it’s on its way out anyway.
But that ignores the fact that in ‘never-before-been-Christian’ societies, Christianity might provide progressive resources, social as well as spiritual. Some choose Christian faith as a means of assimilating liberal Western values, some to connect with a global religious consciousness. Many others see in the faith solutions to personal problems as well as intellectual tools to understand their own cultural traditions. We do the same thing in the West when we borrow non-Western spiritual practices like meditation or yoga.

For whatever reasons, individuals around the world who are concerned about their spirituality are asserting their free agency to choose these resources in order to address their own developing consciousness. They do this in large numbers even now in a post-colonial period of extensive criticism of the West and its religion.

What can be made of this enormous, global community of different and often clashing Christian identities? It’s certainly a testing ground for just about every social problem and potential solution. To take an example from Africa: the Anglican Communion ranges from homophobic bishops to progressive civil rights heroes like South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Ugandan Bishop David Zac Niringiye. How tensions between conservatives and progressives play out will have an enormous influence on African society—as well as demonstrate whether or not Christian faith can mobilize its resources to support human flourishing for everyone.

Whatever you decide to make of it, the Christian movement will be with us for a very long time, warts and all. In spite of its many problems—and they are manifold—it is important to take another look to see how rich it might be in terms of the resources we need to guide the world into a new way of being, and a new form of consciousness, where peace, justice, love, and hope may prevail.

Gregory Leffel, Ph.D., is a missiologist working on collective action, social movements and theo-politics, and is director of One Horizon Institute in Lexington, Kentucky. He is author of Faith Seeking Action: Mission, Social Movements, and the Church in Motion; and is past president of the American Society of Missiology.

Courtesy: Open Democracy

Demonetisation, A Year On: In Delhi Textile Hub, Businesses Unravel, Jobs Scarce

November 13, 2017

Noida, Uttar Pradesh: For the last eight months, Babita Singh has been searching every lane and bylane of the 2-sq-km spread of the Noida Hosiery Complex, here on the grimy edge of India’s capital, for a tailor’s job. She leaves home at 7 am and walks around till 11 am when, with the first shift in place, there is no longer any hope of being called into a factory.

Babita (second from right) has been looking for a job as a tailor for eight months now since the last unit she was employed at shut down post-demonetisation. Every morning, thousands of migrant workers land up at the Noida Hosiery Complex in search of casual jobs.

“Look, my chappals have worn thin,” said Singh, 30, pointing to her feet. Giving up is not an option. There is nothing left for her or her family of four in Bulandshahr, their hometown in western UP that they left seven years ago in search of a better life.

In March this year, the small garment unit where Singh worked for six years shut down in the wake of demonetisation, the scrapping of 86% of India’s currency, by value, on November 8, 2016. There were thousands like her, pleading for jobs at the gates of around 300 factories in the complex or sitting around in groups, hoping for a job tip from passers-by.

The ‘Wanted’ boards outside factories listing vacancies have been increasingly sparse since demonetisation

Aimed at making the economy less cash-reliant, demonetisation came as a body blow to the readymade garments sector, 80% of which made up of informal units that operated with cash and casual labour, as IndiaSpend reported in December 2016.

About 1.5 million jobs were lost during January-April 2017 in the immediate aftermath of demonetisation, according to this analysis by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a business information company. There have been 35% to 55% job losses in manufacturing and trade since November 2016, according to data collected by the All India Manufacturers’ Organisation (AIMO) as the Indian Express reported on November 8, 2017.

There are no clear figures on how many workers have lost their jobs due to the crisis in the unorganised apparel sector. But informal jobs, with little or no social security or benefits, constitute around 92% of all employment in India, as per government data. And the textile industry is the second largest non-farm employer in India.

Singh–and thousands of other semi-literate, mostly unskilled workers employed as tailors, packers, helpers and cutters–have been hit hardest by demonetisation. They usually earn around Rs 350 for a day’s work.

“I was offered a job with an eight-hour schedule this morning for Rs 6,000 a month,” said Yadesh Kumar, a migrant worker from Etawah in western UP. “I have a family of five, how will I cope?”

Many workers, like Yadesh Kumar (in yellow), had opened bank accounts to facilitate cheque payments but now find that there are no jobs to give these accounts any meaning.

Many workers opened bank accounts after demonetisation to allow employers to make cashless payments. But with no jobs for the few thousand workers–100,000, the local reckoned–wandering the hosiery complex, there is no money to put in these accounts.

Just when it seemed that cashless systems were falling into place by the middle of 2017, the complex Goods and Services Tax (GST) arrived as a second big blow. The tax system demands that companies in a supply chain are linked to one another, but it is too complex for this largely unorganised sector.

“Dhandha uth hi nahin paya (the business couldn’t get back on its feet),” said a manager at a export house in Noida. The distress visible on the streets of the factory complex was evident in the wake of demonetisation, when 40% of workers reportedly lost their jobs, but now hopes of recovery are receding.

“Business is down by 40% in the Noida-Greater Noida region. My calculation is that about 50-70 units have shut down here in recent months,” said Lalit Thukral, executive member of the Apparel Export Promotion Council and head of the Noida Apparel Export Cluster. “Around 8,000 small garment businesses of the total of 10,000 in the country are gasping for breath now.”

This is happening not just in Noida. In Tirupur, the hosiery hub in western Tamil Nadu, too businesses are down by over 40%, the Business Standard reported on November 3, 2017. Surat, the textile centre in Gujarat, is in turmoil. And in Gurugram, at the eastern end of the National Capital Region from Noida, former garment units on prime real estate are being let out.

Triple whammy: Competition from Asian rivals, demonetisation and GST

Last year when demonetisation hit the apparel sector, it was already stressed by competition from other Asian nations, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The contribution of apparels to exports of especially Bangladesh and Vietnam rose 6.1% and 9.6% respectively in 2015, the Economist Intelligence Unit, a think tank, reported on February 3, 2016. Bangladesh, now only second to China among apparel exporters, is giving Indian businesses a particularly rough time.

Nearly 80% of businesses in the apparel sector consist of small scale units that employ casual labour.

“We are simply not productive or organised enough to deal with this competition. And then we bring in something like demonetisation and Canadian model of GST into the industry,” said a mid-scale vendor for top western brands. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said he shut down one of his two factories with 100 machines and 150 workers last year and is now downsizing further.

In the long term, he pointed out, cashless payments and GST could bring good things to the industry–formalisation of a largely unorganised sector, more transparency, less inspector raj and the corruption that goes with it. “But in the immediate future it is going to wipe out an entire generation of businesses,” he said.

‘No jobs for men or women, illiterate or educated’

The apparel sector, as we said, provides work for men and women with low of no skills from primarily rural areas in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where their last occupation was either agricultural labour and small-scale farming.

Some said they had not held down jobs for a year now.

Workers like Enashi Devi are being turned away at gates by factory managers who cite GST as the reason for the downturn.

“Woh bole rahein hain DST (sic) hai, naukri nahin milegi (they say there are no jobs because of DST–meaning GST). Look at the mobs of people searching for jobs, it makes me dizzy. Whether you are a man or a woman, educated or illiterate like me, there is no hope for any of us. Bura haal hai (things are bad),” said Enashi Devi, who had been doing the rounds of Noida the first day of every week in the hope of landing a job as a helper.

Feeder businesses struggle to cope

Equally impacted are the jobbers who run the micro businesses feeding the industry. These are complex chains of small but critical enterprises such as dyeing, embroidery, printing and zip-making, all finding it hard to comply with the GST. With earnings between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000 a month, they are struggling to make sense of it all.

Nayagaon, a shanty that is part village and part city, off the Hosiery Complex, houses Durga Dyers. This two-man operation runs out of a room next to a buffalo stable. Its owner, Anil Bansal, is a “local” dyer–someone who can dye small bits of fabric or yarn, the kind of assignment no big business in dyeing will take on.

Small feeder businesses like this dyeing unit running out a one room tenement in Nayagaon, off Noida Hosiery Complex, are finding it hard to deal with the complexities of GST.

He earns around Rs 50,000 in the peak season and has just acquired a GST account. But he cannot handle its complexities since he is not computer literate, so he now hires the services of an accountant. “It is tough but we are managing somehow,” he said.

Not many can afford an accountant’s fees–anywhere between Rs 5,000-Rs 10,000 on average–on such profit margins as small as Rs 15,000-20,000. They opt instead for cash payments to work around GST. “Capital is getting blocked like this because it is hard to claim returns when the entire supply chain is not GST compliant,” said Thukral.

To add to the crisis, the sector is furious with the government decision to slash the duty drawback on exportable garments from 7.5% to 2% from October 1, 2017. This drawback is a relief given to businesses by way of refund of custom and excise duties on inputs used in manufacture of exported goods and it allowed the garment industry to stay competitive.

Thukral predicted the closure of another 20% units in Noida if the industry does not rally around to take orders for the next season.

“Iske baad toh bas ek hi kaam rah gaya hai–haath mein katori leke bheek mangna (there is only one alternative left after this, to beg),” said Singh, the job seeker we met at the start of this story, as she gave up her search for the day.

(Nair is a consulting editor with IndiaSpend.)

Understanding the Marxism in Gandhi’s Fight Against Imperialism

November 13, 2017

Uday Mehta in conversation with Akeel Bilgrami

Postcards for Gandhi, Courtesy SAHMAT

Uday Mehta (UM): I think of you, especially in the essays that constitute this book, as doing a rather particular kind of philosophy. It is a very distinguished tradition of practitioners, including the late Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre in the Anglo-American tradition; Michel Foucault, in the French tradition; Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the German tradition, and of course several others. One of the things that marks this way of doing philosophy (if that is the term we should use) is that the familiar, and typically sharp lines that separate philosophy from the humanities and the social sciences, are wilfully and self-consciously breached. I don’t mean that they are breached just for the heck of it, but that questions are posed in such a way that makes answering them reliant on such a breach. Bernard Williams, as you know, proudly affirmed philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Your own work is heavily informed by the dissenting tradition of 17th century thought, and by contemporary history and social science. And yet, in many ways, this way of doing philosophy is the minor key of contemporary Anglo-American and, increasingly, even continental philosophy. How would you describe what you do? Does it matter to you if it is thought of as “doing philosophy,” or does that description seem arcane to you, as it did for Richard Rorty?
Akeel Bilgrami (AB): I must confess that my work has not been motivated by any self-conscious effort towards trying to reorient the discipline of philosophy, nor even to follow a tradition set by the philosophers you mention, much as I admire them all. Rather, it’s just that certain issues grabbed my interest and I followed what I thought was most important and urgent in them. And when that led to having to read history and intellectual history, and to studying some political economy and politics and a variety of cultural phenomena, I just followed that lead as best I could — mostly for the sake of coming to some fundamental understanding of the issues. You are certainly right that most philosophers do not have a capacious understanding of their subject and many might even view this sort of outreach as contaminating their discipline. However, looking at things from the other side, we mustn’t forget that the social sciences themselves, particularly economics, have manifestly abandoned the historical, the broadly conceptual, and, above all, the value-oriented aspects of their pursuits. So it is possible that we are now at a disciplinary moment when philosophy is poised to pick up that slack and pay close attention to the very things that the social sciences have abdicated. This would, then, be an exciting time to be doing philosophy.

UM: One of the very striking claims you have been making for several years, and which you make in these essays—and which has had a huge influence on me—is that for a figure like Gandhi, politics in its many forms, including in our agency as citizens, just did not make up the terms through which he thought of bettering the world. This is a remarkable claim, especially since we so often think of Gandhi as having inaugurated mass politics in India. Encouraging a certain type of mass public action is one of his most enduring influences all over the world. The idea that there could be something profoundly wrong with the world; and that nevertheless, the redress to that condition was not to be secured through political means, goes against the dominant grain of modern thinking. Could you say more about this? Is this a way of animating the category of ethics as something sharply distinct from politics, rather than the way it is typically thought of as something tied to politics?
AB: When I made the claim you cite, I was trying to understand what I described as a ‘studied indifference’ in much of Gandhi’s theoretical writing (of course, we must not understand the term ‘theoretical’ here in any academic sense) to the kind of liberal, constitutional framework within which the very idea of politics was mostly understood in the tradition of his colonial masters. I was trying to put that indifference together, on the one hand with Gandhi’s incessant moralistic perspective on things and his constantly avowed religiosity and, on the other hand, with his resistance to political abstractions that took one away from the experiences of ordinary people in their quotidian social habitat. In order to integrate these different aspects of his thought, it seemed to me right to attribute to him a skepticism about the idea that what is bad in human beings (a constant theme for Gandhi, as for all religious moralists) can be set right simply by making them over into some abstract form of being called ‘citizens’ in a form of polity that came to be associated with the nation-building exercises in Europe since the Westphalian peace. That is what I meant when I suggested Gandhi was an anti-political thinker. This is quite compatible with viewing Gandhi as having inaugurated a form of mass politics in India that was highly original and imaginative. You ask something slightly different: whether he believed that a wrong in the world (which is somewhat different from what is bad in us) could be redressed by political means. Well, for him, I think a lot depends on what that wrong is or, better, what level of description you give it. It also depends on which phase and context of his thinking we are talking about. So, for instance, if you described the wrong in terms of what he opposed in very specifically oppressive actions and policies of the British government in colonial India or colonial South Africa, he certainly repeatedly appealed to mass politics of one kind or the other to resist such wrongs. Clearly, in this sense, he believed in a politics of resistance. So also, as others have pointed out, when it came to the resolution that was moved at the Karachi Congress in 1931, he found himself in a context where he openly committed himself to a radical (rather than an orthodox liberal) version of political principles and rights. Even on secularist politics he changed his mind, as Bipin Chandra has documented, from the time of his early writings to what he was saying by the 1940s (I discuss some of this in my chapter on secularism in the book). But it is also well known that he believed that there was a great deal in the modern civilisation of the West that was tied to capitalism, and more generally to attitudes of gain and profit and consumerism that you could not constrain merely by liberal or even socio-democratic conceptions of politics, i.e., by a familiar set of political, legal, and economic constraints. Rather, one should shun the entire mentality that underlies it. He certainly did not have a socialist alternative that was supposed to follow upon a transcending of capitalism in the way that Marx did; instead he wanted to pre-empt capitalism in India (not unlike Marx in his very late phase when he was focused on the peasant communes in Russia) and to do so by repudiating the mentality, the cognitive outlook, that lay behind it. This required a deeper reflection about what the corrosive moral and political effects of that mentality are. Hind Swaraj, among other things, is a harshly worded reflection about just that.

UM: Staying with Gandhi, one of the ways in which Gandhi strikes me as almost unique among colonial critics of imperialism is that his challenge to the empire seems singularly unmarked by a sense of inferiority, or a lack of self-confidence, itself so often a product of the empire. This does not seem to me to be true of Nehru, Ambedkar Jinnah, or for that matter Kenyatta or Nkrumah. They all appear not just to have been influenced (as Gandhi clearly was too) by the ideas and practices of the empire, but also in some way distorted, even disfigured, by them. I am not sure you agree with this characterization of Gandhi (and the others), but it makes me wonder if the reason for it might have something to do with what you argue, namely that Gandhi’s opposition to the empire is ultimately a part, and only a part, of a much larger critique of modernity. Gandhi (like Marx), as you point out, is ultimately really concerned with a kind of alienation from nature and from ourselves, which for both of them are the defining traits of modernity. In that sense his critique of empire, even though very sharp, is almost a secondary purpose, and because of that he can inoculate himself from the distortions, such as those that stem from wanting to wrest power from the imperialists.
AB: The way I’ve put the point you are making is to say that Gandhi had a very specific sort of confidence that later, even very powerful, anti-imperialist voices such as Fanon or, say, Edward Said, did not possess. Your term ‘inferiority’ is perhaps a slightly misleading description to put on what the source of the lack of this confidence in the others really is. So take someone like Said, who is so widely read today. He wrote eloquently about the distortions that ‘the West’ has shown in its understanding and conceptualizations of the cultures of the global South (or what was called the ‘Orient’). But he never really asked what was wrong in the West’s own civilizational tendencies, in its own conceptualizations, in short what was wrong in the West’s understanding of itself. It requires a specific kind of confidence to ask that, a confidence that comes not from overcoming a sense of inferiority so much as from possessing a set of intellectual and conceptual reserves. It really comes, in my view, from being a philosopher of a sort that I believe Gandhi was and Said and Fanon were not. It comes from having deeply reflected on moral concepts and the moral life and its relation to politics and economics and culture. That is really my primary reason for being so interested in Gandhi and, as you say, for my placing him side by side with Marx and looking at his ideas on nature, alienation, and so on. Your question, as you have formulated it, makes it seem that if one sees this quality in Gandhi’s thought, one must see his anti-imperialism as secondary and somewhat unimportant. I wonder if that can be right. It would be a bit like saying Marx’s anti-capitalism is made less important because he believes that transcending capitalism is in the service of freeing human beings into a new and liberated subjectivity that is unalienated. I would prefer to say that Gandhi’s anti-imperialism was supremely important to him but it nestled within his eventual ideal of a self-governing moral human subject, just as Marx’s critique of capitalism did.

UM: You were a close friend and colleague of the late Edward Said. By pure happenstance during the last conversation I had with Edward (on the phone) he mentioned you with great affection and admiration and spoke of the course you were teaching together. You write very movingly in your essay about him. It is an essay about Edward but also about friendship. Your relationship was clearly a friendship of many parts — shared intellectual passions, political commitments, a deep love of music, and many other things. Reading your essay on Said made me think about friendships and the academy. How have these and other (I am thinking of Noam Chomsky and Prabhat Patnaik, to whom you dedicate this volume) specifically “academic” friendships moulded your life in the American academy and are there such friendships that link you with India? Has friendship been important to the ideas that you cherish?
AB: It’s hard to talk about specific friendships in a public forum, Uday. But, I do see the point of your question. Speaking generally (individuals apart), in the academy and in intellectual life more broadly, when you learn about ideas from others they become friends in a way that is closely tied to personal respect as much as intimate or amiable relations. Anyone with any experience in the academy will notice that intellectual ability is far more common than intellectual character, and may even perhaps be less important than it. I reckon all of us over a lifetime of thinking and writing come across and, if we are lucky, come to know a handful of people (if that) of whom one thinks: if he or she thinks I am alright, I must at least approximately be alright. They may be one’s friends, of course, but they are not merely so.

UM: Finally, since this book is being published in America and India, what are your thoughts about these two rather difference contexts in which you are intervening? This is clearly not a book of policy recommendations, but you are avidly engaged with public and intellectual life in India. What are some of the points where you see your work as confronting the new political dispensation in India following the recent elections?
AB: I do spend about six weeks in India each year and yes, I do try and keep up with Indian politics. Occasionally, if asked, I write about India in more public spaces than books and learned journals. About the outcome of the recent elections, I can’t, in a short space, do much more than say that there is nothing to do but to work as hard as we can in the next few years to try and make sure that there is a very different outcome next time. It has never before been as frustrating for me to be away from India since it is more urgent now than ever before (except perhaps the brief period of ‘the Emergency’) to put one’s effort in opposing the government and its policies.

UM: Could you name five or six books outside of your discipline that have influenced your work in recent years?
AB: In no particular order and without too much reflection let me put down the following:
1) Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
2) Various writings of Marx that I have studied over the last few decades including—what is often excluded by others influenced by Marx—The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
3) Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
4) M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
5) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
6) Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy; Professor, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

Mahapadav Ends With Call to Prepare For Country-Wide Indefinite Strike

November 13, 2017

Trade Unions declare action plan which includes massive mobilization from district level onwards to make the rigid and unreasonable Modi Govt see sense.

The third and final day of the historic Workers Mahapadav saw more than a lakh women scheme workers on Parliament Street, Delhi demanding that they be recognized as regular workers. These are the poorest of women who are engaged as ASHAs (health workers) and anganwadi workers/helpers and mid day meal cooks.

During 9-11 November, thousands of workers participated in the massive show of strength by workers from all over the country, fighting for a 12-point charter of demands including better wages, social security etc. and also urging withdrawal of anti-people policies like labour law changes, privatization of public sector, etc.

At the end, a resolution calling for workers to prepare for a country wide indefinite strike was passed amidst thunderous applause. A detailed action plan was also announced.

Speaking to Newsclick, Tetri Devi, a mid-day meal worker who came along with other workers from Munger District in Bihar said, they had been working as cooks in schools since 2005. Initially they were paid 25 paise per student and they made anything from Rs 45-100 per month. Even now they are being paid RS 1200 per month. They have come to Delhi along with others demanding “1 Hazar mein dum nahi 18000 se kum hai” which translates to ‘there is no use of the Rs 1000 that they are paid now; they will accept nothing less than Rs 18000 as minimum wages’. Similar sentiments were voiced by women who are engaged as ASHAs and Anganwadi workers.

These lakhs of workers were organized under various Central Trade Unions that had called for the mahapadav, barring the RSS backed BMS.

Various leaders from trade unions addressed the huge gathering amidst resounding slogans and calls for further action. Those who addressed the workers in the first part of the meeting included AR Sindhu from CITU, INTUC President Dr Sanjeeva Reddy, Harbhajan Singh Sidhu of HMS and Gurudas Gupta of AITUC.

Sindhu of CITU, one of the most appreciated speakers, directly spoke of the issues of the women scheme workers gathered there. She started her speech by paying tributes to the 11 year old Santoshi who died of hunger as her parents were denied the PDS because their AADHAR was not linked to PDS system. She said that RS 1,40,000 crores Plan budget for ICDS, the scheme under which anganwadi workers are employed, was cut in the very first year of the BJP coming to power. She gave details of how in various parts of the country anganwadi workers/helpers and ASHAs were struggling to fulfill their important responsibilities despite being paid low wages and not being recognized as workers by the government.

THe second and the third session of the meeting was addressed by the leaders – Hemalatha, Tapan Sen – CITU; Usha Sahni, Amarjeet Kaur – AICTU; Champa Varma, Hanumanth Thate – HMS; and from INTUC, AIUTUC, TUCC, SEWA AICCTU, LPF and UTUC that coordinated the three day meetings. The large gathering adopted an action plan for the coming months which included district level satyagrahas in the last week of January 2018, industry or sectoral strikes whenever the govt. announces privatization, protest actions on the day the Union Budget is announced, etc. The resolution adopted at the Mahapadav called for workers to prepare for a nationwide indefinite strike in the coming months as the govt. doesn’t seem to be willing to accept their just demands.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

Growing resentment among people of Gujarat points to failure of much hyped slogan ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’

November 13, 2017

Gujarat till now had been projected as a unique model of development, which needs to be replicated in all other places. The Prime Minister in his speeches during election campaigns in 2014 Lok Sabha elections and Assembly elections in other states had sought to state that he would turn the country and other states into Gujarat. Gujarat was emulated as a model which was to be replicated in all other states. In recent times, however the vocabulary has changed to state how the other parties in power at the center had been biased against Gujarat and prevented and blocked Development in the state.

The resistance of the people that is taking place during Assembly election campaign of party in power does point to something that has changed in the political landscape in Gujarat. The resentment of the people is becoming more open. ‘Vikas’ is being ridiculed through pointing instances such as potholes on roads and essential commodities becoming more expensive. ‘Vikas Gando Thayo Che’ (Vikas has gone crazy) has spread in cyberspace. People have started questioning the popularized term ‘Vikas’ or ‘Gujarat model’. A consensus that has been reached by all sections of people is that ‘Gujarat Model’ is something that has failed to benefit them despite all the hype that was created around it.

Recently ASHA workers gathered in a meeting in Kapurai village of Vadodara district and pledged to campaign against “the anti-women, oppressive, Hitler-shahi and tyrannical State Government”. In a meeting organized by Jignesh Mevani, the villagers of Gujarat pledged not to vote for BJP. In a meeting on 2nd October, Patidar youth shouted “General Dyer Go back” during the inauguration of the Gaurav Yatra. Residents of two villagers in Valsad district put up banners saying that they would boycott elections as a company is contaminating waterbed in the area.

The boasting which was taking place in the name of ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas’ has only turned out to be ‘Sabka Doka, Sab Barbaadh’. It is not surprising that people across all castes Jignesh Mevani representing Dalits, Alpesh Thakor representing other backward castes and Hardik Patel representing Patidars have come together to overthrow the present regime. This only shows that the poor from all the communities have been left out in this development model. While the three may represent their own social constituencies, but the broader issues of employment and development benefits not reaching them have brought them together. They only point to the vanishing job market. Coming together of Jignesh, Thakor and Hardik, also represent the unrest and resentment of youth in their own social constituencies. While the voices of minorities and adivasis may not be heard in this resistance, it also points to the level of political marginalization they have been through.

Growth of disillusionment could also be seen from among the traders, who formed a major support base of the party in power. Haphazard implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) had an effect on their business. The double stroke of demonetization and GST hit the textile industry in Gujarat. Production in Surat dropped by half and sales during Diwali drastically declined leading to losses. 90,000 looms were shut and 50,000 laborers lost their jobs.

According to the former chief minister of Gujarat Suresh Mehta, “Gujarat Model is nothing but a jugglery of words”. In this model, Gujarat’s debt has increased drastically to Rs. 1, 98,000 crore. While agricultural subsidies to farmers have declined by 80% i.e., from Rs. 408 crores to about Rs. 80 crores, on the other hand subsidies to corporates namely Adanis and Ambanis in petrochemical and energy sector has increased to Rs. 4,471 crores. Food subsidies have reduced by 60% from Rs. 130 crores to Rs. 52 crores. Industrial growth was hardly able to generate jobs. TATA Nano project did not create enough jobs.

Gujarat model points to the missing human dimension and inclusiveness. It is based on higher emphasis on accelerated infrastructure development of roads, highways, dams and a spike in foreign investment. Focus on human development continued to be the least. While the corporate and the rich classes benefitted, the poor were hardly beneficiaries of this model. While Gujarat continues to be among the high performing states in terms of growth rates, it stands low in relation to inclusiveness and human development. Among states ranked from lowest to highest rates of poverty, Gujarat ranks 10th among 20 major states. In terms of mortality it is ranked 11th. In life expectancy, it is ranked 10th. In overall Human Development Index (HDI), Gujarat is ranked 10th.

The growing resentment among people of Gujarat only point to the failure of the much hyped ‘Gujarat model’ or the slogan ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’. It is true that ‘Vikas’ has gone crazy, but it is for the Corporates at the cost of the large majority of the Gujaratis. It is a “Development model for the 1% at the cost of the 99%’. Has Gujarat’s moment of a different version of Occupy movement arrived?

—

*Researcher, works in an NGO. Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/11/11/gujarat-a-hyped-and-failed-development-model/

Courtesy: Counterview

Mauled Body of Umar Thrown on Rail Tracks, PUCL Rajasthan Accuses Police of Complicity

November 13, 2017

The PUCL Rajasthan has demanded the arrests of policemen who allegedly also fired at the now dead Umar Muhammad on November 10, 2017 at Ghatmatika Pahadi, near Pahadi Kaman, Bharatpur, Rajasthan. No FIR was lodged till yesterday, two days after the ghastly murder first initiated by so called ‘Gau Rakshaks’. Sabrangindia had reported from the TV 18 story on the incident yesterday.

Now police sorurces clai, that a ‘second FIR’ was lodged Sunday under IPC section 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) following a complaint by Umar’s family members. The first FIR lodged (despite the fact that a human being had been brutally killed) was under The Rajasthan Bovine Animal (Prohibition of Slaughter and Regulation of Temporary Migration or Export) Act, against the alleged cow smugglers on Friday.

The PUCL, a reputed human rights body has accused policemen from the Ramgarh thana (Alwar) also of the murder and also trying to destroy evidence of the killing by throwing Umar’s body to the railway track. PUCL issued the release after speaking to one Sahir who is an eye witness and who escaped, somehow the bloody attack. The Indian Express has also quoted Alwar’s Meo Panchayat chief, Sher Mohammad alleging that the cow vigilantes killed Umar and then threw his body at the railway tracks to make it look like an accident.

Photographs of the dead Ummar shared by his family and one survivor are testimony to the ghastly levels that the perpetrators have gone to commit the act.

The PUCL press note says that, ” The murder of Umar is the complete failure of the Vasundhara Raje Government in protecting Muslims in particular Dairy farmers from the Killer Gaurakshaks. However in this case it was the bullet of the Ramgarh police that killed him and then the police tried to destroy evidence by throwing his body on the railway track. The present state of his body shows the brutality that the police and the so called Gaurakshaks can indulge in.”

The rights body has demanded of the immediate lodging of an FIR against the so called Gaurakshaks and the Ramgarh police. “Nothing short of arrest of the above including one Rakesh whose name was given by Sahir who escaped the bloody madness of the police and the Gaurakshaks” says the press note.

Meo Panchayat leaders in protest on Sunday: Photo Kavita Srivastava

Compensation including cash of 25 lakhs and land to the family has also been demanded as also protection for th lone survivor of the incident and a compensation of Rs 10 lakhs. There are also specific demands fromt he government regarding the local police: that the Ramgarh SHO be dismissed from duty and the SP Alwar be suspended for failing to prevent this incident and worse, for not locating the body for two days. Finally says the human rights body, it is time that the state’s home minister announce a comprehensive plan for the protection of meos in Alwar and Bharatpur districts.

Rajasthan has seen a spurt of such killings of cattle farmers all in the name of cow protection.
In an attempt to the turn the story around and making it an issue of cow smuggling, the SP Alwar told the Indian Express, “Not much is clear at this moment. A vehicle belonging to cattle smugglers was found abandoned at about 6 am on Friday under the jurisdiction of Alwar’s Govindgarh police station,” Alwar SP Rahul Prakash said.

Depth of Hatred Evident in the Crimes (Photos Shared by Kavita Srivastava)

Another Killing by Gau Rakshaks, Victim Was Shot Dead: Alwar, Rajasthan

November 12, 2017

Home page Image: representational image of lynching

A Muslim man who was transporting cows near the Rajasthan-Haryana border was shot dead allegedly by vigilantes while two of his aides were injured after being thrashed reported TV 18 today. No FIR had been registered yet by the Rajasthan police, reports indicate. Another Killing by Gau Rakshaks, This Time Victim Was Shot Dead not beaten!:

The incident took place in Fahari village near Govindh Gadh in Alwar district of Rajasthan on November 10. Sources said Ummar Muhammad and the two others were transporting cows from Mewat in Haryana to Bharatpur in Rajasthan but they were waylaid by the mob and assaulted.

While police remained tight-lipped about the incident, official sources confirmed that Ummar died of a bullet wound. His body has been kept in a mortuary at Shehr hospital. He is survived by his wife and eight children. The two others got minor injuries and ran away from the scene. One of them, Tahir Muhammad, got himself admitted at a hospital near the state border and the other person was there with him.

Yet again, the Muslim Mewat community is the target and the incident has sent ripples in the Mewat community, with residents launching a protest. Relatives of the victim alleged that policemen too were present when the crime took place but did nothing to stop the attackers. They have demanded immediate arrest of the accused, but two days after the murder, no FIR in the case has been registered so far.

Sher Muhammad, chairman of the Meo Panchayat of Alwar, told the media that villagers claimed the people who fired the bullets were not in any uniform. “The attack took place at around five in the morning. We are calling it a case of lynching too as they have not only been shot but also beaten up. We will press charges accordingly,” said Muhammad. The Panchayat leader alleged that the killers were not done with Ummar even after shooting him dead and tried to show the death an accident by getting a moving train to run over his body. The police has been alleged to be complicit in the crime, yet again.

He said, however, that they could not dump the entire body and only his head and left limb got severed, but the body part where the bullet hit remained intact. “When the police located his body, they brought it to the Shehr Hospital mortuary. There was no investigation carried out. The family members recognised Ummar with the help of his slippers,” Sher Muhammad said.

He said the family will not take the body from the mortuary and bury it until a case is registered to make sure that Ummar’s case does not meet the same fate as that of Pehlu Khan, the dairy farmer who died after being assaulted by cow vigilantes in April this year. All six accused arrested for Pehlu’s murder were given a clean-chit by the special investigation team probing the case.

Ummar’s brother Khurshid said he came to know of the attack from villagers and does not know anything about the attackers. “We we only came to know of it today. Since then we are at the hospital. We do not know who killed him and how he was killed. There needs to be a thorough investigation,” said Khurshid.

According to an India Today report, the Meo community of the region has alleged that right-wing organisations in collusion with the police thrashed the youths. The report added that the community members have demanded a high-level probe into the incident. “The attack took place at around five in the morning. We are calling it a case of lynching too as they have not only been shot but also beaten up. We will press charges accordingly,” Sher Muhammad, chairman of the Meo Panchayat of Alwar, told News18

The latest incident come months after Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer, was brutally beaten to death by cow vigilantes in Alwar district. Khan and at least four others were injured when a mob had attacked nearly 15 persons hailing from Haryana, while transporting cows in vehicles on the Behror highway in Alwar district on 5 April.

In September, the Rajasthan police had given a clean chit to the six people named in the Pehlu Khan lynching incident. Following this, Khan’s family had sought a court-monitored probe into the killing and said the case must be shifted out of the state.

Pehlu Khan’s son Irshad, who was present when the attack took place, told the media that those given a clean chit by Rajasthan Police were among the attackers. In October, the Alwar police was accused of playing into the hands of cow vigilantes when a Muslim family alleged that local police snatched their cows and handed over to a gaushala, Deccan Chronicle had reported.

Subba Khan, 45, had, the report added, alleged that local police forcibly took away his 51 cows at the behest of Hindu activists on 3 October.
“They said we were cow smugglers. When I tried to intervene, they pushed me. The police were present, but they were mere spectators. Later, with the help of the police, the cows were taken to Shri Krishna Gaushala in Bambora Ghati by the cow vigilantes,” Khan’s wife Baseri told Hindustan Times.

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Understanding the Marxism in Gandhi’s Fight Against Imperialism

Uday Mehta in conversation with Akeel Bilgrami

Mahapadav Ends With Call to Prepare For Country-Wide Indefinite Strike

Trade Unions declare action plan which includes massive mobilization from district level onwards to make the rigid and unreasonable Modi Govt see sense.

Growing resentment among people of Gujarat points to failure of much hyped slogan ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’

Mauled Body of Umar Thrown on Rail Tracks, PUCL Rajasthan Accuses Police of Complicity

Another Killing by Gau Rakshaks, Victim Was Shot Dead: Alwar, Rajasthan

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