‘India is, to me, a beacon of light on the sub-continent’

February 29, 2000

Text of Taslima Nasreen’s speech at the Mumbai Marathi Granth Sangrahalaya in Mumbai on March 6, 2000Iwould like to express my gratitude to the organisers for having invited me here.

I am a newcomer to Mumbai. As a transit passenger I came here for the first time last November. Though it was past midnight, I was surprised to find friends of mine waiting for me. This time also I am in transit. A few hours later I will be flying to Paris. I know Mumbai is a great Indian city. I know Calcutta closely through long encounters. This is my first time here. I am grateful for the kind affection you have shown to me. I thank you again for this warm reception.

I am a writer. Whatever I have to say I say with my pen, either in prose or in poetry. I write, I am not like an another agitator. The agitation you see around me is not for my political or social activities. It is simply because of my writings. I have not written much. As a young doctor in a Dacca hospital I started writing columns for newspapers in my country. My primary concern was the plight of ordinary people, especially women. By our standards, those writings were popular and received wide publicity.

My poems also reflected the concerns of everyday life of our people. Particularly women-folk who suffer a lot because of patriarchy and religious zealots. So my writings received attention, and became controversial.

Some extremist groups even put a price on my head. Unfortunately my government, instead of taking action against the fundamentalists, issued an arrest warrant against me. The rest is perhaps known to you. I had to spend sixty long days in hiding and at last had to leave the country. For six years I have been living in exile.

You can easily imagine a writer uprooted from his or her own soil and thrown into an alien environment and completely dependant on that environment — how he or she feels. Fortunately, for me, I found a lot of friends in distant lands and they have given me all sorts of support. Still I feel lonely and long to come back to my own country.

As this is not possible under the present circumstances, I try to come to India. Especially to Calcutta, where I find compatriots and a consensual atmosphere. Unfortunately, coming to India was also not easy. It was six years before I could come to India. I was granted a visa only recently. Because of this generous offer, I could visit Calcutta twice in quick succession. And as a bonus I could stop over for a while in this great city of Mumbai.

India is a great country. It has a long history of civilisation and culture. I adore India. I know there are aberrations in history but India is a land of tolerance. People of different faiths have found sanctuary in India whenever they were in trouble — like Parsees, Jews and Christians. All this has contributed to making India a colourful mosaic where one finds different religious, ethnic and colourful shades. India is not only the world’s largest democracy. It is in a unique position because of its democratic way of life and the liberalism that it practices.

Living in a distant land, when I hear of violations to this ethos, I feel great pain, particularly because on the sub-continent India is, to me, a beacon of light. So, when in 1992, some extremists thought it proper to demolish a 400 year-old mosque I was shocked.
At that time, in Bangladesh, as a reaction to the Babri Mosque affair, many ugly things happened. I could not endure this shock. I wrote a whole book, Lajja. Since then it has been published in twelve different languages in Europe as a testimony of a writer from the majority community defending the minorities.

To me majority and minority by religious definition are meaningless. I consider the citizen of any particular country as a citizen. They are human beings first and human beings last. So, whenever I find some groups who impose their religious or cultural ideas on another, I can’t but protest.

We are seeing this phenomenon everywhere. Where a particular group wants it’s own religious or cultural ideas to dominate others. To put forward their ideas, they choose the path of violence. I think this is not the proper way to propagate one’s ideas, this is not the way to establish one’s ideas over others.

People who are not rational in their attitudes, people who do not believe in the language of logic and who want to subjugate others forcefully are to be resisted. They must be resisted. This, again, not by force but by arguments.
Recently, when I was in Calcutta I read about Deepa Mehta’s trouble with her proposed film Water in Varanasi. For me another shock awaited. Some others were objecting to the showing of Hey Ram. Fortunately better sense prevailed and the protests to Hey Ram were withdrawn. But for Deepa the troubles remain.

Some friends in Calcutta asked me to comment. I supported Deepa’s stand not because I wanted to be involved in a local issue and simply join demonstrations. I supported Deepa Mehta simply because I am against all kinds of fundamentalism. I believe in freedom of expression and the individual’s right to express his or her thoughts in writing, film, theatre, singing, acting or in whatever medium he or she prefers.

It is not my particular concern what the fundamentalists are, what their motive is. Wherever and whenever an artist’s freedom is threatened, I come out in protest. Isn’t it very natural, being the sufferer myself at the hands of fundamentalists who threw me out of my homeland, that I can’t but stand besides others who are oppressed like me?

I don’t know whether I have offended some people. I believe all writings are not to please. Some are to make people even angry. I don’t want to dwell on this subject anymore. My whole life is an open book. I suffered a lot at the hands of fundamentalists. But I know in India people who believe in true democracy and who are liberal in their attitude will triumph in the end. A handful of crazy people will one day find reason and hear, patiently, not only their own voices, but other voices too.

I can assure you, come what may, I will never be silenced. I will fight all the evil forces all the time. The love, support and solidarity you have shown me here has made me all the more committed and all the more determined in my cause.

The BJP president is talking like Pakistan’s Parvez Musharraf’

February 29, 2000

Bangaru Laxman’s statements remind me of the statements of Parvez Musharraf. Musharraf says he wants a peaceful dialogue with India. At the same time, he is sending terrorists to Kashmir. BJP says they want to have interaction, dialogue etc. with Muslims. On the other hand, they are destroying, looting their property, burning their houses, in Gujarat.

Pakistan says we have nothing to do with extremism in Kashmir. Similiarly, the BJP says we have nothing to do with what VHP, Bajrang Dal says. Should we listen to Laxman or to Kalraj Mishra, Acharya Giriraj Kishore and Pravin Togadia? Ultimately the BJP has to make a choice. So long as they keep their relations with these fellows, how can they expect Muslims to take them seriously.

I think we should respond to Bangaru Laxman’s statements the same way that the Indian government responds to Musharraf’s statements. We have justifiably have told Musharraf that no dialogue is possible until his deeds match his words. As long as Pakistan continues supporting terrorism, there is no point in talking to Pakistan because it shows they are not really interested in dialogue. We should treat Laxman’s statements similarly. We should treat all fundamentalists on par; we should not communicate either with Musharraf or with the BJP.

Archived from Communalism Combat, September 2000 Year 8 No. 62, Cover Story 5

TALIBAN STILL STINKS

January 31, 2000

The Taliban remains an extremist regime which undermines global security even as it continues its reign of terror against women residing inside Afghanistan’s borders

After seizing control of Afghanistan in 1996, the Taliban rapidly became the
world’s most despised regime. In August of 1999, a United Nations investigation revealed that the Taliban’s war against women was “widespread, systematic and officially sanctioned”. Three months later, Afghanistan’s gross human rights violations, thriving opium industry, and a welcome mat for terrorists, led the United Nations to impose trade sanctions.

Despite this history, Asian, European and Australian media have recently conjured a new picture of Afghanistan’s Islamic fundamentalists. Most reports stem from the hijacking of the Delhi–bound Indian Airlines flight IC 814 on December 24, 1999. But others, notably those in the London Guardian (November 26 and December 21, 1999) and the Sydney Morning Herald (December 24, 1999), are illogical attempts to deny the obscenities inflicted on Afghan women as a result of the Taliban’s perverted interpretation of the Quran.

World media, while sceptical of Pakistan’s role in the December 24 hijacking, reiterated the Indian government’s praise for the Taliban’s “constructive Cupertino” while 154 passengers were held hostage in the Afghanistan city of Kandahar, and coincidentally, the headquarters of the Taliban militia. In the end, following a week of bargaining orchestrated by the Taliban, three militants held in Indian prisons were released in exchange for the freedom of flight IC 814’s passengers. Most analysts viewed the swap as a victory for terrorism, but many also saw the perceived diplomacy in Kandahar as a step towards improved relations between the Taliban and the outside world.

Presently, the Taliban’s authority in Afghanistan is recognised by only three countries — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; the rest of the world regards the Rabbani government, which controls only 10 per cent of Afghanistan, as the territory’s lawful authority. According to a spokesperson for the Taliban, India should consider renewing diplomatic ties with Kabul after the courtesies extended by the militia to resolve the hijacking crisis, but the international community is likely to be unforgiving of the Taliban’s complicity with the five hijackers of Flight 814, and the three militants released from Indian prisons in exchange for the hostages.

Within days, the Taliban’s role in granting all eight the luxury of ten hours in which to make their escape to Quetta in neighbouring, terrorist-friendly Pakistan sparked an outrage amongst British victims of one of the released militants. Also, a report from Afghanistan indicates that another of the released militants, Maulana Masood Azhar, after being welcomed home to Pakistan as a hero, has retreated back to Afghanistan to avoid US bounty hunters.

Just as claims that the Taliban has been unjustly cast as villains, suggestions that Afghan women have been miscast as helpless heroines holds no sway against the vast body of evidence confirming the Taliban’s obscene treatment of women. After interviewing Afghan women, tens of thousands of whom live in appalling conditions as refugees in Pakistan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, concluded that discrimination against women was an official Taliban policy.

According to Coomara-swamy, armed militia patrol the streets of Kabul looking for women violating the Taliban edicts, which forbid women to venture outside their homes, even for employment, unless accompanied by a male relative. In the same vein, the Taliban bars girls from attending school after the age of twelve. Women violators are publicly beaten, sometimes with radio antennae torn from nearby vehicles, but usually with an instrument resembling a leather cricket bat.

According to the London Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald, women living in Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul have learnt to navigate the sporadically enforced, rigid moral codes laid down by the Taliban’s ministry of vice and virtue. Supposedly, Taliban concessions permit women to collect salaries and qualify for promotion, but only if they were not previously employed as judges or other occupations which the Taliban’s version of Islam deems unsuitable for women. Critics of the Taliban see no virtue in these minimal concessions, and maintain condemnation on the Taliban’s dictates which deny thousands upon thousands of Afghan women access to dignified employment from which to feed and clothe their families.

In a climate where Afghan women have an unimaginable level of widowhood — 35,000 in Kabul alone, as a result of their country’s two decades of civil war — the Taliban’s taboos on their extra–residential employment has left many almost without options. As never before, women dominate the ranks of Kabul’s beggars. Driven to prostitution, some retain the guise of beggars, covering themselves from head to toe with tattered clothes to conceal clothing designed to attract the men frequenting Kabul’s thriving brothel industry. Unlike the beggar prostitutes at risk of the Taliban’s virtuous wrath, brothels are often protected by the Taliban, effectively endorsing the further abuse of Afghanistan’s poverty–stricken women by the regime’s self–righteous militiamen.

Prisons are home to thousands of Afghans, many women, and the vast majority innocent of any crime other than being ethnic Tajiks who are automatically deemed to have violated the Taliban’s religious code. Pol-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul boasts twenty blocks, two assigned to female prisoners, each block divided into 116 rooms, and each room crammed with 40 to 50 prisoners who are regularly raped, beaten, flogged, tortured, and humiliated by the Taliban’s armed guards seeking entertainment.

Each prisoner receives a subsistence daily ration of 180 grams of dried out bread, supplemented with 80 grams of boiled rice from Red Cross aid. Three prisoners die each week from malnutrition. Others often held for between one and three years without legal representation, and facing conviction for some “invented” political crime which brings an undefined prison term, suffer physical and mental illness, and strive to retain their sanity. The solitary Red Cross aid which reaches prisoners is the 80 gram daily ration of boiled rice. Other aid items such as medicines, beans, oil, sugar, tea, meat, vegetables, fruits, soap, carpet, jackets, glasses, and gasoline are divided amongst corrupt Red Cross employees and the prison administration, who falsify prisoner’s names to rationalise their books.

Living in exile, and contending with poverty in nearby Pakistan, the Revolutionary Association of Women from Afghanistan (RAWA), has refused to be intimidated by the Taliban’s vicious inhumanity towards women chiefly but also against women’s children, their partners and their parents. Regularly protesting against the regime’s ignorant misinterpretation of the Quran, RAWA’s courage has brought international attention to the Taliban’s war against women which does not stop at denying them dignified employment.
Featuring amongst the Taliban’s litany of obscenities imposed on women is the burqa, a garment which, except for a filigree strip across the eyes permitting vision, is all–concealing and symbolic of women’s enslavement under the Taliban. Countless Afghan women have been beaten and stoned in public for not wearing the “proper attire”; even in some instances where the offence amounted to nothing more than the revealing of eyes from behind the burqa’s mesh.

The London Guardian also proclaimed the Taliban’s mellowing with respect to girl’s education when the first government girls’ schools were opened in Kabul in November of 1999. But as RAWA was quick to point out, this amounts to nothing more than religious and domestic classes for the daughters of Taliban followers accepting of the vile code of virtuosity which has been imposed in Afghanistan. In other words, these are schools by the Taliban for the Taliban’s barbaric ends, but with the assistance of complicit journalists, a message evolves to create the impression that science subjects and even English are now available to Afghanistan’s girls. The truth, from the mouths of young girls attending such schools verifies that these are indoctrination houses to brainwash the next generation of fundamentalists, hanging like hungry crows on the naked trees of Afghanistan’s vast graveyard created by the murderous, and largely illiterate, Taliban.

The Taliban’s recent hostage negotiations in Kandahar sent a clear message to would–be hijackers that Afghanistan is a sanctuary for unlawful negotiations endorsing terrorism. Equally, daily atrocities send a clear message to the international community that Afghanistan is home to gross human rights violations, particularly those of women, while the Taliban remains in power.

There is absolutely no indication that the Taliban is about to change its tune. On the contrary, the January 8, 2000 issue of the Lancet medical journal warned of Taliban plans to purge Afghanistan’s health professions of staff educated in socialist countries between 1978 and 1992 when Afghanistan was under communist rule. The Taliban has made no secret of its intention to replace the purgees with “like-minded” sharing its version of Islam.
At the end of the day, no amount of sanitising the Taliban’s barbarisms can whitewash the fact that, at the opening of the year 2000, the Taliban is nothing less than an extremist fundamentalist regime; one which undermines global security with its training and sheltering of terrorists, all while implementing its own reign of terror against the women residing within Afghanistan’s borders. Or, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, the Taliban 2000, no matter how intense the sanitising, still reeks with the vile stench of fundamentalist indecency!

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7 No, 56, Region

WATER ON FIRE

January 31, 2000

How dare women presume to question their status? That is the key issue behind all the agitation over Deepa Mehta’s film-in-the-making

Some days ago I was on a television programme with Mr Mohanlal Singhal, a BJP
MP and brother of the fa mous (or more correctly, infamous) Ashok Singhal, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. In response to a question from the presenter, Mr Singhal informed us that the VHP had nothing to do with the agitation against the film Water. That, in fact, it was the “people of Varanasi” whose “sentiments” had been “hurt” and if the newspapers said the VHP had either engineered or upported this agitation, they were lying. The very next day, newspapers carried reports that Ashok Singhal had declared that the filming would be allowed only “over his dead body”.

When questioned further on the programme, it turned out (not surprisingly) that although Mr Singhal — in what has now become the BJP’s classic tactic of overt dissociation but covert support — denied that the VHP had anything to do with the agitation, he, his family and his political brothers, fully supported what the agitation was about. He had many objections to the film: it denigrated India, he said, it projected a bad image of the country for foreigners.

He was upset that the director had chosen to make a film about a time as long ago as 1930 when there was such a rich present to hand. (He had no answer when I asked him why then had his colleagues not protested when the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which were about much more “ancient” times had been filmed). He said the film–maker had done no “scientific” research about the position of widows in India, and was not knowledgeable about the Hindu shastras — else, why would she say that widows were denigrated, called vaishyas, socially ostracised?

According to him, while this may be something that was part of Hindu custom, it was not part of Hindu religion.

He had other objections: the two or three lines that Deepa Mehta had agreed to delete were cited. One had to do with widows, the other with the Ganga. How dare she put these lines in the mouths of characters who had names like Narayan, he said. Why not in the mouth of someone called Javed or some such Muslim name? This led him to object about the names of the women in Fire. Why were they not called Uzma and someone else? Why Radha and Sita?

If the status of widows was deplorable in India, he was asked, why be fearful of a film depicting that? Perhaps this might lead to a debate and discussion which are after all the precursors of any kind of change. But he said there was no scientific research on whether or not the status of widows was actually bad. The film-maker, he was convinced (he did not know this, it was just a conviction) had not spent any time at all with widows. How could she know anything? How could Shabana Azmi know anything? She was a rabble-rouser anyway.

Then, another question was put to him: if a character in a film says something, surely that does not mean that that is the point of view of the director or the script–writer. The film, after all, is a fiction film. This elicited a vehement response: this film was not fiction, it was the director’s view, and it was part of a grand foreign plot to denigrate Hinduism.

Was it not shameful, I asked him, that Varanasi was full of rapacious, avaricious, corrupt Pandits who were out to make as much money as they could from visitors? Did this not sully the face of Hinduism? Why was it that the continuing pollution of the waters of the Ganga had elicited no response from his party or his colleagues, but if someone referred to the Ganga as water (and if I am not mistaken, an Indian–French painter called Vishwanath has made a deeply moving film which features the Ganga as well as other rivers, called Water and no one protested) this became a cause for such heartburn and violence? To this, too, Mr Singhal did not have an answer.

I mention all this because I was confused by his responses. I was not sure, at the end of this discussion (I think tirade would be a more appropriate word for it) exactly what the Hindu right’s objection to Deepa Mehta’s film was. Was it to the title? The film–maker? The subject? Surely they knew nothing about the subject — as Mr Singhal himself admitted, no one had really read the script. So all the noise was based on something else. At one point Mr Singhal said two things, and it was in these that I felt his (and that of his colleagues) deepest objections were rooted. He said, somewhat angrily, that there was no sanction for the ill–treatment of widows in Hinduism, and that what did those people who were making the film know anyway? After all they were women.

Put like this, in cold print, this phrase does not carry any of the vehemence of speech. But when I heard it, I was struck by what to me sounded like a deep dislike and almost hatred that lay behind it.

And political considerations apart, I think it would not be wrong to say that this, in many ways, is the motivating factor behind much of what is going on around this particular film, and also generally around the articulation of any voices of dissent, especially those that have to do with women. The status of widows in Hindu society is a shameful thing: newspapers in the last few days have been full of the widows of Vrindavan and the conditions they live in. It’s not the first time this kind of thing has figured in the media. But a brief spell of coverage and then nothing, is not what will help to change this.

I remember, some years ago, being shocked by a three line reference in the newspapers, to the death of Bina Bhowmick, one of the best known of what were then called “women terrorists” of our nationalist period. She had died, unloved and unknown, in the widows’ ashram at Vrindavan. Where were our agitators then?

Or, indeed, why did we not raise a similar discussion about the ills of widowhood when Charan Shah died on her husband’s pyre, or when Roop Kanwar was killed?

Mr Singhal was emphatic that sati, or widow immolation, was not sanctioned in our shastras. But I don’t seem to remember leaders of the Hindu right making any such statement at the time. Rather, they did quite the opposite — not only the men but also the women. And the list does not end there — for every woman who is burnt as a witch in Jharkhand or elsewhere in the country, it would not come as a surprise to know that most of them are widows and behind their deaths lie very material concerns of property and wealth. For all their poverty, many of the older widows in the ashrams of Vrindavan are legally entitled to pension which is creamed off before they ever get to the women. But none of the so–called protectors of Hinduism protests about this insult to the religion.

It seems to me there are many things that lie behind this agitation by self–styled protectors of the Hindu religion. The key issue here is this: how dare women presume to question their status? Further, how dare a “foreign” woman (Deepa Mehta) and a Muslim woman (Shabana Azmi) do so? While this is the case, I doubt they would be any more tolerant of the questioning had it come from a devout “Hindu” woman. More, in the minds of the majority of men, whether they are self–styled protectors of Hinduism or not, lies a deep anti–woman bias.

I do not say this irresponsibly — it may sound like an extreme statement, but I think we need to see this agitation, and the intolerance it symbolises, as part of a continuum of increasing violence against women which is taking new forms every day as women become more articulate and adept at claiming their rights. Clearly, they are transgressing the boundaries that have been set for them. Virtually every religion sanctions the terrible belief that a woman’s status is defined by her ‘belonging’ to a man: a woman without a man is deeply suspect.

There is no way of controlling her sexuality, none of keeping her within the ordained boundaries, none therefore, of keeping her under the power of a man, or many men. This is why so much suspicion attaches to women who are single, or indeed those who are widows — the latter present a greater threat because, theoretically, having been in sexual union with their husbands, they might actually know what sexuality is about. What better way to keep these women in their place than to divest them of all rights and privileges (hence take away their sources of income such as pensions, land), or of all support (hence throw them out of their homes and send them off to ashrams) and to label them vaishyas, prostitutes, randis?

Where widows are concerned, things are worse. Our society has been relatively successful in locking widows away into remote places, silencing their voices by claiming that they have no life, or no right to live a life, after the deaths of their husbands. Hence we have the ashrams, where hundreds of women live in penury and silence. Imagine the fear if these women were to suddenly rebel, to claim back their homes from which they have been thrown out, to claim back their wealth which they have been divested of, to claim back their rights from an indifferent State which discriminates against them in law. There would be chaos: sexual, political, familial chaos.

We have the experience of Partition to tell us that this is a possible danger — that is why at Partition the Indian State took on the responsibility of looking after all the women who were widowed. They were put in homes, given training and jobs, pensions, and “allowed” to live a mainstream life rather than being socially ostracised like most widows. But the moment they became old and theoretically “useless” it was their families who threw them out of their homes and took over their properties.

A single film is not going to change this shameful state of affairs in India. But it might just succeed in raising a discussion — something which we badly need. And yet, this is precisely the fear, and it is this fear that is the motivation behind the agitation by the self–styled protectors of the Hindu religion.

They know, husbands and mahants and politicians and others, that if widows are allowed to enter and be part of mainstream society, they stand to lose not only the wealth that can be amassed through property and pensions, but also the control that can be maintained by claiming a monopoly over what the shastras say. And it’s very convenient to set up an agitation, and claim that it reflects the sentiments of the “people” of a particular place.

A question we need to ask is: are women not people also? If the status of women is deplorable in this society and someone wishes to depict that in a film, it’s not something that reflects on the Hindu religion, but rather on those who see themselves as the protectors of that religion. And that’s why they are so opposed to it: for more than the religion, it is its self–styled protectors who are exposed by such questioning.

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7 No, 56, Special Report 1

JUSTICE DENIED

January 31, 2000

Seven years ago, India's Christians told the Union government they were ready for sweeping changes in their outdated personal laws to make it gender just. The community now plans an all-India
campaign to demand prompt legislation from the BJP-led NDA
government

When a delegation of Christian leaders met Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in early December, among other things, the long–pending demand of the community for reform in Christian personal laws also entered the conversation. “I told Mr. Vajpayee, "Why don’t you make this a new millennium’s gift to India’s Christians?’ But the Prime Minister did not make any comment”, Delhi’s archbishop Alan de Lastic told Communalism Combat.

What the archbishop was asking for and what the Prime Minister would not commit himself to is, in fact, not a question of ‘gift’ but a matter of ‘justice’ and ‘right’. Since February 1994, successive governments in New Delhi have been sitting tight on three Bills, which suggest comprehensive reforms in the family laws of India’s Christians and which enjoy the full backing of both the clergy and laity of virtually every Christian denomination in India.

When enacted, the new laws would be applicable only to the Christian community in the country. But judged by the yardstick of gender justice, they would compare well with progressive family laws in force elsewhere in the world today. Among other things, several progressive features contained in the country’s Special marriages Act, 1954 have been incorporated in the proposed reforms.

Having waited for seven long years – first, for the avowedly secular Congress and United Front governments, and, subsequently, for the BJP–led governments to introduce fresh legislation — the All India Catholic Union (AICU), an organisation of the laity representing the largest body of Christians in the country, has now decided to launch a national campaign to jolt the Union government into action.

As it is well known, all religion–specific family (personal) laws in India — pertaining to marriage, divorce, maintenance, succession, adoption — are heavily biased against women. In the case of the Christian personal laws, the Indian Divorce Act 1869 (IDA 1869) and the Christian Marriage Act 1872, are in particular and urgent need of change. However terrible and traumatic the marriage may be, it is virtually impossible for a Christian woman to get a divorce under the provisions of the IDA.

These laws were enacted by the British Parliament during the British rule in India and based on the then prevailing notions of marriage and divorce in English law. Ironically, while they have since been radically overhauled in their country of origin, in India the situation has remained static for well over a century. Understandably, different segments of the Christian community have been engaged in intra–sect and intra–community dialogue, discussion and debate for changes in the personal laws applicable to their community since the mid–’80s.

The issue of reforming existing laws was first raised by Protestant groups who have been asking successive governments for a new Christian Marriage Act. But initially there was resistance from the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI), the all-India religious body which represents Roman Catholics, the largest group of Christians in India. This is because for them marriage is an indissoluble sacrament; once a marriage is consummated, no power on earth could dissolve that bond.

The Joint Women’s Programme (JWP), which began efforts to change the Christian personal laws in 1984, took the initiative in preparing a new set of draft bills for reform. By 1990, three new bills — the Christian Marriages and Matrimonial Clauses Bill (1990), the Indian Succession Amendment Bill (1990) and the Christian Adoption and Maintenance Bill (1990) were ready for consideration. Taken together, they were positive efforts towards updating family legislation and based on egalitarian gender values.

Among other progressive changes, chapters 5, 6 and 7 of the Special Marriage Act 1954, on anullity of marriage, divorce, jurisdiction and procedure were incorporated, with the additional provision that marriages annulled by the Church be declared null and void.
The new bills enjoyed the support of Protestant and orthodox churches, as also of the All India Catholic Union, Satyashodhak (a Mumbai–based active group of Catholic women) and a large section of Catholics in the country. But the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) did not give its consent because of the provision for divorce.

At a national conference held in New Delhi, in 1990, to discuss the draft bills and at which representatives of the church and other Christian organisations of the laity were present, the CBCI told that it would not associate itself with that part of the bill which deals with divorce, but would not oppose the rest of the provisions which were in keeping with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

After protracted dialogue over the next three years, the CBCI finally agreed to give its consent after a compromise was worked out. It was agreed that divorce would be defined as “a termination of the civil effects of marriage” which does not compromise the teaching of the Catholic Church on the indissolubility of marriage. Finally, three draft bills — Christian Marriage Bill, 1994, Indian Succession Amendment Bill, 1994 Christian Adoption and Maintenance Bill, 1994 — acceptable to all Christian denominations in India were submitted to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in February 1994. There was also common consent on the repeal of the existing Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872, Indian Succession Act, 1925 and Indian Divorce Act, 1869.

The consensus for change within the Christian community was arrived at after extensive dialogue, discussion and debate in which a large number of organisations, representing both the clergy and the laity of different denominations were involved. Despite this, in response to a query, the then Union law minister, H.R. Bharadwaj, coolly stated in Parliament on March 6, 1996: “As the policy of the government has been not to interfere in the personal laws of the minority community, unless the initiative came from the community concerned, the government has requested the National Commission for Minorities to assess the views of the Christian community by interacting with different sections of it, before the matter is processed further. Hence, it is too early to set any time frame for undertaking any legislation in this regard.”

The Minorities Commission responded to the government with one of its members, B.S. Ramoowalia, observing that “the Minorities Commission had already informed the government that the CPLs (Christian Personal Laws) be changed according to the request of the Christian community”. Ramoowalia also recommended that the different church denominations send letters supporting the proposed bills.

It is now four years since that requirement has been complied with. But for some inexplicable reason, successive governments at the Centre have reluctant to act. In the process, Christian women continue to suffer.

It is in the context of this backdrop that the working committee of AICU, which met in Kanpur on January 15, has resolved to launch a nation–wide campaign on the issue. AICU is a mass–based, democratic, grassroots federation with a presence in more than hundred of the 122 dioceses of the Catholic Church in India. It has a collective membership that runs into lakhs. Will the NDA government listen?

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7 No, 56, Cover Story

Herr Haider, a new Hitler?

January 31, 2000

A xenophobic, extremist right–wing party — whose leader seems like a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler to many people and political leaders in Europe — is now an equal partner in the new government in Austria. The rise to power of such a man in the heart of democratic Europe has thrown the entire European community in an agonising soul–search. Quite apart from the spectre of a new fascist movement on the ascendant, there is the more immediate problem of the Austrian example providing a powerful boost to racist and xenophobic extremist organisations all over Europe.

Joerg Haider is the name of the man whose far–right Freedom Party (FPO) notched up 27 per cent of the popular votes in the general elections last October to emerge as Austria’s second largest party, with 52 of the total 183 seats. First in the electoral race but short of a majority, the Social Democrats failed to reach an agreement on renewing their 13–year–old coalition with Austria’s conservative People’s Party but refused any truck with the FPO. It was then that Herr Haider struck a deal and a very reluctant President Thomas Klestil finally swore in a new government on February 4.

(A throwback to 1933, when President Paul von Hindenberg had invited Hitler’s party into the German government? Not many had then foreseen the threat that Hitler’s 33 per cent of the vote posed to German democracy or world peace, no one had then anticipated the Nazi party’s aggressive military intent, its rampant anti-Semitism, or the ‘Final Solution’).

Herr Haider’s politics is as much a cause for concern as his background. The main plank of his party in the last election was his populist demand that the immigrants from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, who now constitute around five per cent of Austria’s population, be sent back to their countries. With unemployment running at nearly 11 per cent, the FPO attracted the votes of half of all male voters under 30. Haider also strongly opposes the entry of East European countries into the presently 15–member European Union of which Austria is a part.

That is not all. The FPO’s Nazi roots are well known. Haider’s own parents were strong Nazi supporters and the large estate he inherited from them was Jewish–owned until it was "Aryanised" in 1938. Recently, Haider publicly praised Hitler’s "orderly" employment policy, but subsequently apologised.

To compound matters further, unlike Germany, Austria as a country and Austrians as a people have yet to come to terms with their pro–Nazi past. Austrians see themselves as Nazism’s "first victim" while the rest of the West sees them as Hitler’s "first willing accomplice". When Hitler annexed Austria, there were jubilant crowds on the streets of Vienna and elsewhere; and spontaneous incidents of anti–Semitism followed. (Among other ignominies, Jewish women were made to scrub the streets on their hands and knees while Austrian Nazis urinated all over them).

This, incidentally is the second time in 14 years that Austria is troubling the European conscience. In 1986, the country elected Kurt Waldheim as its President ignoring his involvement in Nazi atrocities. Waldheim pretended he could not remember what he did many decades ago.

Now faced with a leader like Herr Haider in its midst, Europe is divided over how to respond to the challenge: No compromise on "principles and values", no truck with racism, rabid nationalism and crypto–fascism of the FPO variety? Or, adherence to the "first principle of democracy" ("parliamentary majority must be respected") and non–interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state?

The other 14 members of the European Union, besides Austria, had threatened to sever relations with one of its own partners if Haider’s chauvinist party became a part of the Austrian government. To make itself more presentable to the western world, the coalition government has evolved a formula which includes the following: Haider himself did not join the national government but continues as a regional governor; two, despite him being Haider’s first choice for the post, Thomas Prinzhorn does not occupy the vice–chancellor’s chair; and, three, the coalition partners have pledged themselves to an extraordinary declaration which reads — "Austria accepts her responsibility arising out of the tragic history of the 20th century and the horrendous crimes of the National Socialist regime. Our country is facing up to the light and dark sides of its past and to the deeds of all Austrians, good and evil, as its responsibility". The declaration also pledges the future government to work for "an Austria in which xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism have no place".

Despite this, several European governments — with Germany, France, Belgium and Portugal in the lead – took the first steps towards the political isolation of Austria the moment the new government was sworn–in. But some are worried that penal action against Austria will only increase Herr Haider’s appeal: the latest opinion poll in Austria indicates that if elections were held today, 33 per cent would vote for his party against the 27 per cent last October.

Is there some parallel between what Europe is now experiencing and India, where the political wing of the sangh parivar — the BJP — was a political pariah for other political parties for some years but now leads a coalition government at the Centre?

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7 No, 56, International

Myth of the Islamist threat to US

January 31, 2000

The American government and media is once again promoting anti–Muslim and anti-Arab hysteria under the guise of vigilance against terroris

Are recent warnings by the US government about the threat of terrorism a reasonable precaution to a real and present danger, or are the media and government once again promoting anti–Muslim and anti-Arab hysteria under the guise of vigilance against terrorism? Whatever the case, the arrest of an Algerian man last December, allegedly for trying to enter the United States from Canada with bomb–making materials, has set off yet another free–for–all of media speculation about vicious Muslim plots to blow up the United States on the eve of the millennium. (The article was posted on the Internet on December 22).

To many people this hysteria appears to be nothing more than a reasonable response to a frightening possibility. But if we examine the US government’s own data about terrorism, it is a completely unjustified overreaction which puts at risk civil liberties and freedoms of all Americans, but especially those of Arab and Muslim Americans who are, despite all the lessons of Oklahoma City, TWA 800 and other incidents, still the first to fall under suspicion and to be victimised by repressive measures such as the use of secret evidence and passenger profiling.

So, is all the focus on the threat of "Islamic" terrorism justified and based in fact?

To put the issue in perspective, I examined the State Department’s own annual report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1998."

Below I have summarised some facts from the report about events that the State Department defines as international terrorist incidents (in other words, excluding domestic terrorism by purely US–based groups, such as anti–abortion groups). The report uses the following definitions: "The term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non–combatant targets by sub–national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. The term "international terrorism" means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country. The term "terrorist group" means any group practising, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism."

1) Terrorism worldwide is decreasing significantly and consistently:

There has been a significant and consistent downward trend in international terrorist incidents in the period 1979–1998. In 1998, the number of international terrorist incidents, at 273, was the lowest ever in the period, and the annual number has shown a consistent downward trend since it reached a peak of 666 in 1987.

2) The vast majority of international terrorist incidents are not related to the Middle East, Muslim ‘extremists’ or Arabs:

Since 1995, Latin America has consistently had the highest annual number of international terrorist incidents of any region, followed by Western Europe. In 1998 there were 110 attacks in Latin America, 48 in Western Europe and 31 in the Middle East. There were 21 in Africa and zero in North America.

The incidents in Latin America are primarily connected to conflicts in Colombia and Peru, while the vast majority of incidents in Europe are, according to the State Department, attributable to Basque separatists in Spain, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Kurdish movement in Turkey and various anarchist groups in Greece. Middle East or "Islamic" terrorism was not a significant factor in either region.

In terms of casualties (deaths + injuries), the highest number has consistently been in Asia since 1993. In 1998 there were over 5,000 in Africa, 635 in Asia, 405 in Western Europe, 68 in the Middle East and zero in North America.

3) Eighty percent of attacks against US targets are in Latin America:

Consistently, the vast majority of events defined by the State Department as "anti–US attacks" occur in Latin America. In 1998, there were a total of 111 anti–US attacks. Eighty–seven were in Latin America, 13 in Western Europe, 5 in the Middle East and 3 each in Africa and Eurasia.

By far the most common target of terrorists are businesses. Attacks on diplomats, military or government installations are relatively rare. The total number of US fatalities from these attacks in 1998 was 12, all related to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

4) Very few Americans are killed by terrorists:

Here are the numbers for the total U.S. citizen casualties caused by international attacks, 1993–98. Note that the figures show no upward trend:

1993 – 7 ; 1994 – 6 ; 1995 10 ;

1996– 25 ; 1997– 6 ; 1998 12

(The 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania caused a large number of non–US casualties in addition to the US victims).

These numbers suggest that terrorism is a relatively insignificant cause of death and injury to Americans compared with other forms of violence. For example, according to the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, 14 children are killed every day in the United States by handguns. In the state of Illinois alone, 320 are killed each year (National Centre for Health Statistics, 1997).

5) Middle East violence is related to local political conflicts, not ‘hatred of the West:’

Although the level of international terrorist events in the Middle East has been lower than in other parts of the world, such violence as occurs is principally related to local political conflicts, not to generalised "hatred of the West" as often portrayed in the media. The numbers and descriptions of patterns of violence in the Middle East suggest that as in other regions, like Northern Ireland, violence diminishes when broad–based political processes or solutions are set in motion. The State Department report acknowledges that the downward trend in terrorism "reflects the improved political climate that has diminished terrorist activity in recent years in various parts of the world."

Conclusion:

There is a complete disparity between the facts about international terrorism as presented by the government on the one hand, and the media, official and popular response to the issue on the other. There is no objective connection between the frequency of terrorist attacks originating from and occurring in the Middle East, and the amount of attention that such attacks receive. President Clinton and other government officials have repeatedly defined terrorism as one of the greatest threats facing the world.

There is little or no media attention to the facts about terrorism, as reported by the government, and a generalised willingness to continue to blame and speculate about the Middle East as a principal purveyor of violence. This situation continues to hurt and marginalise Arab and Muslim citizens of the US, and to distort public perceptions about the Middle East, a region in which US taxpayers are being asked to invest a lot of money, often in the name of "security."

Each and every life lost due to terrorism is one too many and of course there must be vigilance against terrorism, and support for genuine efforts to prevent it. But clearly other policy agendas, totally unrelated to public security, are being served by the obsessive focus on Middle East terrorism, when the facts suggest a more balanced approach would be appropriate.

(ahabunim@midway.uchicago.edu http://www.abunimah.org).

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7 No. 56, Opinion

Of courage, caste and ‘Hindu cowardice’

January 31, 2000

The ‘Hindu cowardice’ bogey must not shut the mouths of the brave followers of Swami Dayanand Saraswati when they are confronted by the very forces against which Swamiji fought and laid down his life

Ill–informed attempts have been made of late to project the concessions made to the hijackers of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi, as yet another illustration of the proverbial Hindu cowardice. Occasional and misleading references have been made, in this context, to the history and mission of the Arya Samaj. This calls for clarification on some basic issues.

The Arya Samaj was essentially a spiritual movement whose mission was to renew and reinforce the Vedic foundations of the Hindu society. The attempt to re–construct the ‘Hindu identity’ that historians and political analysts see in this movement needs to be seen in this light. Swami Dayanand Saraswati and, later, Swami Sraddhanand were reacting reformatively to the social and spiritual paralysis of the Hindu society on account of its apostasy vis–à–vis the eternal principles and ideals embedded in the Vedas.

"Back to the Vedas" was, hence, their battle cry. To them the solution for our chronic and all–round disabilities was not the propagation of a macho culture of physical assertiveness or ideological aggression. It was the creation of a wholesome and dynamic society undergirded by equality, truth, justice and human dignity.

Shuddhi was as much a protest against the caste–bound socio–religious paralysis of the Hindu society as it was to facilitate the home–coming of those who had left the fold, in case they wished to. It was a constructive criticism of the aberration that had been imposed on the Hindu social order by the high castes by making merit entirely birth–based. This turned the Hindu religious community into a semi–closed order from which people were free to escape but not free to return. And the oppressiveness of the caste system provided ample motivation for the lower castes to escape en masse. Out of this there arose a situation that exposed the inner–contradictions and non–viability of the caste system in a situation of free choice.

Such a situation leaves us with two options. The first is to dismantle the caste system and to replace it with the Varna Ashram Vyvastha as laid down in the Vedas. Birth–based human merit has no place in the Vedas. The Vedic worldview, as I have argued time and again, is a dynamic spiritual vision that militates against burying people alive in the graves of caste degradation. This was what the founders of the Arya Samaj advocated. The other option is to put down the rebellion against the caste system in the form of conversion to other theoretically more egalitarian faiths. This is done in two ways by the custodians of the caste system: (a) by creating an anti–conversion dogma, ruling out thereby freedom of choice leading to conversions, or (b) by the use of force either against those who convert or those who encourage conversion or against both. It was a return to the Varna Vyvastha that the Arya Samaj advocated. The logic of the times confirms that only the Arya Samaj approach to this problem is valid and feasible.

Globalisation, among other things, is the unconditional acceptance of a new global order based on free choice. Perpetuation of any birth–based handicap or advantage is utterly incompatible with its ethos. The custodians of casteism, if they are serious about their business, must fight global-isation with all their might as their foremost caste enemy.

But that is not what is happening. Most of them are in league with this pernicious process, conspiratorially crafted to rob the rest of the world for the greater affluence of the richer nations. The hijack drama is a milestone also in the globalisation of terrorism, in which the role–model was set by arbitrary American transnational aggressions in recent times.

While I am unhappy that the hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane got away with some of their demands, after inflicting unspeakable suffering on more than 150 innocent passengers, I cannot fault the government on the way this crisis has been handled. On the contrary, I endorse the government’s concern that innocent lives be not lost through tactical dogmatism and ideological inflexibility. The courage to be inflexible at the cost of other people’s lives is embarrassingly cheap. The hijack crisis provided a glorious opportunity for the RSS leaders to prove their newly acquired Hindu virility. They could have offered themselves as substitute hostages, procured the release of the innocent passengers, and then advocated total inflexibility. It does no credit either to the Hindu community or to their macho image to have hid themselves in safety until the crisis was defused and to emerge soon thereafter to strike up comic–strip–like postures of courage that costs them nothing.

May be that is an illustration of the alleged Hindu cowardice! We need to get out of it. But, then, courage is not an abstract thing. It has to be exemplified in respect of addressing the real issues, irrespective of the cost involved. In Swami Dayanand Saraswati and Swami Sraddhanand we have two good examples of human courage imbued with spiritual significance. Both of them risked their life in pursuing their mission.

The most basic cowardice is flight from reality. This is what is writ large over the whole of our country today. As a society we are running away from the basic issues of social injustice, discrimination against the poor and the underprivileged, our moral and social degradation, and the large-scale sell-out of our country in the name of globalisation. This country could do better with a little more courage to speak the truth, to resist the forces of evil and injustice, the courage above all to live with the projected ‘backwardness’ and global isolation that we are warned against, unless we allow ourselves to be colonised by the West. True Vedic courage calls for doing battle with the predators of hedonist consumerism that assault human dignity and worth. It mandates a relentless struggle to free the Indian society from the evils of casteism, communalism and religious obscurantism so that we re-create the true Aryavarta: a country of noble men and women.

This was the vision that inspired the Arya Samaj movement. Swami Dayanand Saraswati was a liberated soul who maintained excellent relationships with people of other faiths. The very first donation of Rs. 5000 to the cause of the Arya Samaj came from a Muslim in Bombay in 1875. It was in the house of a Muslim, Rahmatullah Ansari of Lahore, that Swamiji formulated the ten basic principles of the Samaj. When Swamiji was poisoned by a Hindu cook, Jagannath, it was to a Muslim — Dr. Ali Mardan Khan — that he entrusted his treatment. Swami Dayanand’s concerns extended to the welfare of other religious faiths and he encouraged Bhai Jawahar Singh, who was general secretary of Arya Samaj, Lahore, to launch the Guru Singh Sabha around 1877.

Swamiji had excellent relationships with all religious leaders, including the Christians, besides being a good friend of Sir Syed Ahmed of the Aligarh Muslim University. The spirit of religious intolerance that is packaged as Hindu revivalism would have been roundly denounced by him. So also the compromise that some sections of the Arya Samaj have struck with the Sangh Parivar by providing the ritualistic paraphernalia for re–conversion into a caste-ridden Hindu order, rather than insist that the Hindu society be rid of this ultimate spiritual anathema. I do hope that "Hindu cowardice" will not shut the mouths of the brave followers of Swami Dayanand Saraswati when they are confronted by the very forces against which Swamiji fought and laid down his life.

(An abridged version of this article was first published by The Indian Express).

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7 No, 56, Faith

1...2,6832,6842,685...2,697 Page 2,684 of 2,697

‘India is, to me, a beacon of light on the sub-continent’

The BJP president is talking like Pakistan’s Parvez Musharraf’

TALIBAN STILL STINKS

WATER ON FIRE

JUSTICE DENIED

Herr Haider, a new Hitler?

Myth of the Islamist threat to US

Of courage, caste and ‘Hindu cowardice’

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