Lefty Prof's List: South Asia

• On 2 June, Sergey Chemezov, the CEO of the Russian State-run company Rostec, told Voice of Russia radio that Moscow was lifting its — undeclared — arms embargo against Pakistan and was negotiating the delivery of Mi-25 helicopter gunships to the country.
• The US’ retreat from West Asia and its pivot to the Asia-Pacific has created several low-hanging opportunities for Russia in the region. Pakistan is one of them. In fact, for the first time ever, Russian and Pakistan interests have converged — in the backdrop of a resurgent Taliban.
• The Pakistanis are worried too. Not only will they lose the hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation that the US doles out for the use of Pakistani military bases, Islamabad feels it is being abandoned in the midst of its do-or-die struggle with the Islamists.
• So, like it or not, Pakistan is really at the frontlines in the battle against the Taliban. The Pakistanis are, therefore, looking at extricating themselves from the US-created mess. The Russian gambit neatly dovetails into Pakistan’s requirement. Moscow has already entered into a deal with India where New Delhi pays for Russian weapons to the Afghan military. The arms deal with Pakistan completes this pincer manoeuvre that surrounds the Taliban.
• While a handful of gunships to Pakistan won’t change the military balance vis-à-vis India, the Mi-25 can be the game-changer in battles with guerillas up in the mountains. Also, in Afghanistan where airfields are as rare as hen’s teeth, helicopters are the only way to get out and about. By supplying these gunships to Pakistan, the Russians get the Pakistanis to continue with the job of clearing up Islamist opposition.

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• Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was an upper-caste dandy who “had few political ideas of his own,” and could be trusted “not to challenge [Gandhi’s] authority if he chose to exercise it.” He is the one who Anderson holds chiefly responsible for using the favor of the British and its crooked electoral architecture to alienate the Muslim minority and undercut socialists, while enshrining a tradition of hereditary politics that India continues to suffer from to this day.
• To Anderson, India is a hopelessly impoverished and divided country, rife with corruption and nepotism and bloody from communal violence and pogroms against Muslims. It is this judgment that has left Anderson contemptuous of liberal Indian intellectuals who produce glowing tributes to their country.

  • "Hopelessly" is a loaded word here. But maybe it isn't far off the mark. Himal Southasia had a special issue last year titled "Are we sure about India?" Anderson is raising a similar question.
• Anderson’s critique, which originally appeared as three essays in the London Review of Books, has inspired critical letters to the editor and several responses, many of which have imputed ignorance of South Asian politics and possible Orientalism.
• In defending India, liberal intellectuals echo the rhetoric of the state, using “the centrality of four tropes in the official and intellectual imaginary of India,” which Anderson sums up as “the couplets of antiquity-continuity; diversity-unity; massivity-democracy; multiconfessionality-secularity.” These tropes, which Anderson says are touchstone of the ‘idea of India,’
• Anderson doesn’t believe that Partition and the segmentation of Indian society were predestined, instead attributing historical agency to India and blaming its failings on its political leaders.

  • Right. And it's noteworthy that this is noteworthy.
• Few political figures are above reproach, but Gandhi certainly seems to be one . He is regularly celebrated by liberals as the spiritual father of India and an icon of anti-colonial movements. Marxists and radicals, from Evelyn Roy to Leon Trotsky, have found him frustrating and even infuriating for having coopted much of the rhetoric of the Left while undermining its policies during India’s slow march to independence.
• Instead of building a secular anti-colonial movement based on economic relief, Gandhi relied on faith.
• Anderson admits that Gandhi was likely sincere “in holding that all religions were equal before the Lord,” but politically, “one religion was, inevitably, more equal than the other.” Seeing Islam as a foreign religion and Buddhism as not unique to the subcontinent, Gandhi thought of Hinduism as essential to the Indian character. But to unite Muslims in their common national struggle, Gandhi rallied under the banner of Islam to try to protect the caliphate in the wake of Ottoman Empire’s defeat in the Great War. Though more secular Muslims regarded the issue as “thoroughly regressive, a breeding ground for clerical posturing,” Gandhi persevered because it was a religious cause that united Hindus and Muslims, and because he would not have to campaign for social justice, which socialists and radicals sought.
• In the end, superficial attacks like Vajpeyi’s serve as an example of Indian intellectuals’ attempts to police the limits of discourse surrounding India’s storied history. Though easily disproven, their claims and invective reflect an automatic effort not only to insulate the prevailing ideology from criticism, but to punish those who try to point out its errors.

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• “Previously, the insurgencies were led by tribal elders. Tribesmen would pick up arms at the behest of their sardars (chiefs) and lay them down when sardar said so. But this time leadership rests with an educated middle class whose participation is based on ideological grounds, and not tribal allegiance,” said a Baloch writer on condition of anonymity.

• Nixon and Mr Kissinger stood with Pakistan, even as they knew of the extent of the slaughter. Their own diplomats told them about it. The centrepiece of Mr Bass’s gripping and well-researched book is the story of how America’s most senior diplomat in East Pakistan, Archer Blood, the consul-general in Dhaka, sent regular, detailed and accurate reports of the bloodshed. Early on he stated that a “selective genocide” was under way.

   

  Blood and his colleagues protested that America should not support Pakistan’s rulers. Then, 20 of them sent a dissenting telegram (the “Blood telegram” of the book’s title) condemning America’s policy.

• Do good fences make good neighbours? Not along the India-Bangladesh border. Here, India has almost finished building a 2,000km fence. Where once people on both sides were part of a greater Bengal, now India has put up a "keep out" sign to stop illegal immigration, smuggling and infiltration by anti-government militants.
• to police the border, India's Border Security Force (BSF), has carried out a shoot-to-kill policy – even on unarmed local villagers.
• The toll has been huge. Over the past 10 years Indian security forces have killed almost 1,000 people, mostly Bangladeshis, turning the border area into a south Asian killing fields. No one has been prosecuted for any of these killings, in spite of evidence in many cases that makes it clear the killings were in cold blood against unarmed and defenceless local residents.
• A single killing by US law enforcement along the Mexican border makes headlines.

  • Well, that's not true.
• India has the right to impose border controls. But India does not have the right to use lethal force except where strictly necessary to protect life. Yet some Indian officials openly admit that unarmed civilians are being killed. The head of the BSF, Raman Srivastava, says that people should not feel sorry for the victims, claiming that since these individuals were illegally entering Indian territory, often at night, they were "not innocent" and therefore were a legitimate target.
• The response of various government officials to allegations of a shoot-to-kill policy has been confusing: we do shoot illegal border crossers since they are lawbreakers; we don't shoot border crossers; we only shoot in self-defence; we never shoot to kill.

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• THE recent spate of violence and vandalism perpetrated by Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, marked by clashes between its activists and the police in the capital Dhaka and elsewhere in the country, is indicative of increasing desperation of the party primarily to protect some of its top leaders
• the protests have been successful to rally increasing popular support for a ban on Jamaat, which actively opposed the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state.
• While the protests pose an existential threat for Jamaat and its front organisations, including Islami Chhatra Shibir, which explains the increasingly militant actions of the latter, these have also left the Awami League-led political incumbents on a sticky turf.
• Whereas the general secretary of the ruling Awami League and LGRD and cooperatives minister, Syed Ashraful Islam, categorically said on November 29, 2012 that the government had no plans to ban Jamaat, the jute and textile minister and AL presidium member, Abdul Latif Siddiqui, said on Tuesday that a bill seeking a ban on the religion-based party and its associate organisations would be placed in the ninth parliament. According to a report published in New Age on February 13, Latif Siddiqui said the bill was being drafted.
• deputy leader of parliament Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury, who was with the minister at the Central Shaheed Minar during the observance of the three-minute silence on Tuesday initiated by the Shahbagh protests, remarked that ban on Jamaat ‘has now become a national demand’ but said the issue was being discussed and ‘will take time.’
• After all, the recent spate of violence and vandalism by Jamaat and its associates is undoubtedly ‘anti-state, anti-government, anti-people and anti-democratic’. Besides, the war crimes tribunal has also held Jamaat responsible as a party for the war crimes perpetrated in 1971.
   In such circumstances, the AL-led government’s plea for time in respect of imposing a ban on Jamaat could be construed as more of political expediency than legal compulsion and thus raise questions about its sincerity and seriousness. The onus obviously lies with the incumbents to dispel such doubts.

  • After listing various parties, including "some 'left extremist groups,'" the New Age editorial goes on to call for banning the Jamaat with expediency.

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• We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims.
• We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.
• Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”
• Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra.
• such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs
• Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

• While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

   This was only the latest in a series of assaults against Pakistan’s Sufis.
• While the Wahhabis have become dominant in northern Pakistan ever since we chose to finance their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, things are different in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Sufis are putting up a strong resistance on behalf of the pluralist, composite culture that emerged in the course of a thousand years of cohabitation between Hinduism and Islam.
• A 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis’ open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”
• Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

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• Nowhere does Guha say what Chibber makes him say: that the bourgeoisie attains hegemony because “it incorporated the real interests of the subaltern social classes into its revolutionary programme” (p 84). It would be absurd for anyone following Gramsci’s lead to say so. In fact, the hegemonic move on the part of the bourgeoisie is almost always a response to pressures from the subaltern classes – an attempt to pre-empt direct resistance and opposition. The hegemonic move is a feat of representation, often accomplished by a successful deployment of political rhetoric: it is constructed in and through ideology.

• Bangladesh today sought the removal of tariff and para-tariff barriers to ensure better bilateral trade with India.

         

  Para-tariffs refer to an extra tax or fee imposed on goods in addition to the country’s existing tariff.
• Although India has granted duty-free access for Bangladeshi goods into the country, exports had not risen to expected levels because of various barriers. Bilateral trade between Bangladesh and India stood at $5 billion in 2012-13. Bangladesh exported only $563 million to India, while India earned $4.7 billion through shipments to Bangladesh.