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[1] From: yogi sikand <ysikand@yahoo.com> Date: Fri Aug 12, 2005 Subject: Ahmad Shaikh, Jamiat ul-Ulama (Ahmedabad) on the Communal Situation in Gujarat Ahmad Shaikh is the secretary of the Legal Cell of the Gujarat unit of the Jamiat ul-???Ulama-I Hind, a leading Muslim religious organisation, based in Ahmedabad. In this interview with Yoginder Sikand he talks about the communal situation in Gujarat today and on the Jamiat??™s efforts to secure justice for the victims of the state sponsored genocide of Muslims in 2002 and on its efforts to promote communal harmony in the state. Q: Three years after the genocide in Gujarat how would you describe the communal situation in the state today? A: Although communal violence has stopped, Muslims in Gujarat are still being harrassed in different places. The poison of communalism still runs very deep, and Hindus and Muslims are still very sharply polarised. I fear it might taken an entire generation to undo the damage that the 2002 genocide has caused in terms of Hindu-Muslim relations. Today, there seems to be a semblance of peace in Gujarat, but this is largely because Hindus and Muslims know that they are economically dependent on each other and that violence cannot be sustained in the long-run. Yet, this does not mean that communalism as an ideology is being countered in any major way, at least directly and openly. Q: What efforts is the Jamiat making to help improve inter-community relations in Gujarat? A: Ever since its inception in the early twentieth century, the Jamiat has been in the forefront of the struggle for communal harmony. We stiffly opposed the Muslim League, its so-called ???two nation??™ theory and its demand for Pakistan. We remained committed to a united India even when the Congress finally agreed to the Partition. Despite the fact that Muslims in Gujarat are a relatively poor and educationally backward community, some Muslim groups, including the Jamiat, have tried to work for other communities as well so as to help promote better inter-communal relations. Thus, for instance, in the wake of the devastating earthquake in Kutch in 2001 the Jamiat provided relief to a number of Hindus and Dalits there and helped rebuild their homes. In the aftermath of the 2002 genocide the Jamiat also provided some relief to Dalit victims. We have also tried to rebuild good relations with Dalits, many of whom were used by the Hindutva groups to attack Muslims in the recent carnage. The prominent Dalit leader Udit Raj visited Gujarat and held a joint rally with Jamiat leaders calling for Dalit-Muslim unity. But, to be honest, I must say that although Dalit and Muslim leaders routinely call for such unity precious little has actually been done in this regard. Q: Ahmedabad has, for some decades now, witnessed periodic riots, in which several hundred people have lost their lives. How was the 2002 carnage different from previous riots? A: I have witnessed numerous riots in Ahmedabad, including the 1946 riots just before Partition, but never before have I witnessed violence on such a scale, so carefully planned and abetted by the state, though of course many of these earlier riots were planned by Congress leaders. Never before have I seen how deep the Hindutva ideology of hate has entered into the psyche of so many people in Gujarat. That said, I must also state that I personally see no difference between the Congress and the BJP as far as Muslims are concerned. This is my personal opinion, not that of the Jamiat. Hundreds of Muslims were killed in violence instigated in Gujarat by the Congress in the past and now the BJP is doing it. So for Muslims, as I personally see it, the BJP nor the Congress are two sides of the same coin, one an open enemy and the other a hidden foe. Q: Do you discern any significant shift or change in the Muslim leadership in Gujarat in the wake of the 2002 carnage? A: Gujarati Muslims hardly have any leadership worth the name. We have not a single charismatic leader whom people are willing to follow. We have few modern educated leaders, and most of our small middle class have little or no involvement with the Muslim masses. Some of them, including those associated with some NGOs, talk of Muslim problems, but in the comfort of hotels and conference rooms, not in the slums and the villages where the vast majority of the Muslims live. For some people these conferences take the place of actual grassroots action. As for the religious leaders, they are still sharply divided on sectarian lines. There have been some efforts to bring the ???ulama of different maslaks (sects) together on issues of common concern to all Muslims, but these have not been very successful as some people have a vested interested in perpetuating sectarian rivalries because that is the only way in which they can maintain their claims to authority. I suppose they see that unity among the different maslaks will force them to close their own petty shops that they have set up in the name of religion. They don??™t mind if disunity damages the Muslim community at large, provided their own little shops remain intact. That said, I must also say that the events of 2002 have forced many Muslims in Gujarat to take the issue of modern education much more seriously. Even Islamic organisations, like the Jamiat, the Tablighi Jamaat and the Jamaat-i Islami, are now making efforts to promote modern education along with religious education. For instance, the Gujarat Sarvajanik Welfare Society, run by people associated with the Tablighi Jamaat, are opening modern schools, and the Jamiat is working with a non-Muslim NGO, Jan Vikas, to introduce the teaching of Gujarati, Mathematics and Environmental Education in a number of maktabs in Kutch. We realise now that modern education is necessary if we are to struggle for our rights and combat the systematic marginalisation of the community, which appears to be the current state policy in Gujarat. The events of 2002 have also made Islamic groups here realise the importance of working with Hindu and secular groups concerned about democracy and secularism. It is important to work with such groups, to stress the point that not all Hindus see Muslims as their enemies, that there are several Hindus who did support the hapless Muslims in the carnage and helped them with relief, rehabiliation and in protesting against state brutality and persecution of innocent Muslims. We need to reach out to such people, and to counter the feeling that all Hindus are necessarily anti-Muslim. The Jamiat tried to do this in its own small way, by organising public meetings addressed by Hindu religious leaders such as Morari Bapu and a representative of the Akshardham temple, the same temple that was unfortunately attacked by some terrorists, where they spoke on the need for communal harmony. Of course such gestures are important, but the point is that the need for communal harmony must also be stressed by Hindu religious leaders when they address audiences consisting of their own followers, and the same holds true for Muslim religious figures as well. The carnage has also led to a growing awareness among Islamic groups in Gujarat of the need to dialogue with secular NGOs, several of whom helped out in providing relief and arranging for rehabilitation to thousands of Muslim victims. Once the violence died down, many NGOs who were working for rehabilitation withdrew, and only a few, such as Action Aid and Jan Vikas, stayed on, continuing to work among Muslims, to empower them and to promote justice and communal harmony. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Although a few NGOs and leftist trade unionists have taken up a couple of legal cases, of innocent Muslims killed, raped or jailed, there are more than three thousand cases that have not been taken up, and no one seems to have any idea about what is happening with them. Most of these involve pathetically poor people, whose families cannot afford to prohibitively high lawyers??™ fees and whose hopes for justice are almost nil. ------------------ [2] From: viji <viji123@yahoo.com> Date: Fri Aug 12, 2005 Subject: Don't list religious groups as minorities: Supreme Court Don't list religious groups as minorities: Supreme Court http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=12761 New Delhi: The Supreme Court has said the practice of listing religious groups as minority communities should be discouraged, even as it rejected a plea to give minority status to the Jain community. A bench of Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti and judges D.M. Dharmadhikari and P.K. Balasubramanyan Monday dismissed a petition that sought a direction to the government to notify the Jain community as a minority group within the meaning of the National Commission for Minorities Act. Significantly, the court asked the National Commission for Minorities to suggest ways to help create social conditions where the list of notified minorities "is gradually reduced and done away with altogether". The bench was of the view that different treatment for linguistic minorities based on language within the state was understandable. "But if the same concept for minorities on the basis of religion was encouraged, the whole country, which is already under class and social conflicts due to various divisive forces, will further face division on the basis of religious diversities," the bench said. Writing the judgment, Dharmadhikari said: "Such claims to minority status based on religion would increase in the fond hope of various sections of people getting special protections, privileges and treatment as part of constitutional guarantees. "Encouragement to such fissiparous tendencies would be a serious jolt to the secular structure of constitutional democracy." The bench said: "We should guard against making our country akin to a theocratic state based on multi-nationalism. Our concept of secularism is that `state' will have no religion. "The state will treat all religions and religious groups equally and with equal respect without in any manner interfering with their individual rights of religion, faith and worship." The judges asked the minorities commissions set up by the central and state governments to keep in mind that the goal of the constitution was to create social conditions where there was no need to protect the rights of minority or majority communities. The court said if each minority group felt afraid of the others, an atmosphere of mutual fear and distrust would be created that would pose serious threat to the integrity of the nation and lead to the sowing of seeds of multi-nationalism. "It is, therefore, necessary that minorities commissions should act in a manner so as to prevent generating feelings of multi-nationalism in various sections of people of Bharat," the bench said. Petitioner Bal Patil had said that while Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians (Parsis) had already been notified as minority communities, the refusal of the National Commission for Minorities to declare Jains a minority community was unjustified. The government informed the court that it was for respective states to take a decision on the claim of Jains to be declared a minority community, depending on their social condition. ----------------------------------- [3] From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in> Date: Fri Aug 12, 2005 Subject: "Dalits in Dravidian Land" -- New from Navayana (fwd) Navayana <http://www.navayana.org/>; announces the launch of: *Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline reports on anti-dalit violence in Tamil Nadu (1995??“2004) *By S. Viswanathan Rs 300 (USD 25); 356 pages, with 34 B&W photographs; paperback, demy 1/8 ISBN: 81-89059-05-X *From the Blurb:* Since the 1990s, India has witnessed a spurt in violence against dalits. This physical violence is perpetrated largely by the 'backward' castes, who claim victimhood under brahmins but also turn oppressors of dalits. Tamil Nadu, home to the nonbrahmin movement, has been projected by the political class, social scientists and policy-makers as fertile soil for social justice. However, the Dravidian movement's empowerment agenda left the dalits??”19 percent of the population??”almost untouched. In fact, the dalits have been subjected to the worst forms of violence, from being forced to consume human excreta to being murdered for contesting local body elections. S. Viswanathan has chronicled this violence over a decade in the pages of * Frontline*, the fortnightly newsmagazine. In his introduction, Ravikumar, activist-theoretician of the dalit movement in Tamil Nadu, offers a framework to understand this violence and suggests that more than being a consequence of the accumulation of power in the hands of the intermediary castes, such violence would be better understood as an attempt by 'backward' caste Hindus to test their newfound authority on those below them. This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of caste in India, especially Tamil Nadu. *About the Author:* S. Viswanathan has been a reporting for *Frontline* since 1993. He had worked with the *Indian Express* for 32 years in Madurai and Madras. A keen follower of Tamil Nadu politics, especially the left movement, he is also interested in education and Tamil literature. * * "An invaluable addition on an important subject. Perhaps no other journalist has tracked the dalit upsurge in Tamil Nadu from the mid-1990s as closely as S. Viswanathan of *Frontline*. Whether it is untouchability, structured discrimination, police atrocities or the growing alienation of the dalits from the Dravidian parties, the reporter has missed no great process, issue or event of the time. These are stories of courage, cruelty, resilience and rebellion??”and capture one of the most turbulent of eras. There is discipline, detail and a depth to the writing that is exemplary. This is the very opposite of parachute reporting." *??”P. Sainath*,* *Rural Affairs Editor, *The Hindu* *For orders:* Send DD for Rs 300 in favour of "Navayana Publishing" for a single copy. Copies will be sent by book post. Those who wish to receive copies by courier, please add Rs 50 towards courier charges. (Add Rs 40 as collection charges for outstation cheques.) NAVAYANA PUBLISHING 54, Ist Floor Savarirayalu Street Pondicherry 605001 Ph: 0413-2223337 Cell: 91-94440-61256 For the remaining catalog visit www.navayana.org <http://www.navayana.org> ----------------------------------------------------------- [4] From: Parvez Jamasji <parvez1942@yahoo.com> Date: Fri Aug 12, 2005 Subject: IAF Pilots Best in the World parvez1942 1. India Air Force Pilots are the Best in the World, they not only take on Odds with technical defects; which come their way as a routine, they practice taking Odds with the enemy; at the same time. If they die it's "Pilot Error", if they survive against all ODDS; it becomes "human error" & the Court of Inquiry is hard put to find which human commited the error. 2. All Military hardware is to be given heroic names : Arjun, Vajra, Gajraj, Trishul, Bhim, Dushyant, etc, etc, this will obviate our enemy form challanging us & knowing the " real " Prowess of our " state of the art, cutting edge; INDEGENIOUS technowlogy " Thanks for your time Best Wishes Parvez Jamasji http://www.geocities.com/siafdu/vc81.html --------------------------------------- [5] From: dnrad1 <dnrad1@sancharnet.in> Date: Thu Aug 11, 2005 Subject: Moral indifference as the form of modern evil Moral indifference as the form of modern evil The Hindu 12-8-05 Siddharth Varadarajan India is the only democracy in the world where politicians and policemen responsible for mass murder, from Delhi in 1984 to Gujarat in 2002, are allowed to thrive while their victims live lives of penury and despair. It's time we put a stop to this. RECOUNTING THE massacre of Jews during the First Crusade in and around the German city of Cologne in 1096, the anonymous authors of the 12th century Solomon bar Simson chronicle asked plaintively, "Why did the heavens not darken and the skies withhold their radiance; why did not the sun and moon turn dark?" The historian, Arno Mayer, poses the same question in his treatise on the Holocaust and `answers' it with Walter Benjamin's assertion, made on the eve of Europe's tryst with genocide, that there is no philosophical basis for our "astonishment that the things we are currently experiencing should `still' be possible in the 20th century." If many Indians were genuinely `astonished' by the well-organised killing of Muslim fellow citizens in Gujarat in 2002 - by the fact that such evil was "still" possible in the 21st century - this was because they had chosen to forget November 1984, the one reference point which made that violence not just intelligible but possible as well. Twenty-one years after it occurred, the genocidal killing of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi, Kanpur, Bokaro, and other cities in November 1984 has been brought alive for both victim and perpetrator by the report of the Justice Nanavati Commission of Inquiry. Mr. Justice Nanavati's labours have served to shake us out of our collective slumber and for that we should be grateful. But the learned judge's report is also disappointing for he has pulled his punches at a time when the country needed a knockout blow to protect itself from a "riot system" that has become so well-entrenched and institutionalised that any ruling party anywhere in the country can use it with impunity. Above all, he has written a whodunit without an ending - at a time when the victims and the national conscience urgently need a sense of closure. He concludes that the violence was "organised" and involved "the backing and help of influential and resourceful persons" but then blithely states that there is "absolutely no evidence" to show high-ranking Congress leaders were involved. Benjamin was German and Jewish and he wrote the lines quoted above in 1940, in a Europe overwhelmed by dictatorship and war. A few months later, he took his own life. The worst crimes of the Nazis were yet to come but Benjamin, who had witnessed Kristallnacht - the November 1938 pogrom in which SS and SA thugs torched synagogues and Jewish homes and shops across Germany because a German diplomat in Paris had been assassinated by a young Jewish man - understood what was about to unfold. Like Benjamin, Rajiv Gandhi too counselled against astonishment but his was an argument informed more by moral indifference than by a desire to change the world. As Prime Minister of India, Rajiv had witnessed - indeed, presided over, if we accept the doctrine of command responsibility - events in his own capital that were even more ferocious than Kristallnacht. In a speech at the Boat Club in Delhi on November 19, 1984 to commemorate the birth anniversary of his assassinated mother, he told the country there was no need to be shocked or saddened: "Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed as if India had been shaken. But when a mighty tree falls, the earth around is bound to shake." A few months later, in an interview to M.J. Akbar in Sunday magazine (March 10-16, 1985), Rajiv again sought to rationalise the November 1984 killings by arguing that the violence was extensive only in those areas where Sikhs (allegedly) distributed sweets to celebrate his mother's assassination. In other statements at the time, Rajiv elaborated on this morally corrosive line of reasoning, telling The Hindu , for example, that a judicial inquiry into the November 1984 massacre "would not be in the interest of Sikhs" (February 20, 1985). Apart from their ominous undertone, such statements were factually wrong, relying as they did on the canard about Sikh `celebrations' and the `spontaneous' outpouring of public grief. If the violence had been spontaneous, the bulk of the killing would have occurred on October 31, the day Indira Gandhi was shot, and not November 1. Clearly somebody high up in the government and party hierarchy planned something in that intervening night. In an essay on the challenges posed by the Holocaust to philosophy, the German sociologist Rainer C. Baum described moral indifference as the definitive form of modern evil (in Echoes from the Holocaust: Reflections on a Dark Time, eds. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers, Temple University Press, 1988). Even if Mr. Justice Nanavati is correct in saying there is no evidence connecting Rajiv Gandhi or other senior leaders to the killings, their moral guilt is manifest from their behaviour both during the violence and after. At no time did either Rajiv Gandhi or any other senior Minister display the slightest interest in understanding how such a terrible crime could have been committed on their watch, in ordering an inquiry, in ensuring that forensic and other forms of evidence were collected in a timely fashion so that the guilt of the perpetrators could be established swiftly. This is the way a leadership that was genuinely unaware of what was going on would have acted after the event. Conversely, it is only a government that knew it had something dreadful to hide that could behave the way the Rajiv Gandhi Government did in the weeks, months, and even years following November 1984. Shabby attempts were made to shut down the relief camps and send the victims of the violence back to their burnt-out homes within a week of the massacre (the High Court had to intervene to put a stop to this). A judicial inquiry was set up only in mid-1985, which began collecting depositions only the following year. None of the politicians against whom credible charges existed was cross-examined. Hearings were held in camera. Meanwhile, the Delhi police worked overtime to sabotage the few criminal cases they had been forced to register. Only the na??ve or the politically motivated can believe that this was happenstance, the product of a few bad apples. Dots not connected Modern states do not allow small men like Jagdish Tytler, Dharamdas Shastri and Sajjan Kumar to unleash - as part of some sort of private initiative - murder on a genocidal scale. Modern states do not allow their police system to fall apart, except by design. Modern states do not allow Army commanders to say they do not have enough troops to do the job at hand. Littered through Mr. Justice Nanavati's text are all the telltale dots of official guilt but these have been left unconnected, allowing the institutional rot to remain and infect our body politic again in the future. His philosophical approach - in which effects can exist without causes - does not augur well for the Gujarat violence inquiry report he will prepare next. After initially prevaricating, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ousted Jagdish Tytler from his Cabinet. But this is, at best, a rectification of the error he made in inducting Mr. Tytler in the first place. Dr. Singh has also promised the re-opening of cases mentioned in the Nanavati report, including those in which his party colleagues stand accused. In fact, this process has to be more thorough. Every 1984-related case that ended in an acquittal - particularly those where Congress leaders or policemen were the defendants - should be re-opened using the Supreme Court's Best Bakery judgment as legal precedent. A special court needs to be established with a dedicated prosecutorial team that enjoys the confidence of the victims so that these cases can proceed expeditiously. Finally, the Government must introduce a well-formulated law to deal with genocidal or mass violence of the kind experienced in Delhi in 1984 or Gujarat in 2002. It is well known that the Indian Penal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code, and the Indian Evidence Act are not equipped to deal with such incidents. Dereliction of duty should be considered as serious an offence in a situation of mass violence as active connivance with the mob. The law must enshrine the principles of vicarious criminal and administrative liability as well as the doctrine of command responsibility - both settled concepts in international humanitarian law. The failure of a policeman, bureaucrat or Minister to take "all necessary and reasonable measures" within his or her power to prevent or repress the commission of mass violence must render the individual concerned liable for prosecution and exemplary punishment. Unfortunately - but typically - the draft law prepared by the Ministry of Home Affairs - and now being considered by the Law Ministry - proposes none of these things |
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