Palash Speaks

CIA Plans to Disrupt Venezuela Election
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
Jewish human rights group launches four-nation Nazi hunt in South America

By Jeannette Neumann
ASSOCIATED PRESS

2:48 p.m. November 27, 2007

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – A Jewish human rights group launched a “last chance” hunt for surviving Nazis in South America on Tuesday, hoping to track down perpetrators of genocide before they die of old age.
“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli Simon Wiesenthal Center as he announced the campaign.
The No. 2 Nazi on the center's most-wanted list is Dr. Aribert Heim, who is believed to be in either Chile or Argentina, Zuroff said. “The whole program would be worth it just if we found Heim.”
The Wiesenthal Center is offering a $460,000 reward for information leading to the capture and prosecution of Heim, who it says worked as a “doctor” in three concentration camps, injecting the drug phenol directly into the hearts of Jews and other prisoners to kill them. The Austrian and German governments put up part of the reward money.
Heim's daughter is currently living in Chile, Zuroff said, and the former Nazi doctor continues to maintain a bank account in Germany containing more than $1.5 million.
If alive, Heim, known as “Doctor Death,” would be 93 years old.
“I'm sure, God forbid, that if someone murdered your grandmother, and we found that murderer 60 years later, it wouldn't very much matter to you if that person was 70, 80 or 90,” Zuroff said.
“All of the people who committed these crimes murdered someone's grandmother or grandfather, father or mother, son or daughter,” he added.
“Operation: Last Chance” was first launched in 2002 in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
According to an annual report released earlier this year by the Wiesenthal Center, there are 1,018 ongoing investigations of Nazi war criminals in 14 countries. The yearlong period ending March 31 saw 21 convictions, primarily in Italy, a statistic that is “considerably higher than in past years,” Zuroff said.
Many Nazi war criminals fled to South America, especially to Argentina, after World War II.
In November 1995, former Nazi Capt. Erich Priebke was extradited from Argentina to Rome, where at 93 he is serving a life sentence for his role in the massacre of 335 Italian civilians in 1944.
Priebke had lived peacefully for decades in the Patagonia mountain town of San Carlos de Bariloche, where he was found and interviewed in 1994 by Sam Donaldson for the ABC News program “Prime Time Live.”
The most famous case was the 1960 capture in Buenos Aires of SS Col. Adolf Eichmann, the so-called architect of Adolf Hitler's final solution to exterminate Europe's Jews. Eichmann was hanged in 1962 in Israel, after a trial that led journalist Hannah Arendt to coin the term “the banality of evil.”
http://www.signonsa ndiego.com/ news/world/ 20071127- 1448-argentina- nazihunt. html
CIA Plans to Disrupt Venezuela Election
http://www.venezuel analysis. com/analysis/ 2914
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Emergency support rally for
Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution!
Stop the U.S. gov't/media slander campaign!
This Saturday, Dec. 1st at 1pm
Venezuelan Consulate
7 East 51th Street
(between 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue)
Take the E/V to 5th Ave or the 6 train to 51st St.
See below for other weekend events.
Click this link to endorse
http://answer. pephost.org/ site/Survey?
SURVEY_ID=4240& ACTION_REQUIRED= URI_ACTION_ USER_REQUESTS
Contact 212-694-8720 or nyc@answercoalition .org
for more information or to get involved.
On Sunday, December 2, the Venezuelan people will go to the polls once again to vote in a
referendum to reform the country's constitution. People in the United States who support
social justice need to stand with the Bolivarian Revolution in the face of U.S. government
threats and media lies.
The Venezuelan public has expressed its political will over and over again in the last
several years. This process has involved millions of people and been profoundly
democratic. But because their will contradicted the aims of U.S. imperialism, Washington
and the corporate media have slandered President Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan
revolution. They have grotesquely distorted, or simply invented, the political reality in
Venezuela.
As the struggle over Venezuela's future heats up -- and the traditional elite become more
desperate to halt the revolution's momentum -- the anti-Venezuela propaganda
campaign will intensify. There have been rumblings of another U.S.-backed coup attempt.
Progressive people in this country need to set the record straight and stand up in defense
of Venezuela's sovereignty.
On Saturday, December 1st, the day before the referendum in Venezuela, there will be an
emergency support rally in front of the Venezuelan Consulate at 7 East 51th Street
(between 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue). The rally will begin at 1pm, and then we will
march to CNN headquarters to protest the misinformation propagated by the U.S.
corporate media. Click this link to endorse.
Call 212-694-8720 or email nyc@answercoalition .org for more information.
Endorsers: ANSWER Coalition, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Cuba Solidarity New York,
Lucha (Columbia University), ANSWER Club (Bronx Community College), Red de Resistencia
Revolucionaria, Iglesia de San Romero - UCC,
Venezuela's constitutional reforms
The proposed reforms are aimed at building a "social economy," strengthening grassroots
communal councils, allowing unlimited presidential reelections so that option is "the
sovereign decision of the constituent people of Venezuela" (similar to the political process
in countries like England, France, Germany and Australia), lowering the eligible voting age
from 18 to 16, guaranteeing free university education to the highest level, prohibiting
foreign funding of elections and political activity, and reducing the work week to 36 hours
to promote more employment.
Unlike traditional political debates, the discussions of the reforms occurred nationwide
and involved massive public participation. In a 47-day period, some 9,020 public events
were held. Over 10 million copies of the reforms were distributed to the public, and one
poll found that over 77 percent of the Venezuelan people had read them.
This democratic and social campaign is not just a step forward for the Venezuelan people.
It is an example of what is needed by millions of people around the world—and right here
in New York City!
Other weekend support events
The Venezuelan opposition is planning a protest against constitutional reform on Dec. 2 -
come show your support for the democratic process that is taking place in Venezuela! The
rally will be followed by an event in the Bronx.
Sunday, Dec. 2 at 11:30 am
Venezuelan Consulate
7 East 51st Street
(between 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue)
Take the E to 5th Ave or the 6 train to 51st St.*
Sunday, Dec. 2 at 3:30pm
El Maestro Community Center
Juan Laporte's Boxing Gym
677 Elton Avenue, Bronx
Between 153rd St and 154th St., Corner of 3rd Avenue
A Short History
of the Human Rights Movement
http://www.hrweb.org/history.html
Early Political, Religious, and Philosophical Sources
The concept of human rights has existed under several names in European thought for many centuries, at least since the time of King John of England. After the king violated a number of ancient laws and customs by which England had been governed, his subjects forced him to sign the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, which enumerates a number of what later came to be thought of as human rights. Among them were the right of the church to be free from governmental interference, the rights of all free citizens to own and inherit property and be free from excessive taxes. It established the right of widows who owned property to choose not to remarry, and established principles of due process and equality before the law. It also contained provisions forbidding bribery and official misconduct.
The political and religious traditions in other parts of the world also proclaimed what have come to be called human rights, calling on rulers to rule justly and compassionately, and delineating limits on their power over the lives, property, and activities of their citizens.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe several philosophers proposed the concept of "natural rights," rights belonging to a person by nature and because he was a human being, not by virtue of his citizenship in a particular country or membership in a particular religious or ethnic group. This concept was vigorously debated and rejected by some philosophers as baseless. Others saw it as a formulation of the underlying principle on which all ideas of citizens' rights and political and religious liberty were based.
In the late 1700s two revolutions occurred which drew heavily on this concept. In 1776 most of the British colonies in North America proclaimed their independence from the British Empire in a document which still stirs feelings, and debate, the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

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We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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In 1789 the people of France overthrew their monarchy and established the first French Republic. Out of the revolution came the "Declaration of the Rights of Man."
The term natural rights eventually fell into disfavor, but the concept of universal rights took root. Philosophers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and Henry David Thoreau expanded the concept. Thoreau is the first philosopher I know of to use the term, "human rights", and does so in his treatise, Civil Disobedience. This work has been extremely influential on individuals as different as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Gandhi and King, in particular, developed their ideas on non-violent resistance to unethical government actions from this work.
Other early proponents of human rights were English philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his Essay on Liberty, and American political theorist Thomas Paine in his essay, The Rights of Man.
The middle and late 19th century saw a number of issues take center stage, many of them issues we in the late 20th century would consider human rights issues. They included slavery, serfdom, brutal working conditions, starvation wages, child labor, and, in the Americas, the "Indian Problem", as it was known at the time. In the United States, a bloody war over slavery came close to destroying a country founded only eighty years earlier on the premise that, "all men are created equal." Russia freed its serfs the year that war began. Neither the emancipated American slaves nor the freed Russian serfs saw any real degree of freedom or basic rights for many more decades, however.
For the last part of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, though, human rights activism remained largely tied to political and religious groups and beliefs. Revolutionaries pointed at the atrocities of governments as proof that their ideology was necessary to bring about change and end the government's abuses. Many people, disgusted with the actions of governments in power, first got involved with revolutionary groups because of this. The governments then pointed at bombings, strike-related violence, and growth in violent crime and social disorder as reasons why a stern approach toward dissent was necessary.
Neither group had any credibility with the other and most had little or no credibility with uninvolved citizens, because their concerns were generally political, not humanitarian. Politically partisan protests often just encouraged more oppression, and uninvolved citizens who got caught in the crossfire usually cursed both sides and made no effort to listen to the reasons given by either.
Nonetheless many specific civil rights and human rights movements managed to affect profound social changes during this time. Labor unions brought about laws granting workers the right to strike, establishing minimum work conditions, forbidding or regulating child labor, establishing a forty hour work week in the United States and many European countries, etc. The women's rights movement succeeded in gaining for many women the right to vote. National liberation movements in many countries succeeded in driving out colonial powers. One of the most influential was Mahatma Ghandi's movement to free his native India from British rule. Movements by long-oppressed racial and religious minorities succeeded in many parts of the world, among them the U.S. Civil Rights movement.
In 1961 a group of lawyers, journalists, writers, and others, offended and frustrated by the sentencing of two Portugese college students to twenty years in prison for having raised their glasses in a toast to "freedom" in a bar, formed Appeal for Amnesty, 1961. The appeal was announced on May 28 in the London Observer's Sunday Supplement. The appeal told the stories of six "prisoners of conscience" from different countries and of different political and religious backgrounds, all jailed for peacefully expressing their political or religious beliefs, and called on governments everywhere to free such prisoners. It set forth a simple plan of action, calling for strictly impartial, non-partisan appeals to be made on behalf of these prisoners and any who, like them, had been imprisoned for peacefully expressed beliefs.
The response to this appeal was larger than anyone had expected. The one-year appeal grew, was extended beyond the year, and Amnesty International and the modern human rights movement were both born.
The modern human rights movement didn't invent any new principles. It was different from what preceeded it primarily in its explicit rejection of political ideology and partisanship, and its demand that governments everywhere, regardless of ideology, adhere to certain basic principles of human rights in their treatment of their citizens.
This appealed to a large group of people, many of whom were politically inactive, not interested in joining a political movement, not ideologically motivated, and didn't care about creating "the perfect society" or perfect government. They were simply outraged that any government dared abuse, imprison, torture, and often kill human beings whose only crime was in believing differently from their government and saying so in public. They (naively, according to many detractors) took to writing letters to governments and publicizing the plights of these people in hopes of persuading or embarrassing abusive governments into better behavior.
Like the early years of many movements, the early years of the modern human rights movement were rocky. "Appeal for Amnesty, 1961" had only the most rudimentary organization. The modern organization named Amnesty International gained the structure it has mostly by learning from mistakes. Early staff members operated with no oversight, and money was wasted. This led to establishing strict financial accountability. Early staff members and volunteers got involved in partisan politics while working on human rights violations in their own countries. This led to the principle that AI members were not, as a matter of practice, asked or permitted to work on cases in their country. Early campaigns failed because Amnesty was misinformed about certain prisoners. This led to the establishment of a formidable research section and the process of "adoption" of prisoners of conscience only after a thorough investigation phase.
The biggest lesson Amnesty learned, and for many the distinguishing feature of the organization, however, was to stick to what it knew and not go outside its mandate. A distinguished human rights researcher I know once said to me that, "Amnesty is an organization that does only one or two things, but does them extremely well." Amnesty International does not take positions on many issues which many people view as human rights concerns (such as abortion) and does not endorse or criticize any form of government. While it will work to ensure a fair trial for all political prisoners, it does not adopt as prisoners of conscience anyone who has used or advocated violence for any reason. It rarely provides statistical data on human rights abuses, and never compares the human rights records of one country with another. It sticks to work on behalf of individual prisoners, and work to abolish specific practices, such as torture and the death penalty.
A lot of people found this too restrictive. Many pro-democracy advocates were extremely upset when the organization dropped Nelson Mandela (at the time a black South African anti-apartheid activist in jail on trumped-up murder charges) from its list of adopted prisoners, because of his endorsing a violent struggle against apartheid. Others were upset that Amnesty would not criticize any form of government, even one which (like Soviet-style Communism, or Franco-style fascism) appeared inherently abusive and incompatible with respect for basic human rights. Many activists simply felt that human rights could be better served by a broader field of action.
Over the years combinations of these concerns and others led to formation of other human rights groups. Among them were groups which later merged to form Human Rights Watch, the first of them being Helsinki Watch in 1978. Regional human rights watchdog groups often operated under extremely difficult conditions, especially those in the Soviet Block. Helsinki Watch, which later merged with other groups to form Human Rights Watch, started as a few Russian activists who formed to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the human rights provisions in the Helsinki accords. Many of its members were arrested shortly after it was formed and had little chance to be active.
Other regional groups formed after military takeovers in Chile in 1973, in East Timor in 1975, in Argentina in 1976, and after the Chinese Democracy Wall Movement in 1979.
Although there were differences in philosophy, focus, and tactics between the groups, for the most part they remained on speaking terms, and a number of human rights activists belonged to more than one.
Recognition for the human rights movement, and Amnesty International in particular, grew during the 1970s. Amnesty gained permanent observer status as an NGO at the United Nations. Its reports became mandatory reading in legislatures, state departments and foreign ministries around the world. Its press releases received respectful attention, even when its recommendations were ignored by the governments involved. In 1977 it was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for its work.
Unfortunately, the Nobel Peace Prize didn't impress the governments Amnesty most wanted to get through to. That year the Argentine military dictatorship reportedly claimed that Amnesty was a front organization for the Soviet KGB. This supposedly occurred the same week that the Soviet government claimed Amnesty was run by the U.S. CIA, to the amusement of human rights activists and, presumably, embarrassment of certain people in Argentina and the Soviet Union.
An Introduction to the Human Rights Movement
http://www.hrweb.org/intro.html
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Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law...
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These are the second and third paragraphs of the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948 without a dissenting vote. It is the first multinational declaration mentioning human rights by name, and the human rights movement has largely adopted it as a charter. I'm quoting them here because it states as well or better than anything I've read what human rights are and why they are important.
The United Nations Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN Human Rights convenants were written and implemented in the aftermath of the Holocaust, revelations coming from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bomb, and other horrors smaller in magnitude but not in impact on the individuals they affected. A whole lot of people in a number of countries had a crisis of conscience and found they could no longer look the other way while tyrants jailed, tortured, and killed their neighbors.

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In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me... and by that time, there was no one to speak up for anyone.
-- Martin Niemoeller, Pastor,
German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church
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Many also realized that advances in technology and changes in social structures had rendered war a threat to the continued existence of the human race. Large numbers of people in many countries lived under the control of tyrants, having no recourse but war to relieve often intolerable living conditions. Unless some way was found to relieve the lot of these people, they could revolt and become the catalyst for another wide-scale and possibly nuclear war. For perhaps the first time, representatives from the majority of governments in the world came to the conclusion that basic human rights must be protected, not only for the sake of the individuals and countries involved, but to preserve the human race.

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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
President of the United States
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert Einstein
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My Reasons for Working for Human Rights
My reasons for believing in and supporting human rights stem from what I saw growing up in El Paso, Texas, less than two miles from the border with Mexico and Mexico's second largest city, Cuidad Juarez. Like most border cities, Juarez was filled with very poor people who had left the countryside looking for a better life. They were prey to every kind of abuse, from harrassment to false imprisonment to beatings to rape to politically-motivated murder by authorities and others on both sides of the border with more power and influence than they had.

I doubt I would have known such things existed from my own experience. It became part of my experience, though, and I've never since been able to take my freedom and lack of fear for granted.
Human rights
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Magna Carta or "Great Charter" was the world's first document containing commitments by a sovereign to his people to respect certain legal rightsHuman rights refers to "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law."[1] The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."[2]
The idea of human rights descended from the philosophical idea of natural rights which are considered to exist even when trampled by governments or society;[3] some recognize virtually no difference between the two and regard both as labels for the same thing, while others choose to keep the terms separate to eliminate association with some features traditionally associated with natural rights.[4] Natural rights, in particular, are rights of the individual, and are considered beyond the authority of a future government or international body to dismiss. John Locke is perhaps the most prominent philosopher that developed this theory.[5]
9.1 Human rights organizations

[edit] Human rights sources
[edit] The United Nations
Main articles: United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The UN General AssemblyThe United Nations is the only international entity with jurisdiction for universal human rights legislation. All UN organs have advisory roles to the United Nations Security Council. Article 1-3 of the United Nations Charter states "To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."
The United Nations Human Rights Council is involved with the investigation into violations of human rights.[6] The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principle judicial organ of the United Nations.[7]

[edit] Europe
Main articles: European Convention on Human Rights, European Social Charter, and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
The European Convention on Human Rights defines and guarantees since 1950 human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe. All 47 member states of the Council of Europe have signed this Convention and are therefore under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In order to prevent torture and inhuman or degrading treatment (see Article 3 of the Convention), the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has been set up.

European Court of Human Rights in StrasbourgHuman rights commonly include:
security rights that prohibit crimes such as murder, massacre, torture and rape
liberty rights that protect freedoms in areas such as belief and religion, association, assembling and movement
political rights that protect the liberty to participate in politics by expressing themselves, protesting, participating in a republic
due process rights that protect against abuses of the legal system such as arrest and imprisonment without trial, secret trials and excessive punishments
equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law and nondiscrimination
welfare rights (also known as economic rights) that require the provision of, e.g., education, paid holidays, and protections against severe poverty and starvation
group rights
[edit] History of human rights
[edit] Human Rights in the ancient world
Ur-Nammu, king of Ur in ca. 2050 BC created the Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest legal codex that survives today. Several other sets of laws were created in Mesopotamia including the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1780 BC), one of the best preserved examples of this type of document. It shows rules, and punishments if those rules are broken, on a variety of matters including women's rights, children's rights and slave rights.
The prefaces of these codes invoked the Mesopotamian gods for divine sanction. Societies have often derived the origins of human rights in religious documents. The Vedas, the Bible, the Qur'an and the Analects of Confucius are some of the oldest written sources that address questions of people's duties, rights, and responsibilities.

[edit] Persian Empire
See also: Persian Empire

The Cyrus cylinder of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian EmpireThe Achaemenid Persian Empire of ancient Iran established unprecedented principles of human rights in the 6th century BC under Cyrus the Great. After his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, the king issued the Cyrus cylinder, discovered in 1879 and recognized by many today as the first human rights document. The cylinder declared that citizens of the empire would be allowed to practice their religious beliefs freely. It also abolished slavery, so all the palaces of the kings of Persia were built by paid workers in an era where slaves typically did such work.[8] These two reforms were reflected in the biblical books of Chronicles, Nehemiah, and Ezra, which state that Cyrus released the followers of Judaism from slavery and allowed them to migrate back to their land. The cylinder now lies in the British Museum, and a replica is kept at the United Nations Headquarters.
In the Persian Empire, citizens of all religions and ethnic groups were also given the same rights, while women had the same rights as men. The Cyrus cylinder also documents the protection of the rights to liberty and security, freedom of movement, the right of property, and economic and social rights.[9]

[edit] Maurya Empire
See also: Maurya Empire
The Maurya Empire of ancient India established unprecedented principles of civil rights in the 3rd century BC under Ashoka the Great. After his brutal conquest of Kalinga in circa 265 BC, he felt remorse for what he had done, and as a result, adopted Buddhism. From then, Ashoka, who had been described as "the cruel Ashoka" eventually came to be known as "the pious Ashoka". During his reign, he pursued an official policy of nonviolence (ahimsa) and the protection of human rights, as his chief concern was the happiness of his subjects.[10] The unnecessary slaughter or mutilation of animals was immediately abolished, such as sport hunting and branding. Ashoka also showed mercy to those imprisoned, allowing them outside one day each year, and offered common citizens free education at universities. He treated his subjects as equals regardless of their religion, politics or caste, and constructed free hospitals for both humans and animals. Ashoka defined the main principles of nonviolence, tolerance of all sects and opinions, obedience to parents, respect for teachers and priests, being liberal towards friends, humane treatment of servants, and generosity towards all. These reforms are described in the Edicts of Ashoka.
In the Maurya Empire, citizens of all religions and ethnic groups also had rights to freedom, tolerance, and equality. The need for tolerance on an egalitarian basis can be found in the Edicts of Ashoka, which emphasize the importance of tolerance in public policy by the government. The slaughter or capture of prisoners of war was also condemned by Ashoka.[11] Slavery was also non-existent in ancient India.[12]

[edit] Early Islamic Caliphate
Main article: Early reforms under Islam
Many reforms in human rights took place under Islam between 610 and 661, including the period of Muhammad's (Peace Be Upon Him) mission and the rule of the four immediate successors who established the Rashidain Caliphate. Historians generally agree that Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) preached against what he saw as the social evils of his day,[13] and that Islamic social reforms in areas such as social security, family structure, slavery, and the rights of women and ethnic minorities improved on what was present in existing Arab society at the time.[14][15][16][17][18]

Appeal to Left Front Partners to Withdraw from West Bengal State Government
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
We endorse the Appeal to Left Front Partners to Withdraw from West Bengal State Government Petition to The General Secretaries of Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Communist Party of India (CPI), All India Forward Block (AIF.
to send money online for the relief of the distressed people of nandigram Inbox
hindol bhattacharjee to me
show details 11:48 am (7 hours ago)
you have to write in this format
Beneficiary's Name:
Janasqwastha Swadhikar Mancha
A/C No. S/B 24941 with canara bank, Sealdah, Kolkata( 0396)swift code: CNRBINBBCFD Canara Bank A/C No 2000193008894 with Wachovia Bank, Newyork, Swift Code: PMBPUS3NNYC

Hindol Bhattacharjee
9830751535
To: The General Secretaries of Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Communist Party of India (CPI), All India Forward Block (AIF
Respected friends,
We are horrified by the barbaric attack on the people of Nandigram by a veritable army of CPI(M) cadres and anti-social elements. In a clearly pre-planned move, co-ordinated with the West Bengal government, the CPI(M) is out to recapture what it identifies as lost territory, and to teach the people of Nandigram a lesson for originally resisting the acquisition of their lands for establishment of an SEZ.
The ongoing atrocities, which includes the surrounding of Nandigram from all sides, penetration by armed brigades of CPI(M) cadres, widespread firing, looting, destruction and burning of homes and eviction of thousands of people all signify this absolutely fascist move. The attackers have erected road-blocks all around Nandigram and have physically assaulted and prevented human rights workers and social activists from entering Nandigram, and have also prevented the injured from getting medical attention. More disturbingly, the police has remained a silent spectator, suggesting direct abetment by the state government of West Bengal. These horrifying atrocities, which have given rise to a humanitarian crisis, are being committed by the CPI(M) in collusion with the state government, which is a government of Left parties like yours, and would become a permanent blot on the history of the Left movement in India.
We have seen, and greatly appreciated, the courageous and pro-people stand your respective parties had taken after the 14th March massacre in Nandigram. Together with the outpouring of indignation and protests by all sections of the people, it was your constant pressure that made the West Bengal government back off from acquiring the land of Nandigram. At this critical juncture in front of the Left in India, when all the gains made by peoples' struggles and sacrifices in creating the Left Front is in danger of being lost by the unilateral and fascistic action of one party, we appeal to you to take a stand and clearly come out on the side of the poor and working people. We request you to condemn the actions of the CPI(M) and demand a halt to the atrocities in Nandigram, withdraw from the Left Front, withdraw your ministers from the West Bengal state cabinet and act in unison with the greater peoples' movement that is taking place around Nandigram and other mass struggles.
The CPI(M) is already isolated from the people, it is up to you to isolate it from the Left Front. It is up to you stop these brutalities being inflicted on the people and to prevent the collapse of peoples' trust in the Left movement in India. History has put a great responsibility on your shoulders today, and we sincerely hope that you would take these actions which would express your long-standing commitment to the common people of India.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned

Stalinism and Fascism: A Comparison
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/print/zize01_.html The Two Totalitarianisms Slavoj Žižek A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological identity.
Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to
which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.
In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are all its servants, the leader included. A Nazi leader, having delivered a speech, stood and silently accepted the applause, but under Stalinism, when the obligatory applause exploded at the end of the leader’s speech, he stood up and joined in. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler responds to the Nazi salute by raising his hand and saying: ‘Heil myself!’ This is pure humour because it could never have happened in reality, while Stalin effectively did ‘hail himself’ when he joined others in the applause. Consider the fact that, on Stalin’s birthday, prisoners would send him congratulatory telegrams from the darkest gulags: it isn’t possible to imagine a Jew in Auschwitz sending Hitler such a telegram. It is a tasteless distinction, but it supports the contention that under Stalin, the ruling ideology presupposed a space in
which the leader and his subjects could meet as servants of Historical Reason. Under Stalin, all people were, theoretically, equal.
We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one in Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’. Herein lies the flaw (and the bias) of all attempts, such as that of the conservative historian Ernst Nolte, to adopt a neutral position – i.e. to ask why we don’t apply the same standards to the Communists as we apply to the Nazis. If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht and others be pardoned for their much longer engagement with Stalinism? This position reduces Nazism to a reaction to, and repetition of, practices already found in Bolshevism – terror, concentration camps, the struggle to the death against political enemies – so that the ‘original sin’ is that of Communism.
In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas’s principal opponent in the so-called Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be regarded as the incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did Nazism, reprehensible as it was, appear after Communism: it was an excessive reaction to the Communist threat, and all its horrors were merely copies of those already perpetrated under Soviet Communism. Nolte’s idea is that Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian form, and the difference between them consists only in the difference between the empirical agents which fill their respective structural roles (‘Jews’ instead of ‘class enemy’). The usual liberal reaction to Nolte is that he relativises Nazism, reducing it to a secondary echo of the Communist evil. However, even if we leave aside the unhelpful comparison between Communism – a thwarted attempt at liberation – and the radical evil of Nazism, we should still concede Nolte’s central point. Nazism was effectively
a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces
this essential antagonism.
It’s appropriate, then, to recognise the tragedy of the October Revolution: both its unique emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. We should have the honesty to acknowledge that the Stalinist purges were in a way more ‘irrational’ than the Fascist violence: its excess is an unmistakable sign that, in contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was a case of an authentic revolution perverted. Under Fascism, even in Nazi Germany, it was possible to survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’ everyday life, if one did not involve oneself in any oppositional political activity (and, of course, if one were not Jewish). Under Stalin in the late 1930s, on the other hand, nobody was safe: anyone could be unexpectedly denounced, arrested and shot as a traitor. The irrationality of Nazism was ‘condensed’ in anti-semitism – in its belief in the Jewish plot – while the irrationality of Stalinism pervaded the entire social body. For that reason, Nazi
police investigators looked for proofs and traces of active opposition to the regime, whereas Stalin’s investigators were happy to fabricate evidence, invent plots etc.
We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon. The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which suggested that the three great world-systems – New Deal capitalism, Fascism and Stalinism – tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally organised, ‘administered’ society; Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and, finally, in the 1980s, the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime – interesting, but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism. How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the conditions of the
failure of the emancipatory project abstain from analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’? And was its focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the real trauma?
It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on
anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.
From the LRB letters page: [ 31 March 2005 ] Clive James [ 21 April 2005 ] Phil Edwards.
Slavoj Žižek is a dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst. He also co-directs the International Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck College. The Parallax View appeared last year.

The No-spin Zone - Nandigram, facts and myths (ongoing commentary)
http://sanhati.com/news/415/
Nov. 26, 2007 - Ration riots - The Disconnect and the Connections - Debarshi Das
Nov. 24, 2007- Sushilbabur Maaneboi, or how to tell a Sushil from a Harmad and other exam questions - Cheatsheet by Saikat Bandyopadhyay [PDF, Bengali] »
Nov. 24, 2007- The Fig Leaf Falls - Debarshi Das
Nov. 21, 2007- An Autumn of Discontent - Debarshi Das
Nov. 20, 2007- Prior to Nandigram - Debarshi Das
Nov. 18, 2007- The spark of Nandigram - Debarshi Das
Nov. 16, 2007- The CPI(M)’s Harmad Bahini - human shields, rape as a weapon and other parallels with private militias the world over - Siddhartha Mitra
Nov. 16, 2007- Which side are you on, Mr Bhattacharjee? Neo-liberal games and the cloak of turf war - Debarshi Das
Nov. 15, 2007- How long shall we sing the TINA tune? Nandigram comes to me as burning torch of courage. - Suvarup Saha
Nov. 13, 2007- “Bol ki lab aazad hain tere” - Debarshi Das
Nov. 12, 2007- The struggle of memory against forgetting… - Debarshi Das
Nov. 11, 2007- Are Maoists the new WMDs? - Debarshi Das
Nov. 11, 2007- Who is fighting this turf-war, and why sides need to be taken - Partho Sarathi Ray
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Ration riots - The Disconnect and the Connections
By Debarshi Das, Sanhati
Dhanupada Das was a landless farm labourer in Gonnaserendi village of Bardhaman district. He used to earn Rs 45 plus a kilo and a half of rice the day he found work. His son Paresh, a cowherd, could not attend school. They have to buy rice at Rs. 14 a kilogram in open market. The family cannot remember the last time they had dal. The vegetables consist of leaves of locally found plants. This family comes under the APL category. On 3rd of October, villagers accosted the local ration dealer; they wanted to know why wheat allotment under APL had not been available for the last 11 months. Police first lathi charged, allegedly under a local CPM leader’s instruction and then opened fire. Dhanupada was shot dead. For assets, the widow, Suchana, has a run-down hut and a cow which they have leased in. They can keep the milk if it calves.
Sitting in his comfortable drawing room, the village Panchayat chief Ansarul Haq theorises, “Those who are creating trouble are reactionary elements.” He does not know if the village ration dealer is honest or not, but “He is a good man.” The villagers were alleging that Panchayat leaders themselves had ordered the firing. The chief responds, “They were fining the dealers. We opposed the fining of the dealers. They don’t understand we were doing so in the interest of the people.” He assures that he was considering if the widow could be given widow dole.
Langalhata village of Birbhum district was home of Ayub Shekh. “He fell to a police bullet after joining a team that had gone to the block development officer at Labhpur in Birbhum to demand action against corrupt dealers.” After he was killed in the ration turmoil, instead of a ration card, a job card was found in his pocket. Perhaps Rs. 6.75 a kilogram wheat under the ration scheme does not entirely explain the fire which engulfed south Bengal. The link between the right to work and food security is clear to the poorest and the illiterate. In Radhakrishnapur, Chandmoni Tudu, does not whine over not getting her rightful supply of grains. She is angry because she had worked for 7 days and she had to put thumb impression under 14 days. The police had refused to lodge a complaint. On handing out morsels of subsistence people may have given up on the ruling dispensation. They are demanding the right to work, to work with dignity. When this is not being met, the starkest and most unjust manifestations of the nexus, the ration shops, are being raged.
Swati Bhattacharya further writes, “Touring the villages one could not find support for the hypothesis that the ration system is collapsing due to APL customers; and hence the poorest BPL customers are bearing the brunt….There might be difference in the central allocations, but ration scam does not differentiate between APL and BPL. That the theory of class conflict one hears on ration scam is a cruel parody of reality can be realised if one is a little observant while visiting the villages.” When the whole body is infected it is indeed ludicrous to amputate the APL part. The enormity of the situation is brought home by the following pieces of statistics. Percentage of people who get the right quantity of ration allocation is 2% in Bengal (national average 8%, Bihar 6%). Percentage getting the right quality is even worse at 1% (9%, 14%). Percentage of those who get their rations regularly is 9% (23%, 10%). In 2002, a survey was conducted in 24 states investigating the administration of the Public Distribution System. Tamil Nadu topped the list, West Bengal was at 17. NREGA implementation in the state is equally abysmal. The complicity of the reactionary-hating ‘Leftists’ becomes clear as one reads, “One ration dealer of Sonamukhi in Bankura, accused of hoarding foodgrains, has admitted that he has been funding party programmes. “It would have been impossible to run my business without the help of the party,” he said…. A party source who refused to be named, said: “Ours is the ruling party with a strong organization down to the grassroots level. So, the leadership was very much aware that ration dealers sell foodgrains meant for public distribution in the black market. It is not possible for ration dealers to carry on the illegal business without backing from sections of the party.””
One woman member of the state Agricultural Labourers Forum is remarkably clear on the rural reality, “Land owners, school teachers, rice dealers will never do anything for us.” Aside from gaping poverty and getting killed by the aforesaid clique, one more thread binds Dhanupada Das of Gonnaserendi and Ayub Shekh of Langalhata together. Panchayat chiefs did not dare to visit their houses after the deaths.
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Nov. 24, 2007 - Sushilbabur Maaneboi, or how to tell a Sushil from a Harmad and other exam questions [PDF, Bengali] »
A cheatsheet by Saikat Bandyopadhyay, Sanhati
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Nov. 24, 2007 - The Fig Leaf Falls
By Debarshi Das, Sanhati
Taslima Nasreen is no stranger to communal politics. Some would sniff she revels in being its victim. It seems neither does the greatest defender of secularism in the national political space, namely the Communist Party of India (Marxist), consider the same politics beyond the pale. On 28th November, 2003 the Left Front government in West Bengal banned Taslima Nasreen’s “Dwikhondito.” Some prominent Muslim citizens had appealed to the government that “the book contains false and fictitious comments regarding the holy Quran and commandments of Islam. This may jeopardise the tradition of communal peace among the Hindus and Muslims in the state.” Curiously the signatories were not the run of the mill skullcap Mullahs. They included a former Madrassa College principal, a former professor of Calcutta University cum member of the state Planning Board, and strangest of all, the incisive and robust Bengali writer Syed Mustafa Siraj.
The State Secretary of the party Anil Biswas had the familiar words, “The book has been banned because it can spread communal tension. The government has done this as a precautionary measure.” For good measure, he reminded us that the Left Front government had not banned a single book for political reasons in its 26 years of rule. What is to be noted is that all the books of literature which had been banned before the LF, were due to court orders and not because of government intervention (on charge of obscenity principally – Samaresh Basu’s “Bibar,” “Prajapati,” Buddhadeb Basu’s “Raatbhor Brishti”). The litterateur chief minister was silent when asked if banning of a book did not violate the freedom of writers and artistes in a democratic country.
However, there were people who were not ready to stomach the nose poking by the state. On 22nd September, 2005 on an appeal by APDR (Association for Protection of Democratic Rights) the Calcutta High Court revoked the ban. The Left Front government had an unusual comrade in this jihad on freedom of expression. The Anandabazar Patrika of 23rd September reports, “The lawyer of the State Government had appealed the Division Bench for a stay order of six weeks. On behalf of a Muslim organisation, Idrish Ali also appealed for a stay order of six weeks. This was turned down.”
The two reunited on the streets of Kolkata on 21st November, 2007. Idrish Ali of All India Minority Forum was one of the organisers for the proposed three hour blockade of Kolkata. They demonstration was against the Nandigram massacre, mishandling of Rizwanur Rahman case, and demanding cancellation of visa for Taslima Nasreen. Gradually, however, the last demand engulfed the other two. For five hours central Kolkata was at the mercy of a communal rabble. This is the first time since 1992’s Babri Masjid that the city witnessed dusk to dawn curfew in a number of localities. Questions have started to be asked as to why the police did not respond swiftly enough. And indeed the paralysis has a longer history. The administration did precious little when in late June a local imam announced a reward for eliminating her.
Doubt condenses into suspicion when Biman Bose, after a day of shameful ineptitude and prostration to Muslim fundamentalists, declares that she should better accommodate to fascist demands (later retracted). And suspicion almost reaches conviction as one learns “the Left Front government on Thursday [22nd November] nudged the controversial Bangladeshi writer to leave the state for Jaipur…the Buddha government liaised with Rajasthan Foundation, a body of Rajasthani businessmen in Bengal and led by a top cement manufacturer, to make arrangements for her stay in Jaipur.” Could not the progressive government of the day stand up to Muslim fundamentalism, as it supposedly does to the RSS Vanar Senas? Was this fleeing of the incompetent or is there any cynical electoral calculus underlying?
Perhaps it’s all a matter of appropriating political space. It would be a folly to ignore ‘Nandigram’ in the list of agenda of the Kolkata demonstration of AIMF. As the ‘Left’ is renouncing the anti-imperialist, pro-people stand, these popular demands would search for articulation from some quarters. As Germany and Iran have shown, visceral forces of fascism and religious fundamentalism would have a natural tendency to fill up the vacuum and to channelise people’s rage into destructive routes. It would be a failure of ominous proportions for the left movement in India if it does not recognise this and as an ad hoc measure, submits to opportunistic electoral deals.
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Nov. 21, 2007- An Autumn of Discontent
By Debarshi Das, Sanhati
Starting from mid-September CPM’s hold over rural Bengal began to get questioned in a violent way. Mainly in eight districts of south Bengal, there were spontaneous and repeated attacks on the stores of ration dealers, their houses were looted and torched, Panchayat members were beaten up, local CPM leaders were accosted and roughed up, even the police were attacked when they came to protect the property of the wealthy and the influential. The correlation of attack on ration dealers and CPM leaders is not surprising. On 6th October The Anandabazar Patrika reports, “On Friday [5th October] the CPM State Committee discussed issues such as, a part of the party may have got involved in the ration scam, through a nexus with the ration dealers they may have denied people their rightful supply. The district leaders were instructed to assuage people’s anger by organising meetings and gatherings. In Bankura and Birbhum districts there were attacks on the houses of two CPM leaders. Arson, beating up of dealers, vandalising, tension have continued.” After four days, the same paper reports, due to continuing lawlessness finger pointing has started within the Left Front. “A part of the political set up is questioning why the Food Department, under Forward Bloc, had not taken adequate measures so that the situation could not go out of control. In fact the chief minister himself is dissatisfied with the working of the Food Department in the context of ration scam.” The Forward Bloc was not to keep quiet. It tried to pass the buck to corruption at the Panchayat level. Further, a leader of the party remarked, ‘If there is an investigation our people will be only 10% of the guilty, CPM’s will be 90%!’ In the same vein a leader of the Left Front said, ‘Nothing is working here – everyone is getting his pound of flesh depending on his might’”.
On 8th November, Swati Bhattacharya, a well known journalist with the Anandabazar Patrika, writes of Kotalpukur village in Bankura district where there was firing by a dealer wounding five villagers, “Rajob Ali, a bullet wound in his leg, says, ‘Every Monday they used to sell ration rice and wheat openly in Sonamukhi market.’” In Radhamohanpur the complain was, “Supply used to get sold from the point of the wholesaler, the dealers would not even bring it to the village. ‘They have kept us in the dark, be it in job cards or ration cards. There are no mid day meals for two months a year, the gruel of Anganwadi has stopped for more than a week now. No one has the guts to stand up to the leaders. There is no use of the Panchayat.’” Moksed Sardar, a member of the village Development Council says, “We have repeatedly said the ration shop must be opened four days a week, notices should be put up. The Food Inspector asks us, who are you? Neither does the Panchayat inform us of anything.” Dharmadas Mandal, a village Education Committee member of Dhulia villages says, “Till this day I have not got any account of the mid day meals. They beat us up if we complain on corruption.” In Basanti Bajar, South 24 Pargana district, Mohammad Anisur Rahman laments, “People whom we have elected tell us they would not tolerate our protest.”
Though, “the supply of essential commodities through the PDS has been the cornerstone of Left politics in West Bengal” the response of the ruling alliance and especially CPM to this crisis has been curious. Any leftist worth his salt would recognise the demand for food as one of the key facets shaping his politics. District Secretary and State Committee member, Amol Haldar’s reaction, “This is not an attack by the people. Criminals are involved in this. We had protested against lawlessness and therefore have become the target. If this continues, we shall have to retort.” Chairman of the Left Front, Biman Bose, never short of words, offers, “This is a conspiracy for breaking down the public distribution system.”. Some leaders, have been more brave. Sanat Pramanik, Zonal Committee Secretary, Nalhati almost issued a threat, “The Party will be forced to hit back.” The State Committee member Arun Chouduri nearly confessed, “Ours is a large party, there are plenty of members. All of them cannot be controlled.”.
But most strangely, there were talks that the burden of APL (above poverty line) beneficiaries was creating distress for the BPL (below poverty line) clients. “A part of the political establishment is now demanding APL should be scrapped. Only BPL should remain. That would mitigate the problem considerably”. Perhaps Mr. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is aware that neo-liberal thinking is in the same lines. Sugata Marjit, a well known economist writes in the Anandabazar Patrika of 23rd October, “It would have been far better if the ration system was folded up gradually and open market made more competitive.”
Did not Nandigram, and Singur before that, play a role of catalyst in the flare up?
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Nov. 20, 2007: Prior to Nandigram
By Debarshi Das, Sanhati
If the Nandigram churnings had been confined within a few municipalities, factories and colleges the Communist Party of India (Marxist) would not have been so much worried. The indomitable Benoy Konar would not have ventured to advice the Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, to fly a Trinamul Congress flag or would not have asked the High Court chief justice whether the police carry gangajal . What perhaps made them jittery and more prone to violence, both physical and verbal, was that Nandigram became a symbol that rural Bengal is done with CPM and can defy it. The party has traditionally depended on its rural mass base which catapulted it to power and which was consolidated further by the land reform programme Operation Barga. From 1952 to 1972 it was in fact the Congress party which used to call the shots in rural Bengal.
During the initial Left Front governments a few things were given priority. One, patta land, or vested government land, be distributed among the landless and small peasants; two, bargadars, or tenant cultivators’ legal rights be properly protected; three, a three tier Panchayat system was introduced which had its first election in 1978. About 60% of total distribution of land however happened before 1977, that is, even before the LF government came to power. Nevertheless the combination of economic and political measures played a major role in uplifting a wide swathe of rural masses. During 1980-1983 agricultural production in West Bengal rose by 5.83% per annum, one of the highest recorded by any state in the country. Rural poverty fell substantially from 73% (1973-74) to 48% (1988). Thereafter things started to slow down. The rate of growth in agriculture was only about 3% per year during 1992-1995. The decline of poverty slowed down as well. The percentage of people living below the poverty line was 44% in 1998-1999, that is, a fall of 4 percentage points in 10 years. Why did growth and decline in poverty slow down?
There are many reasons which have been emphasised by researchers. One major point is that land reform was by its very nature limited in its reach. One, the most numerous and vulnerable section, namely the landless labourers did not figure much in the entire agenda. In 1993 the minimum wage rate in Bengal was higher than only UP and Bihar and lower than states like Orissa, Assam, Madhya Pradesh etc. The growth rate of wage was also most tardy. Over 1983 to 1993 Bengal had the second lowest figure above. It was found out the keeping wages of agricultural labourers low was one of the main instruments in containing class conflict. Two, the landless and marginal peasants continue to get excluded from organised credit markets for lack of collaterals. Needless to say, access to credit is vital for meeting the cost of production and consumptio

Indian protest rocks Malaysia ahead of polls
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashchandrabiswas@gmail.com">palashchandrabiswas@gmail.com
Indian protest rocks Malaysia ahead of polls
By Mark Bendeich & Clarence Fernandez
http://ultracurrents.blogspot.com
Sun Nov 25, 2007 , REUTERS
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's ethnic Indian
community staged its biggest anti-government street
protest on Sunday when more than 10,000 pro testers
defied tear gas and water cannon to voice complaints
of racial discrimination.
The sheer size of the protest, called by a Hindu
rights group, represents a political challenge for the
government as it heads toward possible early elections
in the next few months.
Ethnic Indians from around the country swarmed into
Kuala Lumpur for the rally, despite a virtual
lock-down of the capital over the previous three days
and warnings from police and the government that
people should not take part.
"Malaysian Indians have never gathered in such large
numbers in this way...," said organizer P. Uthaya
Kumar, of the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf).
"They are frustrated and have no job opportunities in
the government or the private sector. They are not
given business licenses or places in university," he
said, adding that Indians were also incensed by some
recent demolitions of Hindu temples.
Riot police fired at the protesters with sustained
volleys of tear gas and jets of water laced with an
eye-stinging chemical, but it took more than five
hours to finally clear the streets of downtown Kuala
Lumpur, by then littered with empty gas canisters.
Veteran journalists and analysts could not recall a
bigger anti-government protest by ethnic Indians, who
make up about 7 percent of the population, although
some said a larger rally had been held over internal
Indian politics in the late 1980s.
Political columnist Zainon Ahmad said the protest
would shake the Indian community's establishment
party, the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), a junior
member of the ruling coalition.
"The MIC is severely challenged on this matter," he
said.
MIC leader S. Samy Vellu, who is also works minister,
denied the protest spelt trouble for his party. "We
represent the Indian community and will remain so," he
said in a statement.
But Vellu, who has himself voiced unease over a recent
Hindu temple demolition by local authorities outside
the capital, added: "There is still a lot to be done
for the Indians and we will continue with our
struggle."
"LACK OF OPPORTUNITIES"
Many protesters complained of a lack of educational
and business opportunities, saying a government
affirmative-action policy in favor of majority ethnic
Malays had marginalized them.
Malays make up about 60 percent of the population and,
according to official data, remain the poorest group
by some average measures such as household income.
Opposition groups say the most severe cases of poverty
exist among Indians.
Brought over as indentured labor from the late 1800s
by colonial ruler Britain, Indians worked Malaya's
rubber estates. These estates were later broken up,
forcing many unskilled Indian workers into poverty in
the city.
Ostensibly, Sunday's protesters wanted to hand a
petition to the British embassy in support of a legal
claim by Hindraf for reparations from Britain for
colonial-era abuses. But Hindraf said the protest was
also aimed at the Malaysian government.
"We are here for our rights," one protester told
Reuters as he sat cross-legged on the road.
"The British brought our forefathers here 150 years
ago," he added. "Whatever the government is supposed
to give us, to look after our welfare, well, they have
failed."
Police fired tear gas outside Kuala Lumpur's iconic
twin towers and five-star hotels. Curious tourists
ventured out to take a look but rushed back inside
once the gas stung their eyes.
At the Batu Caves, a Hindu place of worship just
outside the capital, police clashed with 2,000
protesters early on Sunday after barring entry to the
temple.
Many Malaysians, including an Indian Muslim group,
opposed the rally, fearing it could spark violence.
Malaysia has not experienced a major race riot since
1969, but many seasoned politicians fear racial and
religious tensions could flare again.
At least one policeman was injured when protesters hit
him with crash helmets, one officer said. Organizers
said 400 had been arrested and 19 injured. Police said
they had no figures.
It was the second crackdown this month on a
demonstration critical of the government, as
speculation grows that Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad
Badawi will call snap elections early next year. The
next election is not due until May 2009.
Early in November, about 10,000 protesters demanding
electoral reform defied a police ban to rally in the
capital.url:http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSKLR16504820071125
MALAYSIAN SHARIA @
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GqIhYxT__c&mode=user&search=
http://ultracurrents.blogspot.com

CONVERSIONS AND POLITICS OF HINDU RIGHT
- Sumit Sarkar
With the spread of liberation theologies, churches have been changing. Christian groups have been prominent in progressive movements. In the face of attacks, they have not retreated into secretarian or fundamentalists shells but have joined secular, liberal and Left formations. It is this progressive aspect of contemporary Christianity that arouses the greatest anger and fear among proponents of hindutva.
1. ATTACKS ON CHRISTIANS
POKHRAN blasts apart, it seems likely that BJP-Dominated rule at Delhi might come to be remembered above all for the concerted campaign against Christians. The Sangh parivar has always needed one or more enemy 'Other' to consolidate into an aggressive bloc the 'Hindu community' which it claims to represent and seeks to constitute. What is largely new is that over the past year Christians seem to have displaces Muslims as primary target.
The epicenter, so far as the number of incidents is concerned, has been BJP-ruled Gujarat, where already in August 1988 a fact-finding team sent by the Nishant Theatre Group, Delhi, saw many villages sporting the banner 'Vishwa Hindu Parishad welcomes you to Hindu Rashtra's village'. The earlier attacks were widely spread out, and not confined to the Dangs tribal area. Particularly gross incidents included that of Samuel Christian, whose body was exhumed from Kapadvanj cemetery (Nadiad district) on July 8, 1998 and thrown outside the Methodist church, and the attack on century-old Christian girls school at Rajkot on June 20, 1998 where amidst slogans of 'Jai Shri Ram', copies of the New Testament were torn out from the hands of students and 300 of them burnt. By August 1009, the All India Catholic Union had complied a list of 33 incidents in various parts of Gujarat, most of htem during the preceding six months. The targets were mostly Christians, but also included some Muslims - for they have certainly not been left off the hook altogether. Thus at Bardoli scores of shops owned by Muslims were burnt after an inter-religious marriage between a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl, and large number of Muslims of Randhikapur (Panchmahals_ and Sanjeli (Godhra) had to flee their homes following a couple of cases of similar inter-religious love affairs. (The Gujarat government's reaction was characteristic, and revealing: it set up a police cell to 'monitor', i.e. harass and discourage, inter-religious marriages. The same government has disbanded an earlier police cell that had been set up to investigate atrocities against women.)
Then, during Christmas week, no doubt to teach Christians a lesson for having had the temerity to organize a most impressive peaceful country2ide protest and shutdown of missionary schools on December 4, there came the obviously concerted, planned attack on Christian Dangs. Between December 25 and January 3, 24 churches, three schools, and six houses or shops were burnt, destroyed or damaged, and nine Christian tribals suffered serious injuries. "The only lights visible that black Christmas night, and the nights to come, were infernos of churches [Gonzalves]. Incidents in other states have been more sporadic, but in some cases even more horrifying. On September 23, 1998 there was the gang-rape of four nuns at Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. B.L.Sharma, former BJP MP and currently central secretary of the VHP, claimed that this was a result of the "anger of patriotic youth against anti-national forces…the direct result of conversions of Hindus to Christianity by the Christian priests." The subsequent assurance by VHP general secretary Giriraj Kishore that his organization was not condoning rape did not improve matters, for he demanded that "foreign missionaries should be removed from the country (Hindu, September 29, 1998; The Times of India, October 1998). And then in the last week of January 1999 came the burning alive at Monoharpur, Orissa, once again amidst slogans of 'Jai Shri Ram', of the Australian missionary doctor Staines and two of his children. Staines had left the comforts of first world life to serve for 40 years the lepers of this obscure village in India.
The sheer horror of the Staines murder, and the almost unbelievable fortitude, dignity and deeply moving Christian forgiveness with which his widow received the news, evoked powerful and wide spread emotional reactions both in India and abroad. "Serve lepers, do not burn those who serve them", ran the banner carried by some school children at a protest demonstration in Delhi on January 30, 1999 one of many throughout the country. Quite unusually, the initiative for protest rallies often came from students generally aloof from politics, as at Delhi colleges like Miranda or St. Stephens. The prime minister claimed that he was hanging his head in shame, and the intensity of reactions seems to have forced a certain threat, for the time being. But scattered incidents of violence and intimidation are still being reported, and there are also signs that a systematic campaign of lies and distortions concerning Christians is being disseminated through leaflets and brochures. Some of these - usually those without press-lines - are crudely slanderous, and threaten open violence against Christians. Others present what might appear at first sign cogent arguments against missionary activity, often claiming to quote from respected national figures.
Let me give on example, from a pamphlet of the more 'sober' kind. 'Seva ki aad me church ka shadyantra' (church conspiracy under the cover of service) by Ravindra Agarwal (Hindu Manch, Delhi, Sivaratri, 1999), carries, very prominently on its inside cover, the Hindi translatioin of a passage from Gandhi which seems to justify the current anti-missionary campaign. I checked up the reference, and found that it is there in the Mahatma's Collected Works, Volume XLVI, pp 27-28, nor is the translation unfair. In an interview dated March 22, 1931 given to Hindi, Gandhi apparently stated that if in self-governing India missionaries kept on "proselytizing by means of aid, education, etc., I would certainly ask them to withdraw. Every nation's religion is as good as any other. Certainly India's religions are adequate for her people. We need no converting spirituality." The crunch comes when we look at the entire article, which was first published in Young India, April 23, 1931. Here Gandhi began with this passage, but went on to add that "This is what a reporter has put into my mouth….All that I can say is that it is a travesty of what I have always said and held." He offered a corrected version, where he explained that "I am, then, not against conversion. But I am against the modern methods of it. Conversion nowadays has become a matter of business, like any other." The modifications he made in the rest of the quote are equally interesting: "Every nation considers its own faith to be as good as that of any other. Certainly the great faiths held by the people to another." As adequate for her people, India stands in no need of conversions from one faith to another." As striking, and utterly in contrast to hindutva tenets, is the list he went on to offer of India's great' and 'all-sufficing' faiths: "Apart from Christianity and Judaism, Hinduism and its offshoots, Islam and Zoroastrianism are living faiths." The article ended with a characteristic plea for "living friendly contact among the followers of the great religions of the world and not a clash among them…."
An anti-Christian campaign in India today necessarily has to base itself on the question of conversion. This is a partial contrast to Hindu-Muslim relations, for between Hindus and Christians there are no memories of communal violence or partition, nothing that rally corresponds to issues like 'go-korbani' (cow-slaughter) or music before mosques that have sparked off so many riots at least from the 1890's onwards. It is not at all accidental, therefore, that the so-called mild face of the BJP, Vajpayee, had recourse to this ploy when he visited Gujarat just after the Christmas burnings of churches and called for a 'national debate' on conversions, thus adroitly hinting that Christians are ultimately responsible for their own woes. And this, though CP Singh, director-general of the Gujarat police, had categorically declared on October 6, 1998 that the charges being made of forced inter-religious marriages and conversions were baseless, and that it was rather "the activities of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal activists who are taking the law into their own hands which posed a serious danger to peace in Gujarat" (Communalism Combat 1998). As for Staines, he had been a doctor, not an ordained priest, and could not have baptized anyone even if he had wanted to. A delegation of religious leaders of various communities that went on a pilgrimage to Monoharpur recently found that there was not a single Christian among the 80 inmates of Staines' leprosarium (Thampu 1999). Conversion through force evidently requires the complicity of sections of the state apparatus, and, whatever may or may not have been occasionally under colonial rule, in today's circumstances - and most obviously in the BJP's Gujarat bastion - it is clearly absurd to think that such support could ever come the way of Christian missionaries.
Actually some information is available about who exactly is doing forced conversions in the Dangs. "…since the past few months, and more extensively in the first fortnight of January, tribals (of Goghli and surrounding villages) were being bundled into jeeps and taken to the 'garamkund' (hot springs) at Unai for a 'shuddhikaran' (purificatory bath). Then they were driven to swami Assemanand's ashram, to state that they have 'reconverted' to Hinduism."
What is worrying is the confusion the question of Christian conversions can still evoke, even among well-intentioned and progressive people. There are very few who would not condemn the Staines murder, yet this could be accompanied by something like a sotto voce 'but' about conversions. Thus even swami Agnivesh, well know champion of so many progressive causes, welcomed Vajpayee's call for national debate, and while stating that "individual freedom is thekey to the modern outlook", declared that he was "indignang at conversions" [Communalism Combat 1999]. The Hindu Manch pamphlet that I have cited quotes with great glee a report from the Indian Express, January 7, 1999, headlined 'Gandhians blame conversions, seek total 'ban'. The statement apparently comes from two senior Gujarat Sarvoday workers, one of whom, the 82 year old Ghelubhai Nayak, claimed that way back in 1948 Sardar Patel had sent him to Dangs to counter possible Christian conversions there.
In logic and law alike, one would have thought, there is little scope for doubt or confusion here. Article 25 (1) of the Fundamental Rights chapter in the Constitution defines the 'Right to Freedom of Religion' quite categorically: "all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion". Propagation makes no sense at all without the possibility of convincing others of the validity of one's religious beliefs, and rituals. Freedom of choice, in religion or for that matter in politics or anything else, and therefore freedom to change one's beliefs, is surely n any case integral to any conception of democracy. Conversely, conversion by force or fraud is contrary to the basic principle of equal freedom.
Yet, in an admittedly specific and isolated judgment, a Supreme Court judge defied commonsense by declaring that the right to propagate does not include the right to convert, and it is pointless to deny that doubts about this subject have come to be accepted as somehow 'natural' by many. But it is always the 'natural' that stands in need of the most rigorous questioning, and I feel that a little historical exploration might help. In what follows, I look first at the question of conversions and its changing meanings and forms across time, trying to investigate when, under what conditions, and how it became such a contentious issue. My closing section will come back to current events, and ask why the Sangh parivar has chosen such a tiny minority as prime target, and what developments might be helping to make such targeting appear plausible.
2. CONVESIONS IN HISTORY
Let me begin by raising two preliminary questions, one of logic, the other semantics.
What conditions, or widely held assumptions, are necessary before conversions can become contentious issue, arouse widespread and violent passions? Clearly religious communities need to have become crystallized, come to be seen as having firm and fixed boundaries, so that the crossing of borders becomes a dramatic, one-shot matter. Such developed 'community consciousness' however, is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the development of what 20th century Indian English has come to call 'communalism': when, obviously, conversions become controversial on a qualitatively higher scale. This requires, not just the transition from 'fuzzy' to enumerated communities to which Sudipo Kaviraj drew our attention some years back in an influential essay, but the further assumption of inevitable and overriding, conflict of interests, such that, in a kind of zero-sum game, the gain of one community is thought to invariably involve the loss of the other.
It needs to be emphasized that this distinction between developed community-consciousness and communalism is important precisely because tendencies exist that virtually equate the latter with any firmly-bounded religious identity. These operate from two diametrically opposed points of view. Pradip Datta has recently made the very perceptive point that communalism is distinctive among ideologies in its refusal to name itself. There is rather the constant effort at identification with religious community, as well as, for Hindu-majoritarian communalists, with nationalism. Consider for instance the very term 'hindutva' which literally means no more than 'Hindu-ness', but has come to be the self-description, from the mid-1920's onwards, of a much more specific and narrow ideology. And here extremes sometimes meet, for its secularism gets equated with anti-religion, the implication becomes that communalism can be countered only by exposing religion as 'superstitious' or 'irrational'. Once again, in effect, 'communal' is being collapsed into 'religious community'. Operationally, such hostility to religion has been rare within Indian secularism, for here the term ahs really been synonymous with anti-communal policies and values, rather than being anti-religious or even particularly rationalist. Anti-secularist polemic however frequently makes such an equation for its own purposes. Paradoxically, when combined with rejection of hindutva as within an influential current intellectual trend, 'communal' and 'community' once again tend to get collapsed into each other, except that then a sharp disjunction is postulated between 'modern' and Pre-modern' communities, 'religion-as-ideology' as contrasted to a somewhat romanticized 'religion-as-faith'.
The sense of outrage evoked by religious conversion, thirdly, can be greatly intensified and made to appear much more legitimate if the loss can be given a 'patriotic', or 'national', colour. This, of course, has been the special advantage enjoyed by Hindu majoritarianism, particularly after 1947. Sangh parivar justifications of recent outrages against Christians are replete with instances of such equation.
One need to note also the very effective semantic ploy through which it has come to be widely assumed that Hinduism is near-unique among religious traditions in being non-proselytising: conversion to other faiths therefore is a loss that cannot be recuperated, and so particularly unfair. This at 'first sight seems to fit in well with the ommon sense view that one can become Hindu by birth alone, since caste (whether in the 'varna' or the 'jati' sense) is crucial to Hinduism, and your caste status is hereditary. But certain ticklish questions arise as soon as we enlarge the time-perspective: where did all the Buddhists of ancient India go, for instance? And how did Hindu icons and myths spill over into lare parts of southeast Asia? More crucially, one needs to recognize that, across centuries but in accelerated manner with modernized communications, brahmanical Hindurituals, beliefs, and caste disciplines have spread across the subcontinent and penetrated and sought to transform communities with initially very different practices and faiths. It has somehow become very conventional to describe the process here by anodyne terms like 'Sanskritisation' or 'cultural integration', but they really amount nevertheless to what with other religious traditions would have been termed 'conversion'. There is also much historical data about the spread of specific varieties of Hindu traditions, like for instance Chaitanya bhakti from central and western Bengal into Orissa and the uplands of Jharkhand. A whole battery of terms was developed from the late 19th century onwards as expansion directed towards marginal groups and tribals became more organized: 'reclamation', 'shuddhi' (purification'), 'recon version', 'paravartan' (turning back', the term preferred by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad today). Commonto all these labels is an instance that all that is being attempted is to bring people back to their 'natural' state: which, for all the targeted groups, is always assumed to be being Hindu in a more or less sanskritised manner. Semantic aggression can hardly go further.
But if shifts in religious allegiance are obviously nothing new, their forms are likely to have changed over time. The precise meanings of 'conversion; need to be historicized.
The thrust of much recent historical work has been towards the destabilization of assumptions of continuous, firmly-bounded identities. This is in significant contrast to the bulk of earlier historiography, which had tended to essentialise terms like Hindu or Muslim, and then gone on to emphasize either the moments of synthesis, or (in the communal variant) perennial conflict. On need not go as far as the questioning of pre-colonial identities as some colonial discourse analysts would want to agree that the absence of modern communicational networks (developed roads, railways, telegraph lines, the printing press, etc) must have greatly hindered the formation of stable and tight countrywide religious blocks. Trends in medieval Indian scholarship seem to be moving in a similar direction, though a more rigorous probing of the rhetorical aspects and precise implications of texts than at first sight seem to indicate a high level of religious conflict and persecution. (Selective 19th century translations from some of these, notably by Elliot and Sowson, had greatly contributed to communalization.) Thus Persian chronicles boasting of wars against infidels and desecration of temples - or for that matter a text like the Vilasa copperplate grant describing in lurid but highly formulaic terms that Kaliyuga ushered in by Muhammad bin Tughlaq's destruction of the Kakatiya dynasty in Andhra - are being recognized to have been in part legitimate devices. (The same temples, for instance, seem to be getting destroyed again and again, as Romila Thapar has shown recently in an as yet unpublished paper about Somnath). Again, 'Hindu' texts, in Sanskrit or regional languages like Telugu, use, overwhelmingly, ethnic rather than religious terms (Turushka, most commonly) to describe the kingdoms and armies we have become accustomed since the 19th century to call 'Muslim'. All this does not mean, of course, that there were not many instances of conflicts and acts of violence wholly or partly 'religious' (thought even the meaning of that term is not entirely transparent, or impervious to change), amidst much everyday coexistence and co-mingling of practices. But their generalization into mass communal ideologies with a sub-continental reach was unlikely.
In an important discussion of processes of Islamisation in medieval BENGAL, Eaton has tried to draw out the implications of their relative absence of firmly-bounded communities for the question of religious conversion. Use of the term itself, he argues, becomes "perhaps misleading - since it ordinarily connotes a sudden and total transformation", whereas the changes could have "proceeded so gradually as to be nearly imperceptible". Like other secular-minded historians, Eaton (1994:269) rejects the theory of large-scale forcible conversion, since the religions that became massively Muslim - East Bengal and Western Punjab - were also those furthest away from major centres of Muslim politico-military power. He discounts also the view that Islam attracted converts from lower castes primarily by virtue of its egalitarian tenets, for these were also the areas where brahmanical penetration, and therefore structures of caste oppression, had been relatively weak. By implication, Eaton's account draws attention to the possibility that in large parts of the subcontinents, certainly in medieval times and to a considerable extent even today, the great religious traditions have been expanding at the cost, not so much of each other as in relation to a multitude of local cults or practices. Conflicts in pre-modern times would have been considerably reduced, further, by the slow, phased nature of the transition. Here Eaton (1994: 113-19, 268-90) distinguishes three, heuristic moments, of 'inclusion' of Islamic cult figures within the local cosmologies, 'identification' of some of these with indigenous objects of worship, and finally (and perhaps often mainly in the 19th century), 'displacement' through which Islam became 'purified' through reform or purging of non-islamic beliefs and practices. One might add that pre-colonial conversion was probably not so much a matter of individual and one-shot choice, as of slow changes involving an entire group, family or kinship network, or local community - which would once again reduce the potentials for conflict.
Three major changes, roughly from the latter part of the 19th century onwards, seems particularly relevant for understanding why conversions started becoming so much more controversial.
The first was the tightening of community boundaries: there has come into being a broad consensus about this among historians, despite continuing differences regarding the extent of novelty involved her, or in the practice weighing-up of causes. Within the broader framework of developing politico-administrative, economic, and communicational integration, particularly important inputs probably came from colonial law, and from census operations. In matters of so-called 'personal' or 'family' law, the British had decided in the 1770's that they would administer according to Hindu or Islamic sacred texts and in consultation with Brahman pandits and Muslim ulema: differential, in other words, for the two major religious traditions. In many everyday situations, therefore, one had to declare oneself a Hindu or Muslim (or member of any other religious communities that had come to develop 'personal' legal systems of their own). While superficially not dissimilar to Mughal practice, there was a significant change insofar as Mughal courts had never tried to penetrate deep into lower levels through the kind of systematic hierarchy of appellate jurisdictions that British rule developed over time. Disputes must have been often decided at local or village levels according to diverse customary standards that would have had little to do with textual (or 'religious') principles Colonial 'personal' law centralized, textualised, made operationally much sharper the boundaries between religious communities and probably enhanced also to a significant extent the influence over the rest of society of high castes and Muslim elites.
The impact of the census from 1870's onwards is more obvious, and has been repeatedly emphasized in recent academic discussions. Census operations necessitated the drawing of sharp distinctions, of religion, caste, language, or whatever else the administrators had decided on as worthy of being counted. Enumerated communities made for mutual competition, complaints about unfair representation in education, jobs, administration or politics, stimulated fears about being left behind in numbers games. The census procedures often involved the imposition of order, rather than simple recording of realities on the ground, becomes clear, for instance, from the amusing instance in the 1911 census of a 35,000-strong community of 'Hindu-Muhammadans' in Gujarat, so termed by a Bombay census superintendent confounded by the inextricable combination of multiple practices, beliefs, and even self-definitions. The latter was pulled up sharply by his superior, census commissioner E.A. Gait, who ordered the location of "the persons concerned to the one religion or the other as best he could" [Census 1911:118]
Colonial modernity helped to tighten community bonds: it has been less often noticed, however, that it also stimulated forces that made them more fragile. What was coming into existence by the late 19th early 20th century was a situation conducive for growth of note one, but many community identities - religious, caste, linguistic-regional, anti-colonial 'national', class, gender, in interactive yet often conflictual relationships with each other. Among the many merits of Pradip Datta's just-published work (1999:9) is the way he has been able to bring together these interlocking narratives, in an effort to view "communal formations…..as part of a field in which they have to perforce relate to other collective identities (other than its binary in 'Hindu' or 'Muslim'), such as class, gender, or caste affiliations."
Signs can be discerned, thirdly, of the beginnings of a discourse of individual rights. The direct influence of western liberal and radical ideologies, while not negligible, was no doubt confined to relatively few, but there was also the fallout from certain institutional developments. Colonial justice, while shoring up religiously-defined community norms in personal law, simultaneously enlarged up to a point "the freedom of the individual in the market-place" in land and commercial transactions (Washbrook 1981: 650). British Indian definitions for criminal liability, too, came to be theoretically based on notions of an "equal abstract and universal legal subject" - though once again only to a partial extent, for there were many accommodations in practice with existing social hierarchies (Singha 1998: viii). Equality before the law, promised in much-cited official documents like the Queen's proclamation of 1858, was often severely tampered with by white racial privilege. But then promises simultaneously held out and broken trend to whet appetites, and such a dialectic came to operate, though of course in widely different and at times even contradictory ways, both with respect to attitudes towards their foreign overlords of growing number of Indians, and lower caste (and/or class) resentments about indigenous hierarchies of privilege and exploitation.
Even more significant initially, perhaps, were developments relating to gender, it has been argued recently that the 19th century legal reforms and debates around women ('sati

Should the State License Human Beings?

Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashchandrabiswas@gmail.com">palashchandrabiswas@gmail.com

Should the State License Human Beings?
Op_ed
By Sheldon Richman
Translation

Should the State License Human Beings?
Democratic presidential candidates are tripping over the driver’s-licenses-for-illegal-aliens issue like a bunch of old slapstick vaudevillians.
What’s so comical about their antics is that the issue demonstrates that politicians are locked into bad assumptions from top to bottom. Start with driver’s licenses. In one debate Sen. Chris Dodd said driving “is a privilege not a right.” That’s a common belief. But it’s incoherent.
In common parlance, a privilege is something someone grants to someone else. If I let my teenager borrow my car, that’s a privilege I extend to him. Since it’s my car, I have the legitimate authority to do this. I may set the terms, and I can revoke the privilege at will. My child has no rights in the matter. He is in the position of a supplicant. (When he grows up and I need to borrow his car, the roles will be reversed.)
This sort of privilege, then, grows out of property ownership. The owner sets the rules of use, and no one may rightfully use the property without the owner’s permission. Privileges regarding use are an owner’s to bestow — or not.
What does a driving privilege mean when we’re talking about adults and the government? Where does the government get the authority to bestow, deny, or revoke this alleged privilege? Under American political theory, the government supposedly rules by the consent of the governed. Sometimes it is held that the government is us. If that is true, the grantor of the driving privilege must ultimately be the people.
Who is the grantee? Also the people. So we the people grant us the people the privilege to drive. That makes no sense.
"The upshot is that the government-issued driver’s license is incompatible with a truly free society. So are government-owned roads, for that matter. We may confidently predict that owners of private roads, which have existed through history, would require drivers to have proof of competence, but that is a far cry from the system of identification that constitutes today’s driver’s license. Under the REAL ID legislation passed by Congress the link between identification and permission to drive will take a quantum leap."
But it does make sense if we realize that this theory of government is a fraud. The government is something over and above the people with the power to issue decrees we are legally required to obey under threat of punishment. True, each of us gets an infinitesimal say in who holds office, but that doesn’t change the essential fact that once candidates are in office, they issue orders and we defy them at our peril. If you don’t like the orders, you are instructed to exercise your “power” to elect a new government. Good luck with that.
The upshot is that the government-issued driver’s license is incompatible with a truly free society. So are government-owned roads, for that matter. We may confidently predict that owners of private roads, which have existed through history, would require drivers to have proof of competence, but that is a far cry from the system of identification that constitutes today’s driver’s license. Under the REAL ID legislation passed by Congress the link between identification and permission to drive will take a quantum leap.
If Americans shouldn’t need the government’s permission to drive, why should so-called illegal aliens, who are merely undocumented residents, need it?
Presidential candidates find it in their interest to one-up their rivals in showing how tough they want to be on “border security.” Denying undocumented residents permission to drive is part of their posturing. So are the threats to imprison employers who hire them. How odious. People who have no other way of getting into the United States sneak in to make a better life through hard work. Preventing them from driving and threatening their prospective employers are flagrant attacks on innocent people’s ability to improve their lot in life.
As we head into Thanksgiving, let us contemplate this disgrace to America’s noble heritage.
Mr. Richman's articles on population, federal disaster assistance, international trade, education, the environment, American history, foreign policy, privacy, computers, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The Freeman, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. Articles by Sheldon Richman at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/sheldon-richman