SACW | 15 May 2004

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire   |  15 May,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Bangladesh: Police inactive as Ahmadiyyas attacked in Rangpur
[2] India: Let us hope the darkness has passed (Arundhati Roy)
[3] India: The Big Idea: Back to the future (Praful Bidwai)
[4] India: India's New Era (Salman Rushdie)
[5] India: A Congress-Communist Coalition Augurs 
Well for All (S. P. Udayakumar)
[6] Thoughts on the victory in India (Manu Bhagavan)
[7] India: Press Statement (All India Christian Council)
[8] Upcoming event: Network on Communal Harmony  meeting on May 21 (Bombay)


--------------

[1]


The Daily Star [Bangladesh]
May 15, 2004

POLICE INACTIVE AS AHMADIYYAS ATTACKED IN RANGPUR, HR ACTIVISTS SAY
A Correspondent, Rangpur

A fundamentalist group attacked houses belonging 
to Ahmadia community in four villages under 
Baderganj upzila in Rangpur but police did not 
take any action, human rights and legal aid 
activists alleged.
They made the allegation at a press conference 
here on Wednesday after visiting Dalapara, 
Gazipara, Dhamapur, and Shibpur villages. The 
attack was made on April 29.

Held at the Zila Parishad auditorium, it was 
addressed by Khushi Kabir, Coordainator of 
Nijwera Kori, an NGO. The team included, Sultana 
Kamal and Dr. Hamida Hossen, Executive Director 
and director respectively of Ayin O Shalish 
Kendra (a legal aid forum), Rangpur Lawyers 
Association Secretary Samsuzzman and Gonotantri 
Party leader Afzal Hossen and representatives of 
some local NGOs.
Khushi Kabir quoted local Ahmadia community 
leaders and said about three thousand people 
ransacked and looted their houses in the four 
villages on April 29. But when contacted, 
Officer-in-Charge of Baderganj thana Md Golam 
Mostafa said he did not know anything about the 
attack, she said.

During the visit, the community leaders told the 
team that their members were isolated from the 
society. Their children are not allowed to go to 
school or madrassah and they can not go to 
markets, she quoted them as saying.
Abdul High, a member of the community, told the 
team that he is fleeing homes since April 29 as 
police, instead of arresting the attackers, are 
after him.
Jaedul, another member, complained to the team 
that some local leaders of Zamaat-e-Islami barred 
Imams of mosques to offer Namaz-e-Janaja of his 
elder brother Nazrul Islam who died on April 7, 
she said. Tension mounted in the area after the 
incident.
Aiyunuudin, another member, said police arrested 
his son Aiyub Ali though court granted him bail 
in connection with an incident in Rangpur Sader 
upzila. This is an allegation of police 
harassment.

After the visit, the team called on Rangpur 
Deputy Commissioner Anwarul Karim at his office 
and urged him to take all necessary steps to 
protect the Ahmadias in the four villages.
The victims told the team that after the attack 
the OC refused to record any case.
Khushi Kabir told the newsmen that they were 
surprised when the Baderganj thana OC said he was 
not informed of any attack on Ahmadias on April 
29.


______


[2]

The Guardian [UK]
May 14, 2004

LET US HOPE THE DARKNESS HAS PASSED
India's real and virtual worlds have collided in a humiliation of power
by Arundhati Roy

For many of us who feel estranged from mainstream 
politics, there are rare, ephemeral moments of 
celebration. Today is one of them. When India 
went to the polls, we were negotiating the 
dangerous cross-currents of neo-liberalism and 
neo-fascism - an assault on the poor and minority 
communities.

None of the pundits and psephologists predicted 
the results. The rightwing BJP-led coalition has 
not just been voted out of power, it has been 
humiliated. It cannot but be seen as a decisive 
vote against communalism, and neo-liberalism's 
economic "reforms". The Congress has become the 
largest party. The left parties, the only parties 
to be overtly (but ineffectively) critical of the 
reforms, have been given an unprecedented 
mandate. But even as we celebrate, we know that 
on every major issue besides overt Hindu 
nationalism (nuclear bombs, big dams and 
privatisation), the Congress and the BJP have no 
major ideological differences. We know the legacy 
of the Congress led us to the horror of the BJP. 
Still, we celebrate because surely a darkness has 
passed. Or has it?

Recently, a young friend was talking to me about 
Kashmir. About the morass of political venality, 
the brutality of the security forces, the 
inchoate edges of a society saturated in 
violence, where militants, police, intelligence 
officers, government servants, businessmen and 
even journalists encounter each other, and 
gradually, over time, become each other. About 
having to live with the endless killing, the 
mounting "disappearances", the whispering, the 
fear, the rumours, the insane disconnection 
between what Kashmiris know is happening and what 
the rest of us are told is happening in Kashmir. 
He said: "Kashmir used to be a business. Now it's 
a mental asylum."

Admittedly, the conflicts in Kashmir and the 
north-eastern states make them separate wings 
that house the more perilous wards in the asylum. 
But in the heartland too, the schism between 
knowledge and information, between fact and 
conjecture, between the "real" world and the 
virtual world, has become a place of endless 
speculation and potential insanity.

Each time there is a so-called terrorist strike, 
the BJP government has rushed in, eager to assign 
culpability with little or no investigation. The 
attack on the parliament building, on December 13 
2001, and the burning of the Sabarmati Express, 
in Godhra, the following year are fine examples. 
In both cases, the evidence that surfaced raised 
disturbing questions and so was put into cold 
storage. Everybody believed what they wanted to, 
but the incidents were used to whip up communal 
bigotry in a haze of heightened Hindu nationalism.

Many governments - state as well as centre; 
Congress, BJP, as well as regional parties - have 
used this climate of manufactured frenzy to mount 
an assault on human rights on a scale that would 
shame the world's better known despotic regimes.

In recent years, the number of people killed by 
the police and security forces runs into tens of 
thousands. Andhra Pradesh (neo-liberalism's 
poster state) chalks up an average of about 200 
deaths of "extremists" in "encounters" every 
year. In Kashmir an estimated 80,000 people have 
been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply 
"disappeared".

According to the Association of Parents of 
Disappeared People in Kashmir, more than 2,500 
people were killed in 2003. In the last 18 months 
there have been 54 deaths in custody. The Indian 
state's proclivity to harass and terrorise has 
been institutionalised by the draconian 
Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). In Tamil 
Nadu, the act has been used to stifle criticism 
of the state government. In Jharkhand, 3,200 
people, mostly poor adivasis (indigenous people) 
accused of being Maoists, have been named in POTA 
cases. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, the act is used 
to clamp down on those who protest about the 
dispossession of their land. In Gujarat and 
Mumbai, it is used almost exclusively against 
Muslims. In Gujarat, after the 2002 pogrom in 
which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed, 287 
people were accused under POTA: 286 were Muslim 
and one a Sikh. POTA allows confessions extracted 
in police custody to be admitted as evidence. 
Under the POTA regime, torture tends to replace 
investigation in our police stations: that's 
everything from people being forced to drink 
urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given 
electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts and 
having iron rods put up their anuses, to being 
beaten to death.

Under POTA you cannot get bail unless you can 
prove that you are innocent - of a crime that you 
have not been formally charged with. It would be 
naive to imagine that POTA is being "misused". It 
is being used for precisely the reasons it was 
enacted. This year in the UN, 181 countries voted 
for increased protection of human rights. Even 
the US voted in favour. India abstained.

Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of 
corporate newspapers inform us that the GDP 
growth rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops 
are overflowing with consumer goods. Government 
storehouses are overflowing with grain. Outside 
this circle of light, the past five years have 
seen the most violent increase in rural-urban 
income inequalities since independence. Farmers 
steeped in debt are committing suicide in 
hundreds; 40% of the rural population in India 
has the same foodgrain absorption level as 
sub-Saharan Africa, and 47% of Indian children 
under three suffer from malnutrition.

But in urban India, shops, restaurants, railway 
stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals have TV 
monitors in which India's Shining, Feeling Good. 
You only have to close your ears to the sickening 
crunch of the policeman's boot on someone's ribs, 
you only have to raise your eyes from the 
squalor, the slums, the ragged broken people on 
the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor, and 
you will be in that other beautiful world. The 
singing, dancing world of Bollywood's permanent 
pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, happy 
Indians waving the tricolour and Feeling Good. 
Laws like POTA are like buttons on a TV. You can 
use it to switch off the poor, the troublesome, 
the unwanted.

When POTA was passed, the Congress staged a noisy 
opposition in Parliament. However, repealing POTA 
never figured in its election campaign. Even 
before it has formed a government, there have 
been overt reassurances that "reforms" will 
continue. Exactly what kind of reforms, we'll 
have to wait and see. Fortunately the Congress 
will be hobbled by the fact that it needs the 
support of left parties to form a government. 
Hopefully, things will change. A little. It's 
been a pretty hellish six years.

( Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small 
Things and The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire)

_____



[3]

Hindustan Times
May 15, 2004 |
Delhi Edition  Pg 10: Edit Page

THE BIG IDEA: BACK TO THE FUTURE
by Praful Bidwai
May 14

This election marks a defining moment in our 
politics, of the same significance as, say, the 
post-bank nationalisation Garibi Hatao elections 
of 1971 or the post-Emergency elections of 1977. 
It opens up more possibilities for a politics of 
transformation and popular empowerment.

The changes of the Seventies, although momentous, 
were largely directed from 'above', by parties, 
leaders and slogans. The latest verdict, people's 
gut-level concerns and choices from 'below' have 
played a decisive role. Political parties have 
acted as their instruments.

The single-most important message is that the 
Indian people comprehensively reject the BJP's 
politics with its characteristic combination of 
communalism, parochialism, divisiveness, 
deception and unabashed economic elitism. Let's 
put the issue bluntly. The BJP set out not just 
to rule for another five years, but to firmly 
establish a middle class-driven system, an Indian 
version of 'property-owning democracy' based on 
the 'India Shining' myth, in which the 
underprivileged would be effectively 
disenfranchised, the ethnic-religious minorities 
would submit to Hindutva's majoritarian dictates, 
and where rapacious corporations would rule 
unhampered by democratic control.

This project, and the entire set of social and 
economic policies that came with it, has been 
voted out. The significance of the verdict goes 
infinitely deeper than shifts in vote-shares, 
striking of alliances, the burdens or advantages 
of incumbency, appeals of different 'brands' 
(like 'Atal' or 'Sonia'), or various strategies 
of election 'micro-management'.

Three very dissimilar states capture the essence: 
Gujarat, Andhra and UP. In Gujarat, the 
electorate finally punished the BJP for its 
viciously Right-wing, oppressively dualistic 
economic policies, its years of misgovernance and 
India's worst State-sponsored communal carnage.

The anti-BJP undercurrent, evident in all local 
elections two years before February 2002, was 
temporarily, artificially, suppressed by the 
polarisation following the carnage, and the 
absence of a political alternative. (The Congress 
was then playing as Hindutva's 'B' team.)

The BJP received its worst drubbing in the very 
areas (central and northern Gujarat) where the 
violence was the fiercest. Modi's politics - 
crudely communal, blatantly imperious, and using 
language bordering on the obscene - has become a 
huge liability. So has the neo-liberal legacy in 
which capital thrives only by virtue of 
deindustrialisation and casualisation of 
production, and through rapacious labour 
exploitation (witness Alang's ship-breaking 
yards).

Andhra's results are an unambiguous rejection of 
Chandrababu Naidu's corporate-CEO-style politics. 
Naidu's Andhra was turning into 
Chile-under-Pinochet, with massive transfers of 
public assets into private hands, starving of 
social sector spending and big tax-breaks for 
corporates. For Naidu, attending the Davos forum 
and blowing up huge sums on PR to impress 
potential investors was always a higher priority 
than redressing acute hunger or indebtedness 
(which drove over 3,000 farmers to suicide). 
Naidu stood exposed as a communally compromised 
politician when he refused to criticise the BJP's 
outrageous conduct and its defence of the Gujarat 
pogrom.

As agrarian distress grew, the Andhras readily 
compared his tall claims about information 
technology with reality - IT's measly 2 per cent 
share in state GDP and the state's falling 
software-export rank. The people couldn't take 
deception anymore. One more reason for Naidu's 
rout is that Andhra was the only state where the 
opposition mobilised people in a sustained way.

In UP, the BJP has not only suffered a halving of 
its seats and substantial decrease in votes in 
all regions. Its social base has shrunk: even 
Brahmins are deserting it and the OBCs aren't 
returning despite Kalyan Singh. The party's 
defeat in Faizabad-Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura 
only confirms what's known: the temple issue is 
dead.

The principal reason for the BJP's growing 
unpopularity is agrarian distress, unemployment, 
and popular exhaustion with Machiavellian 
politics, reflected for example, in Vajpayee's 
pitiable attempt first to get, and then divide, 
the Muslim vote by twisting facts to present 
Mulayam Singh as an ally.

The BJP may soon be out of UP's reckoning even as 
the Congress revitalises itself through the 
projection of youth, dynamism and transparent 
earnestness. (That's Rahul's image at least 
today). The BJP could shrink into what it was 
before the mid-Eighties - a relatively minor 
western India party, with 30 (or 50?) Lok Sabha 
seats.

The Congress's performance has outstripped the 
most optimistic projections, including its own. 
The credit must go to the party's projection of a 
left-of-centre identity, based on pluralism and 
inclusivism, willingness to forge alliances, and 
Sonia Gandhi's tireless, focused campaigning. She 
consistently drew vastly larger crowds than 
Vajpayee when she stressed gut-level livelihood 
issues and unsparingly attacked communalism. She 
has grown in acceptance and stature - as a 
serious, dignified and yet accessible leader, who 
is tough on the BJP but who never descended to 
its gutter-level personal attacks.

Vajpayee's manufactured image no longer sells. It 
has shrivelled badly in the past three weeks. In 
any case, he's unlikely to lead the BJP into the 
next election. The Congress did well where it was 
combative and unabashedly left-of-centre. It 
fared poorly where plagued by despair, drift and 
confusion about what agendas to emphasise. It 
must now rediscover the worth of good 'populism' 
- a much-maligned word, once used to kill the 
best programme designed for Indian children, 
namely mid-day meals. The future lies in ordinary 
people's sensibilities, not the Sensex, leave 
alone global finance.

The Left has put up its best-ever performance and 
assured for itself a moral-political stature far 
higher than its 62 seats. This derives from its 
fundamental commitment to popular sovereignty, 
secularism, its leaders' intellectual qualities, 
and its clean politics. A Congress-Left alliance 
must form the core of the next government. To be 
inclusive, representative and durable, it should 
draw in Deve Gowda's JD(S), Mulayam's SP, and 
Ajit Singh's RLD, besides the Tamil parties.

However, it would be a huge mistake to rush into 
alliances without negotiating a proper, 
comprehensive common agenda, which reflects 
popular aspirations as well as rational 
priorities. This will be important in four areas: 
economics, social policy, institutional 
structures, and foreign and security policy.

The economic priorities include major employment 
programmes, quantum-jumps in social spending, 
macro-economic correction through progressive 
taxation and democratisation and reform of the 
public sector, not its privatisation. Crucial 
here is reversal of past policies which have 
added to inequalities and regional disparities 
and which generated nominal growth while 
impoverishing people.

It's vital to reaffirm secularism and pluralism 
actively by exemplarily bringing the Gujarat 
pogrom's villains to justice, by resolving the 
Ayodhya dispute through a formula such as V.P. 
Singh's temple-plus-mosque, banning and 
penalising Togadia-style hate-speech, and 
extensively revising communal textbooks. Our 
public discourse must change towards genuine 
tolerance and respect for difference. Structures 
and institutions corrupted by the BJP - the PMO, 
the Akademis, the ICSSR-ICHR, Prasar Bharati, 
numerous official and advisory committees - must 
be thoroughly cleansed and reformed.

Our foreign policy has become unbalanced as 
regards the US, Israel and the Iraq crisis. It's 
basically disengaged from the neighbours, barring 
Pakistan. India must return to its broad-range 
policy orientation, which emphasises 
non-alignment and a multipolar, non-hegemonic, 
multilateral, peaceful and rule-based world 
order. Similarly, our security policy must be 
freed of the jingoism the BJP has imposed on it. 
The nuclear policy must be turned upside-down, 
with disarmament as the top priority.

This is a big agenda - but the minimum the new 
government will need to command credibility and 
authority and launch a politics of transformation.



_____


[4]

The Washington Post
Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A25

INDIA'S NEW ERA
By Salman Rushdie

The fall of the Indian government is a huge 
political shock that strikingly echoes the only 
comparable electoral upset, the defeat of Indira 
Gandhi in 1977. Then as now, just about the 
entire commentariat was convinced that the 
incumbent would win; then as now, the opposition 
was widely written off; then as now, India's 
voters left the politicians and media with egg on 
their faces. Both elections are high points in 
the history of Indian democracy. An ornery 
electorate that doesn't do what it's supposed to 
do is a fine and cheering thing.

In the 21/2 years before the 1977 election, 
Gandhi's autocratic "emergency" regime, initiated 
after she was found guilty of electoral 
malpractice in 1975, had been guilty of many 
civil and human rights abuses, including forced 
sterilizations and vasectomies. The National 
Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition led by Atal 
Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 
was not by any means a dictatorship, but its 
leaders have turned a blind eye to some terrible 
deeds, notably the mass killings, mainly of 
Muslims, in the state of Gujarat, where the 
BJP-led state government itself is accused of a 
role in the slaughter of 2002. The Congress 
Party's success in Gujarat suggests that voters 
have been sickened by what they have seen, just 
as Gandhi's fall in 1977 was an expression of 
national disgust at her government's brutalities.

The oldest Indian rivalries of all have 
resurfaced in this election, as they also did in 
1977. Then as now, much of the urban bourgeoisie 
voted for the government, while the impoverished 
Indian masses, in particular the rural poor, 
mostly voted against it. The Indian battle for 
centrality in the debate about the country's 
future has always been, to some degree, a battle 
between the city and the village. It is between, 
on the one hand, the urbanized, industrialized 
India favored by both the socialist-inclined 
Jawaharlal Nehru and the free-market architects 
of "India Shining," the new India in which a 
highly successful capitalist class has 
transformed the heights of the economy; and, on 
the other hand, the agricultural, homespun India 
beloved of Mahatma Gandhi, the immense 
countryside India where three-quarters of the 
population still lives and which has not 
benefited in the slightest from the recent 
economic boom.

It's no accident that the ruling alliance lost 
heavily in Andhra Pradesh and in Tamil Nadu, 
precisely the states that wooed information 
technology giants such as Microsoft to set up 
shop, turning sleepy "second cities" such as 
Madras, Bangalore and Hyderabad into new-tech 
boom towns. That's because while the rich got 
richer, the fortunes of the poor, such as the 
farmers of Andhra, declined year by year. The 
gulf between India's rich and poor has never 
looked wider than it does today, and the 
government has fallen into that chasm.

The failure of the NDA's ubiquitous "India 
Shining" slogan has backfired just as, in Indira 
Gandhi's hour of defeat, her grandiose slogan 
Garibi Hatao -- "remove poverty" -- was 
successfully rewritten by her opponents as Indira 
Hatao -- "remove Indira."

India's business elite has hastened to welcome 
the Congress victory, and we shall have to see 
how the change of government affects market 
confidence. But the dispossessed of India have 
dealt a mighty blow to the assumptions of the 
country's political and economic chieftains, and 
the lesson should be learned by all parties: 
Ignore the well-being of the masses at your peril.

I have two immediate wishes for the new era. The 
first is that the debates about "foreignness" can 
be laid to rest. Those of us who are part of the 
Indian diaspora, and who have fought for years to 
have Indians recognized as full citizens of the 
societies in which we have settled and in which 
our children have been born and raised, have 
found the attack on the Italian origins of Sonia 
Gandhi, the Congress Party's leader and widow of 
the slain prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, to be 
highly unpleasant. Even more unpleasant were the 
BJP's suggestions that her children, the children 
of Rajiv Gandhi, were also somehow aliens. You 
can't have it both ways. If Indians outside India 
are to be seen as "belonging" to their new 
homelands, then those who make India their home, 
as Sonia Gandhi has done for 40 years or so, must 
be given the same respect. Gratifyingly, the 
electorate has shown it just doesn't care about 
the "foreignness" issue. A BJP leader foolishly 
said in the immediate aftermath of his party's 
rejection that he thought it "shameful" that 
India might be led by a foreigner. Such slurs are 
part of the reason for the BJP defeat. They are 
essentially racist, and must cease.

My second wish is that the study of India's 
history can now be rescued from the extremists 
and ideologues. The outgoing government's 
politicization of historical scholarship -- its 
determination to impose textbooks peddling a 
narrow, revisionist, Hindu-nationalist vision of 
India's past on the country's schools and 
colleges, and its deriding of the work of the 
greatest Indian historians, such as Professor 
Romila Thapar -- was one of its most alarming 
initiatives. The BJP has often seemed to want to 
inflame our perceptions of the past in order to 
inflame the passions of the present. Congress and 
its allies have it in their power to restore the 
atmosphere of cool objectivity that true learning 
requires.

Delightful as it is to watch democracy on such a 
scale in action, one doesn't have to give the new 
government an unreserved welcome. Time will tell 
whether this new coalition will hold or 
disintegrate. The Congress Party will have to 
relearn the arts of government after the long 
wilderness years, and Sonia Gandhi -- who has 
proved she has the stomach for the fight -- will 
have to prove that she is not just keeping the 
leader's seat warm for her son or daughter to 
inherit, that she is a true, unifying leader.

Time will tell, too, whether the defeated BJP 
casts off, in opposition, the velvet glove of 
moderation that Vajpayee imposed during its time 
of power, and reinvents itself as a hard-line 
communalist force. If that happens the years 
ahead could be full of conflict and violence.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy this rare moment of hope.

The writer is a novelist and essayist. His latest 
book is "Step Across This Line," a collection of 
essays.


______


[5]


A CONGRESS-COMMUNIST COALITION AUGURS WELL FOR ALL
by S. P. Udayakumar

(Submitted to The Hindu, May 15, 2004)


The Congress (I) and the Communist parties are 
toying with the idea of coming closer to form a 
coalition government at the Centre. The upshot of 
it all may be, besides showing the door to the 
BJP-led government, the Congress getting back its 
reformatory vigor and the Communists occupying 
the political center stage.  The biggest winner 
will be, of course, India who will gain a 
progressive political climate and a new 
orientation.

The ideological travails of Congress have been so 
long and arduous that the social radicalism and 
reformatory zeal were gradually lost on the way. 
From 1934 onwards the party had an inner group 
called the Congress Socialist Party of 
Jayaprakash Narayan and others even as Mahatma 
Gandhi was replacing the "gentlemanly class" as 
the main voice
of Indian nationalism through large-scale 
mobilization and organizational activism. The CSP 
that claimed to have come to apply Marxism 
correctly to the Indian situation had to exit the 
Congress soon after independence. Pundit 
Jawaharlal Nehru set out to transform
the country into an industrialized, secular, 
liberal democracy with Western rationality and 
science along with Gandhian values and vision 
that completely contradicted the former.

Indira Gandhi, who inherited her father's 
centralized economic planning, ended up 
centralizing Indian politics as well. With the 
Nehruvian model aground in the 1980s, it was all 
downhill for the Congress party. Having lost the 
confidence of both minority and
majority communities all over the country, the 
party stood completely discredited with 
accusations of corruption and inefficiency. The 
party tried to revert back to their traditional 
dynastic sycophancy and to prepare a road map for 
their aimless political
journey under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. It 
is important to note that even now the Indian 
voters have not handed the Congress party a clear 
mandate to rule them.  In the light of the above 
situation, it is definitely in their best 
interest to join hands with the Communists and 
inject some radical ideology into their otherwise 
sterile politics.

Communists, on the other hand, have often lurked 
in the margins of national politics. The 
Communist Party of India itself was formed almost 
40 years after the Indian National Congress came 
into being. As per the policy reversal of the 
Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 
1928, the CPI heeded on building themselves up 
rather
than cooperating with the nationalist 
organizations in the independence struggle. This 
kind of "sectarian mistakes" which had kept the 
party aloof from the mass movements of the period 
did not offer them a good start. Broadening the 
concrete Congress-led
national struggle for freedom to a vague 
Soviet-led international struggle against 
imperialism, they marginalized themselves even 
further.

However, the mainstream Communist parties have 
overcome some of the unfavorable assessments of 
the public and begun to play seminal roles in the 
national politics. They are no longer seen as 
Moscow-bent or Beijing-slanted fire-spitting 
rabble-rousers. Nor are they considered anymore 
as hard-headed ideologues lost in their 
rhetorical Utopian
fantasies. They are rather well respected 
pragmatic politicians who combine revolutionary 
agenda and responsible governance. They are 
successful Chief Ministers, erstwhile Home 
Minister, potential Prime Ministers, and 
respectable elder statesmen to whom the country 
can turn for advice and direction.

Despite the mutual contempt the Congress workers 
and Communists have for each other, they do share 
some commonalities. Congress has gone far away 
from Mahatma Gandhi who wanted the party to be 
disbanded on achieving independence. Communists 
have not lived up to their ideology quite 
strictly either. Both groups have varying degrees 
of
corruption, opportunism, confusion, dilution of 
political will, and lack of a viable political 
program. However, if there are some sincere 
patriots and genuine `possibilists' left in India 
in the midst of all the gloom and doom, many of 
them are in these two camps. Communists and the 
Congress have a reasonably good number of leaders 
with mature political background, personal 
integrity and commitment.

The Congress-Communist alliance may bring one of 
two things to the country. If the Congress sticks 
to the Gandhis of lower order, and the Communists 
stay tuned to distant borders, India may suffer 
yet another political miscarriage and will have a 
near-sighted government for a short period of 
time. On the contrary, the country may gain much 
more
if the former decides to look higher toward the 
original Gandhi and the Communists look down at 
the subcontinental ground reality they are faced 
with. However, such a union may not result in 
bringing about Gandhian Marxists or Marxist 
Gandhians for obvious reasons.

Late veteran Communist leader E. M. S. 
Namboodiripad commented (in a 1997 edited volume 
Gandhi and the Future of Humanity) on the 
complementarities and contradictions between 
Gandhians and Communists. While Gandhi was 
committed to nonviolence in his fight against the 
British, the Communists's were for the 
revolutionary overthrow of the
British rulers and their Indian minions. Their 
motto was "nonviolence if possible, violence if 
necessary" which was in direct contrast with the 
Gandhian position. Nampoodiripad explained at 
length how Gandhi's non-violent means "meant the 
subordination of militant mass action to the 
requirements of a negotiated settlement with the 
British rulers."

Besides the means, Gandhians and Communists also 
differed on the ends. Although Mahatma Gandhi was 
committed to the cause of serving the poor, he 
did not want the poor to be the ruling classes. 
He was, according to Namboodiripad, "thinking of 
replacing the alien rulers with India's own 
ruling classes." The Communists, however, wanted 
the
complete eonomic and political emancipation of 
the industrial and agricultural workers, the 
working peasants, toiling middle classes and 
other oppressed and exploited sections of the 
society.

Though critical of Gandhi's method of leading the 
freedom struggle, his compromises with the 
British rulers and his partiality for the Indian 
vested interests, the Communists hailed his 
service to the poor during the post-partition 
violence. His admitting `failure' in his mission 
in life "shows how great he was as a person." 
Namboodiripad concluded: "We Communists, 
therefore, hold him in high esteem, even while 
continuing to be critical of his ideology, 
politics, strategy and tactics."

Some of the other differences between Gandhi and 
Communists could be their understanding of state, 
economic development, social evolution etc. As 
Bhikhu Parekh contends in his 1989 book Gandhi's 
Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination that 
Gandhi spent all his life fighting against the 
state and he shared the rebel's deep suspicion
and biased view of it. For him, human as a soul 
and the state (organized along the lines of 
modern science) as a 'soul-less machine' could 
not co-exist. This product of material 
civilization was particularly unsuited to India 
because it had a spiritual civilization. So 
Gandhi felt the need for a "a new type of 
non-statal polity" which he called 'enlightened 
anarchy.'

Under this 'ordered anarchy' socially responsible 
and morally disciplined men and women would enjoy 
maximum freedom with minimum necessary order. 
This polity would be based on non-violence; place 
people at the center; build up courage, autonomy 
and a sense of power among them; foster strong 
and vibrant local communities; and regenerate 
Indian society and culture. It would have a 
central government but no centralized structure 
of authority; it would cultivate a sense of 
nationality but rely on autonomous and 
self-governing local communities.

Gandhi never considered himself as a visionary or 
a philosopher but as a `practical idealist' who 
tried to combine high moral standing and a series 
of 'experiments with truth'. His `Truth' was 
neither positivistic nor absolutistic, and his 
efforts were ongoing
experiments from which he kept learning valuable 
lessons all the time. He had a unique knack of 
communicating with the people of India by using 
indigenous metaphors and methods that had been 
there on the Indian masses' psyche. Equipped with 
such flexibility and ingenuity, he could easily 
motivate the people of India for mass political 
action. That is why even today invoking the 
Mahatma's name turns people's heads in India, and 
Marx or Mao means little to most people.

An impartial scrutiny of both Gandhi and 
Communists would reveal quite a few holes in both 
their politics. Neither of them is perfect. 
Informed Gandhians would readily admit that. 
Communists have been forced to face that fact. 
Now that independence has been achieved and that 
we have come a long way from 1947, some of the 
basic differences
between Gandhians and Communists can and should 
be overlooked. After all, mainstream Communists 
are not engaging in "class war" or random acts of 
violence, and the largely marginalized Gandhians 
are not colluding with the ruling classes either.

Combining the strengths of both Gandhian and 
Communist politics and building up on their 
shared interests such as Ahimsa/nonviolence, 
Sarvodaya/egalitarianism, Satya/emancipation, and 
Satyagraha/organized struggle, they can and 
should steer Indian politics to a dignified 
destination. Both groups need to upgrade 
themselves and become more user-friendly. We are 
not looking for an unprincipled mega-merger but a 
strategic joint-venture to accomplish a specific 
objective: to create a favorable political 
climate in the country that will help the healthy 
human seeds sprout, grow, and bloom into Gandhian 
Leftists and Leftist Gandhians. To adapt a quote 
of Swami Vivekananda, a few millions of such `Red 
Indians' fired with the zeal for social justice 
and fortified with eternal faith in human dignity 
and freedom should go over the length and breadth 
of India preaching and practicing the gospel of 
salvation, the gospel of socioeconomic-political 
emancipation, and the gospel of true independence.


S. P. Udayakumar is Managing Trustee of South 
Asian Community Center for Education and Research 
Trust, Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu 
<drspudayakumar at yahoo.com>.


______



[6]

Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 19:23:31 -0600
Subject: Thoughts on the victory in India

Dear Friends:

With the swirl of hatred that has taken over the world in the last several
years, it is with immense pleasure and pride that I write in regards to the
just-completed elections in India, "the world's largest democracy."  For the
past 5 years or so, India has been ruled by right-wing militaristic forces,
the heirs of the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi.  In their hands, open
admiration of Hitler and his "final solution" became fashionable.  In their
hands, gruesome violence became all too common, nowhere more visceral than
in a state-sponsored pogrom in the West Indian state of Gujarat two years
ago.  In their hands, India marched steadily towards nuclear-powered
fascism.  And with this as their record, India was brought to an election
campaign premised on the slogan "India Shining."

And now the people have spoken.  The forces of fascism and hate have been
turned away.  The liberal Congress party, in collaboration with regional
social justice parties and Communist forces, together in a massive secular
alliance have won an unexpected but resounding victory.  It is time to
celebrate!  And to marvel at the truly awesome and majestic power of
democracy. 

Although Sonia Gandhi and her glamorous children Rahul and Priyanka, the
heirs of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, are the face of this victory, it is the
teeming masses of India who have spoken.  Rejecting "reforms for the rich"
schemes, and instead demanding basic infrastructure, clean water, and basic
health care, India's millions have overturned the consolidated power of the
urban elite.  The new view is simple: the people want universal justice and
sustainable development.  The forces of sanity--and the soul of Mahatma
Gandhi--have returned to India.  It is wondrous to behold.

Let's not be under delusions.  There are many problems ahead.  And the new
government must not betray the trust reposed in them, as constituent
elements have done in the past.  But this election proves that in any event
the ruling elite will be held accountable.  And the standard to which they
shall be held is one that celebrates diversity and pluralism, that respects
human rights, that demands equality and social justice for all.
India--now--is truly shining.

Sincerely,

Manu Bhagavan
Assistant Professor
Department of History and Political Science
Manchester College
N. Manchester, IN 46962 [USA}

______


[7]

ALL INDIA CHRISTIAN COUNCIL
Regd. Office: 8-2-601/B/17 Bhanu Society Banjara 
Hills, Hyderabad 500034 Andhra Pradesh, India
President: Dr Joseph D’ Souza      Secretary General: Dr. John Dayal

Please correspond with Secretary General at:
505 Link Society, 18 I.P. Extension, Delhi 110092 India
Phone (91 11) 22722262 Mobile 09811021072
Email: johndayal at vsnl.com

PRESS STATEMENT

14 May 2004

Christian Council congratulates people for 
rejecting fascist cultural nationalism; Young 
India votes for a secular future

New government must challenge poverty, purge 
system of Hindutva fanatics, help economic growth 
of minorities

[All India Christian Council President Dr Joseph 
D Souza and Secretary general Dr John Dayal have 
issued the following statement on the results of 
the General elections to the 14th Lok Sabha]

The All India Christian Council congratulates the 
people of India for summarily rejecting, in the 
largest exercise of democratic franchise in 
history, all purveyors of the politics of hate, 
revenge and communalism, and their ideology of 
narrow nationalism, religion and ethnicity. The 
defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya 
Swayamsevak Sangh NDA alliance in the 2004 
General Elections to the 14th Lok Sabha echoes 
the united voice of an essentially young 
electorate demanding a secure future for 
themselves in which there is food and jobs for 
all, genuine freedom of faith, cultural 
pluralism, and opportunity of growth.

Slogans of India Shining and Cyber-politics were 
not been able to close the eyes of the people to 
the carnage in Gujarat 2002, the farmers’ 
suicides in Andhra 2003 and the persecution of 
small Christian community from 1997 to 2004. Nor 
could the expensive propaganda hide the denial of 
development to Dalits and rural poor, and the 
absence of the minority communities from higher 
echelons of the State, including the judiciary, 
the police and the administration. The elections 
therefore become a referendum rejecting attempts 
to constrict secular space and reserve 
development only for the elite.

The election results are a call for equity, 
Freedom of Faith and the Rule of Law once more, 
free of the shadow of groups that invidiously 
hijacked the national agenda in 1992 and held 
national peace and unity hostage for 12 years.

The fact that the BJP or its allies still rule at 
the state level in the entire tribal belt of 
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and 
Orissa, remains a cause for concern. The divisive 
forces of the RSS, aided and abetted by money 
from Non resident Indians and the state 
machinery, are still dividing innocent 
communities in these states, and contaminating 
the minds of an entire generation.

The People’s mandate to the Congress Party and 
its Allies also devolves on them the 
responsibility to restore the confidence of the 
people – specially the Dalits and the Minorities 
-- in the System, and in national institutions 
including the Judiciary, the police and the 
administration across the nation.  This would 
also demand entirely re-structuring the National 
Commissions for Minorities, the National 
Commission for Scheduled castes and the National 
Commission for Women, which in the past six years 
became willing slaves and vassals of the RSS and 
the BJP.

There may be need to purge these institutions of 
the RSS cadres and ideology that have been 
planted in them over the last six years. This 
would also involve expurgating from the 
Educational system all that was forced into it in 
the guise of defining culture, and rewriting 
history, and which mitigates against the 
Constitution and the wonderful variety of India.

The new Government must of course evolve priority 
policies that provide a safety net to the poor, 
the minorities and the Dalits from the 
delinquency of globalisation and liberalization.

The Council also calls on new Government to take 
steps to punish the guilty of Gujarat 2002 and 
all those responsible for the persecution of 
Christians in various states. The FCRA regime 
must be dismantled, a Directorate of Minority 
Education set up to ensure that the spirit and 
letter of Article 30 of the Constitution is not 
diluted, and restrictions now faced by minority 
institutions in the education, medical and social 
service sectors be removed forthwith.  The 
National Integration Council must be revived, and 
measures taken for reparations to victims of 
communal violence. The Tenth Plan must also 
provide for the economic emancipation of 
minorities – the worst island of non-development.

For the Christian community, successive 
governments and Parliaments have ignored our 
demands for changes in personal laws of marriage, 
inheritance and adoption. For fifty years, the 
Dalits who profess Christianity have demanded the 
same civil rights as their brethren in the Hindu, 
Sikh and Buddhist faiths. And the regulations of 
Visas have discriminated against Christian 
priests and preachers. The Christian community 
demands no more, and no less, than the rights and 
privileges given to other communities as citizens 
of a free India. The new government must honour 
this basic guarantee of equality in the eye of 
the law.


______



[8]


-------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 05:39:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: suma josson

Representatives from various groups and individuals
will be meeting to discuss the above subject: NETWORK
ON COMMUNAL HARMONY. This meeting will be on May 21,
at 6 p.m. at Shramik, Dadar (E), on the second lane
behind the Swami Narayan temple. [Bombay]


Dear Friends,

After the recent election results, Ram Madhav, the RSS
spokesman has gone on record saying that it was the
dilution of the Hindutva ideology that was the cause
for the poor performance of the BJP. So this becomes
the context in which we have to work.

It has often been said that the secular forces come
together in times of crises and then battle such
emergencies with fire fighting endeavours and efforts.
When things calm down we go back into our routine
lives until we wait for the next outbreak.

But then Gujarat happened and we saw the unbelievable
take place. We also saw the slow poison of hate
silently spreading across the country, right from
textbooks, to institutions, to the Constitution.

It is in this context that some of us felt that we
should form a platform/network of various groups with
the central issue being that of communal harmony and
peace. We also felt that there is a growing need to
ensure that all these energies are coordinated and
that they draw from each other, to strengthen the
tasks on hand in a consistent manner.

Thus while each group goes ahead with itís own
programmes, this forum will merely be platform where
we collect information, disseminate, interact, and
help each other out.

The most important issue is that we must find ways and
means to address the unconverted.

Here are SOME points on which we can work together.

1) We are in dire need of speakers who can counter the
false propaganda unleashed by the RSS. Therefore it is
necessary to organise ëTraining of Trainersí
programmes. These speakers should come from various
backgrounds like colleges, trade unions, bastis and so
on.

2) To respond to the violation of secular values by
the state and the communal groups we need organized
forms of protest. This protest can be in the form of
demonstrations, petitions, letters to concerned
authorities, letters in the newspapers, legal
interventions wherever feasible, and area-wide
meetings on this issue.

3) Culture is a very important form of intervention
and we have to work out ways of implementing this.

4) We can run awareness campaigns in certain areas.
Groups can adopt a basti for example and run a
campaign there.

5) We have to put together our resources to ensure
that in case of violence/riots we can intervene
effectively.

6) Work out strategies for the coming Assembly
elections.


The organizational aspects of the platform

a.	A small rotating secretariat

      b. Specialized committees as and when the need
arises. Like for example one for the   ëTraining of
Trainersí. One to do with intervention in Colleges
etc.

      c.  Directory of individuals/ groups wanting to
contribute in this work

      d.  E-group to inform about the activities

      e.  We meet once in a month



Anjum Rajbali
Ankur Dutta
Athar Querishi
Arjun Dangle
Bhau Korde
Charul Joshi
Dolphy DíSouza
Firoz Mithiborwalla
Geeta Seshu
Golandaz
Himmatbhai Zaveri
Irfan Engineer
Jaya Menon
Kumar Prashant
Leslie Rodericks
Mihir Desai
Nandkumar Vagarya
Priyanka Josson
Rajeev Kalelkar
Ram Punyani
Sandhya Gokhale
Santosh Panighri
Sudhir Paranjpe
Sukla Sen
Shweta Tambe
Suma Josson
TRK Somaiya
Uday Mehta
Vahida Nainar
Vasudevan


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on 
matters of peace and democratisation in South 
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit 
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