SACW | 15 June 2006 | Aung San Suu Kyi; Hindu right and Nepal; Pak-India Parleys out of steam; Forced marriages in the UK; Ravi Dayal; Ban on Baa Baa Black Sheep
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Wed Jun 14 21:42:30 CDT 2006
South Asia Citizens Wire | 15 June, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2258
[Mid June 2006, Marks Ten Years of South Asia Citizens Web initiative! ]
[1] Remember Asia's Nelson Mandela: a political
act of the first importance (Timothy Garton Ash)
[2] India['s Hindu far right] and Nepal (Badri Raina)
[3] India - Pakistan Dialogue is Slow and Unsteady (A.G. Noorani)
[4] [UK's position on forced marriages] This is
a Betrayal of Asian women (Ross Clark)
[5] India: Irreplaceable Pioneer - Obituary:
Ravi Dayal 1937-2006. (Rukun Advani)
[6] BJP ruled Indian state bans Baa Baa Black Sheep (Maseeh Rahman)
[7] Two recent volumes by OUP Pakistan
[8] Public Meeting on Increasing Assaults on
'Right to Assembly and Protest' (New Delhi, June
15)
____
[1]
The Guardian
June 15, 2006
REMEMBER ASIA'S NELSON MANDELA: A POLITICAL ACT OF THE FIRST IMPORTANCE
Western policy cannot change Burma by itself.
Aung San Suu Kyi needs the clout of Asian
democracies
Timothy Garton Ash
Next Monday is the 61st birthday of Aung San Suu
Kyi. Unless she is back in hospital, where she
was recently treated for a stomach ailment, she
will presumably mark that birthday on her own, in
the run-down villa on the shore of Inya lake
where she has spent more than 10 of her past 17
years under house arrest. We don't know what she
will do, what she is writing or what she is
thinking. Her isolation is almost total.
According to recent reports, she sees only a
housekeeper, the housekeeper's daughter, a
gardener and occasionally her doctor. It seems
unlikely that she will even be able to talk on
the telephone with her sons, Alexander and Kim,
who live in the west.
We are told she spends much time meditating,
playing the piano and keeping fit, but that is
hearsay. The last foreigner to meet her was a UN
envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, who said she was well and
expressed his hope that she could make a
"contribution" to political progress in Burma,
now officially known as Myanmar. There were
rumours that her house arrest would be lifted. A
few days later the military regime extended her
detention order for another year. So much for
dialogue. As the local joke goes, George Orwell
wrote not just one but three books about Burma:
Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
I will never forget meeting Suu Kyi in Rangoon -
now officially known as Yangon - some six years
ago, when she was still able to leave her house.
I went on to lecture about transitions to
democracy, with her chairing and interpreting, to
an intense, brave group of activists from the
National League for Democracy (NLD). Unthinkable
today, in a country that has gone backwards while
all around are going forwards.
I'm sure she will be bearing her solitary
confinement with fortitude, grace and the
Buddhist life-philosophy that is so important to
her. Yet I feel a terrible sense of frustration
in writing about her and her country's
predicament. What new is there to say? That she
is a heroine of our time, an Asian Nelson
Mandela. That the Burmese generals run one of the
worst states in the world, spending some 40% of
the country's budget on the military, while most
of their people live in poverty and disease. (The
Burmese health system is ranked 190th out of 190
countries by the World Health Organisation.) That
dialogue with the NLD, which overwhelmingly won a
democratic election in 1990, is the key to
political change. All true. All said a thousand
times already. All to no apparent effect.
Groundhog day in Yangon.
But if Suu Kyi doesn't give up, we have no right
to. Instead of saying "happy birthday", which
would seem grotesque in the circumstances, here
are three modest thoughts about possible ways to
thaw this frozen conflict. First of all,
remembering Burma is itself a political act of
the first importance. As the Czech writer Milan
Kundera famously observed, "the struggle of man
against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting". Forgetting Burma is just what its
rulers want us to do. No news from Burma is good
news for them, bad news for their people.
(There's a challenge for the free media of the
world here: how do you cover the story when there
is no story?) We have to keep hammering away,
even if it means repeating the same lines for
years and years. After all, though the comparison
is hardly encouraging, Nelson Mandela was in
prison for 27 years; and yet South Africa moved
in the end.
Second, while paying all respect to Suu Kyi's
often repeated call for tight sanctions against
the military regime, we should think again about
the mix of our policies. For example, is there
more we can do to alleviate directly the
suffering of the population from the effects of
Aids or drug addiction without giving an
unacceptable payoff to the regime? The Free Burma
Coalition activist and analyst Zarni has recently
argued that both the western policy of sanctions
and the eastern policy of constructive engagement
have failed. He suggests that the starting point
for moving towards a more effective combination
of the two might be to try to see the world
through the greedy but also anxious eyes of the
Burmese military. What mixture of carrots and
sticks would have a chance of persuading them to
loosen up?
One thing should be clear after 16 years: no
western policy, however carefully designed, can
work on its own. We simply don't have enough
leverage in this largely self-sufficient Asian
country, tucked in between the two Asian giants,
India and China, and its south-east Asian
neighbours, such as Thailand. If you doubt that
we are already in a multipolar world, look at
Burma. If the internal key to change is the
reopening of dialogue between the military regime
and the NLD, the external key is a change in
approach by at least one, and preferably several,
of its Asian neighbours.
Where to begin? Surely in India, a country where
Suu Kyi went to school, and whose culture she
studied and admires - and the world's largest
democracy. One hardly expects communist China to
press for liberalisation and democracy in its
disgraceful little neighbour, but it is
disappointing that democratic India has been so
timid in policy towards its Burmese neighbour.
If we look to India for leadership in this
respect, then we must start by listening to what
Indians themselves have to say. The shape of the
conversation should not be (Washington speaking):
"Hey, Indians, you must take our self-evidently
correct western template and help us impose it on
Burma." It should be: "We're wondering whether
you think, judging by your own lights and values,
that this is acceptable behaviour in your own
immediate neighbourhood? And if not, how do you
suggest we work together to catalyse peaceful
change there?" Better still, that debate should
be initiated and carried forward inside India by
intellectuals, commentators and politicians who
argue that respect for human rights and respect
for basic liberties are as much Indian values as
they are western values.
This is the shape of the new world order, if
there is to be one. We liberal internationalists
in the west don't need to change that much of
what we say; but if we are to achieve liberal
ends in an increasingly multipolar world, then we
do have to rethink how we say it, and to whom.
And we have to listen more than we have for the
last 500 years.
"To see a world in a grain of sand" exhorted the
poet William Blake - a line that Suu Kyi must
have studied when she read English literature at
St Hugh's College, Oxford - just a couple of
hundred metres from where I'm writing these
words. And contemplating the lot of one brave
woman in a lakeside house on a solitary birthday
can lead us to a new understanding of the world
we're in. So: have as good a birthday as
possible, Suu, and many happier ones to come.
_____
[2]
ZNet
June 10, 2006
INDIA AND NEPAL
by Badri Raina
Replicating the wishful follies of the eighteenth
century Bourbon monarch, Louis XVI, King
Gyanendra Shah of Nepal has finally been denuded
of all his powers. It hardly matters now what
royal robes he wears; the emperor will
henceforth be effectively without clothes. This
being 2006 rather than 1793, he might just save
his head.
All that has been accomplished by a revolutionary
upsurge spearheaded by Nepalese youth.
Undeterred by either the 'royal Nepalese army',
the subterfuges of 'mainstream' Nepalese
polticians, or the not so incipient royalist
sympathies of the Indian and American
establishments, the Nepalese people may have laid
the groundwork for a Republic.
Having brought about a relatively peaceful
overthrow of feudal despotism in their own
country-in sharp contrast rather to the exertions
of elite sections of Indian youth who are now
engaged in counter-revolutionary activity to
shore up privileges that accrue to them as a
consequence of birth and economic status-their
achievement may, infact, bear far-reaching
beneficial consequence for India's State and
Polity as well.
One of the declarations made by the new Nepalese
government is that Nepal will no longer be a
Hindu theocratic State but a 'secular' one.
This causes an enormous problem for the Hindu
Right (led by the RSS) in India whose project
ever since its establishment in 1925 has been to
transform India into a Hindu Rashtra, even as it
has also been their oxymoronic boast that India's
preponderant Hindu majority ipso facto renders it
a secular nation. The declaration in Nepal,
however, clearly implies that the Nepalese State
has not been a 'secular' State thus far,
regardless of its preponderant Hindu population.
A statement made by the senior BJP (the
political/electoral front of the RSS) leader,
V.K.Malhotra (The Hindu, May 20) regretting the
Nepalese declaration is based on the assumption
that 'Hindu' and 'Secular' are interchangeable
concepts. Never mind that the anti-minority
pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat under Narendra Modi
busted this pretence sky-high.
Recorded ideological facts, however, belie this
boast. Long before Jinnah the founder of
Pakistan, stipulated that Hindus and Muslims
constituted separate 'nations,'and asked for a
separate muslim State (1940), it was the Hindutva
ideologue, Savarkar, who had expressed this
theory first(1923). He laid the hypothesis that
only those who were both born in India ( pitra
bhumi) and bore allegiance to forms of religion
'indigenous' to India ( punya bhumi) could be
considered 'Indian.' Muslims and Christians were
thus excluded from 'Indianness', since their
chief places of worship lay outside the territory
of India. Following upon that, Golwalkar, the
then RSS chief (or Sarsangchalak) in a
pernicious book, We, Our Nationhood(1939),
which unabashedly lauded the Nazis for having
elevated 'race pride' to unprecedented heights,
warned India's religious minorities in no
uncertain terms that unless they learnt to
subjugate themselves wholly and without demur to
dominant Hindu culture, and venerated Hindu gods,
all their rights, including those of citizenship,
would be denied them in the stipulated Hindu
Rashtra (Hindu theocratic State).
In fact, just recently, another deeply
embarrassing chapter has been added to the
Goeblesian history of the RSS/BJP: In a volume
(RSS Aur Bharti Jana Sangh Ki Sthapna Ka
Itihaas-RSS and the History of the Establishment
of the Jana Sangh), one of several commissioned
by the Hindu Right to commemorate the silver
jubilee of the existence of the BJP, the authors
(both RSS insiders), Makhan Lal and J.K.Mathur,
have forthrightly inscribed the truth that the
RSS and the Jana Sangh-the predecessor of the
BJP-were created to 'counter the muslims.'Having
in recent years charged India's secular
historians of 'distorting' Indian history, the
RSS now claims its own history has been distorted
by its own historians! Never mind that they spoke
the plain truth.
Ever since India's Independence in 1947, thus,
the Hindu Right in India, led by the RSS, has
refused allegiance to either the secular Indian
Constitution or the national flag, the Tricolour.
This despite the fact that such allegiance was
enjoined upon them by the post-Independence
government led by Nehru as quid pro quo to the
release of their leaders from incarceration which
had resulted from suspicion of their involvement
in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi in 1948.
When the eastern wing of Pakistan seceded in 1971
to establish an independent Bangladesh, despite a
shared religious affiliation, the world had
resonant proof that a common religion alone
could not be a viable basis for State-formation.
Much as the RSS then applauded Pakistan's
break-up, the larger lesson was lost on it. It
thus continued to view Nepal, a Hindu theocratic
State, as an object of its own dreams, and the
King as a veritable avatar of the Hindu god,
Vishnu. The new development in Nepal has thus
driven a stake not just through the Nepalese
theocratic monarchy but of the RSS as well, just
at it has lent force to all those in India who
have maintained that only a secular and pluralist
India can be a modern and viable India.
Furthermore, one of the chief accusations of the
RSS against India's Congress Party (which had led
the struggle for independence from colonial
rule), has been that it has always engaged in
pampering India's religious minorities, chiefly
the muslims. The RSS calls this the Congress's
'minorityism.' With news coming now from the new
Nepal that provisions will be enshrined there as
well for protective and enabling laws in the
interests of Nepalese ethnic and religious
minorities, the RSS has lost another one of its
major propaganda mechanisms against India's
secular parties.
All in all, the Nepalese events bear a resonance
that stretches way beyond life in Nepal. Indeed,
these lessons need not be restricted only to the
RSS in India; they seem of equal relevance to
large parts of the world where Islamic ideologues
seek to deny secular, democratic forms of
Statehood, and perhaps also to the new crop of
born-again Evangelists in America whose vision of
Statehood in recent years has not, after all,
been too different from that of those whom they
seek to defeat.
_____
[3]
Hindustan Times
June 12, 2006
SLOW AND UNSTEADY
A.G. Noorani
By now, the near decade-old composite dialogue
between India and Pakistan has run out of steam.
There is little progress on any of the eight
topics listed in the joint statement issued in
Islamabad on June 23, 1997. Least of all on the
item placed least significantly, namely
'promotion of friendly exchanges in various
fields'. There has been some improvement in the
last two years since the Saarc summit in
Islamabad in January 2004, but not much. While
there are obstacles on both sides in this matter,
the honours are not evenly divided. Pakistan has
been by far the more blatant offender though
India has not lagged too far behind in this silly
game.
Since the governments of both countries control
the academia and wield influence over what pass
for 'think-tanks', private initiative cannot go
far without official support. Professions of
commitment to freer intellectual exchange have
not prompted any government of India, regardless
of its political complexion, to rescind the
long-standing obscene circular that requires
Indian citizens to seek permission from the MEA
and the Union Home Ministry to hold any seminar
within the country in which South Asians
participate.
Yet, it would be unfair to dismiss professions of
commitment to freer exchange of persons and ideas
as altogether insincere. One suspects that one
drawback is that not much thought has been given
as to how the process can be put on rails so that
it moves smoothly. Another is ignorance and
suspicion on both sides.
As to the first, a good roadmap was drawn up 45
years ago at the Indo-Pak Cultural Conference in
New Delhi in April 1961. Its moving spirit was Dr
Tara Chand, while Humayun Kabir, as then chairman
of the ICCR, gave his strong backing. Behind the
scenes, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lent his
powerful support and inaugurated the conference.
Nothing like that has been witnessed in the years
since.
Erudite papers were read by scholars on
archaeology, history, education, fine arts,
journalism, films and languages. Among those who
participated enthusiastically were I.H. Qureshi,
R.S. Sharma, G.C. Chatterjee, K.G. Saiyadain,
Mulk Raj Anand, Balraj Sahni, Gopinath Aman and
Gopichand Narang.
Four papers stand out: A.R. Rashidi's on Indo-Pak
historiography since 1947; Mulk Raj Anand's on a
common basis for contemporary art in India and
Pakistan; Yadu Vanshi's on growth of scientific
and technical literature in Hindi and Urdu; and
Gopinath Aman's on Urdu literature in
post-Independence India. It was not dominated by
Urdu-speaking scholars nor by any single
intellectual discipline. There were only three
papers in Urdu: by Ehtesham Husain, Gopichand
Narang, and Balraj Sahni. Born in Rawalpindi,
Balraj Sahni's thought-provoking paper on the
language issue makes poignant reading. Indeed, to
read the papers today is to realise what both
countries missed because of their obdurate and
short-sighted policies.
For a roadmap, the Resolution which the
Conference unanimously adopted can serve as a
good model. Its very first recommendation was
that 'for exchange of information on literary and
cultural matters centres may be established in
the two countries'. Others were 'exchange of
professors and students', 'facilities for
research', 'exchange or transmission of books and
journals'; agreement on protection of copyright;
periodic conferences on 'scientific and academic
subjects' and 'the institution of a new type of
visa, to grant facilities to students and
scholars who visit the country for the purpose of
study and research'.
Politics killed these ideas. How can any such
centre exist in a hostile environment and without
official support? The odd seminar, the jamboree,
and visits of public figures are no substitute
for organised, institutional exchanges, say,
between the leading universities of both
countries.
The generation with memories of the pre-Partition
subcontinent is fading away. Most of the
stalwarts of the Progressive Writers' Movement
are gone. The new generation combines healthy
curiosity with inherited suspicion. There is
little appreciation of the intellectual ferment
on both sides of the divide in which there is
sharp questioning of conventional wisdom, not
excluding the policies of the national heroes
that led to the Partition.
Chaudhary Khaliquzzaman, a leading figure in the
Pakistan movement, lamented, "Look at the
condition of the three isolated Muslim
communities [in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh].
They dare not communicate with one another.
Pakistan today is not one-third as important as
the pre-Independence Muslim India was. Are the
Indian Muslims a third of their forebears in
political weight? And the Muslims of Bangladesh -
well, you know, they do not count as much as even
Pakistan". This was said in an interview with
M.B. Naqvi ages ago (Pakistan Economist, April
15, 1979). The distinguished poet, Munir Niazi,
told The Herald (Jan. 2006) that "Partition was
the worst thing that could have happened to us."
Air Marshal (retd.) Zafar Chaudhri had no
hesitation in asserting that the so-called
"Pakistan ideology", a euphemism for religious
bigotry, was no part of Jinnah's credo and cited
his famous speech in 1947 which brought our poor
L.K. Advani to grief. He said, "The Pakistan
ideology was invented after the birth of
Pakistan" (Jang, July 10, 1987).
While religious bigots hijacked Jinnah's
Pakistan, the bureaucracy and armed services also
put on it the stamp of their own outlook.
Ironically, Pakistan's civil and military
bureaucracies could boast of a large number of
writers and intellectuals from among their own
ranks. There began an increasing domination of
religious bigots and civil and military
bureaucracies over the intellectual life of the
society.
As Mohammed Waseem pointed out, their credo was
"anti-communism, anti-secularism and
anti-Indianism". But there was another school,
intellectually no less powerful, with bases in
Lahore and Karachi. I.A. Rehman and Khaled Ahmed
represent it in their analyses. They are as
nationalistic as any other Pakistani but are
secular and liberal to the core. We laud their
criticisms of Islamabad, ignore those of New
Delhi. The school they represent received no
understanding from us at any time.
The reality of Pakistan's cultural scene was
portrayed accurately by Zeno in MAG on Aug. 5,
1982. On the surface, Islamisation held sway.
Yet, there was an 'Indian-Muslim dimension of our
culture', as Indian as it was Muslim. Efforts to
denude, if not eliminate, the former could not go
far. The 'new view of Pakistan's culture being
presented by our diehard Islamists... does not
exclude the Indian element from the Indo-Muslim
culture'. In fact, 'it affirms the Indianness of
the Pakistan tradition'. A statesmanlike policy
by India will strengthen this school of thought.
_____
[4]
The Telegraph
June 11, 2006
THIS IS A BETRAYAL OF ASIAN WOMEN
by Ross Clark
After a consultation involving 157 individuals
and organisations, the Home Office decided last
week that there should be no specific offence of
rape. Many respondents, according to the Home
Office minister Baroness Scotland, fear that a
specific offence of rape merely helps to "isolate
victims, prevent reconciliation and drive rape
further underground". Instead, she proposed that
rapists should be pursued through the civil
courts, adding: "We will continue to provide
information and assistance both to potential
victims and to concerned professionals who are
confronted by this abuse."
Actually, the above is not quite true. I have
substituted "rape" for "forced marriage". In some
ways, though, the distinction is academic: a
woman forced into marriage is almost certainly,
sooner or later, going to be forced into sex as
well - not to mention imprisonment and slavery to
boot.
Baroness Scotland was certainly in no mood to
tolerate forced marriage when, last September,
she launched a consultation on her proposals to
criminalise the practice: "Forced marriage cannot
be justified on religious or cultural grounds
because no major world religion supports itBy
making forced marriage a specific offence we give
it a voice in a form which it doesn't have at the
moment."
What has happened in the meantime to change her
mind? The Government's commitment to human rights
has been overridden by its weak-headed devotion
to multiculturalism, that's what. In Labour Party
politics there is, of course, an enormous
difference between rape and forced marriage:
while the former is an offence committed all over
the country, the latter is almost exclusively
confined to the Asian population. And that, in
the Government's mind, makes a law against forced
marriage indefensible - on the grounds that it
would discriminate "unfairly" against a
particular race.
Indeed, the Home Office appears to have been
thinking along these lines when it published its
consultation paper on forced marriage, gently
suggesting to potential respondents that a
criminal offence of forced marriage would
"disproportionately impact on black and ethnic
communities and might be misinterpreted as an
attack on those communities". In other words: "We
would like to catch these brutes who kidnap young
members of their families, hustle them off to
Pakistan and, under threat of death, marry them
off to some thuggish cousin who repulses them.
But we are frightened that if we do so we will
provoke a few more mad imams to burn the Union
flag and demand that unbelievers be put to the
sword."
In reality, it isn't a law against forced
marriage that discriminates against ethnic
minorities; it is the failure to introduce such a
law.
The Government has created a situation in which
young Asian women are deemed to have lesser human
rights than have the rest of us; what chance the
Home Office declining to act if it were a nutty
Christian sect forcing women into marriage? Like
Basil Fawlty, so obsessed with not mentioning the
war to his German guests that he can't stop
himself doing just that, the Government has
become so preoccupied with avoiding racial
discrimination that it has ended up committing
this very act.
The Home Office estimates that 300 British women
annually are forced into marriage against their
will. It will come as little consolation to them,
as "concerned professionals" attempt to effect a
"reconciliation" between them and their
kidnappers - that their plight has been
overlooked supposedly in the name of racial
harmony.
_____
[5]
The Telegraph
June 11, 2006
IRREPLACEABLE PIONEER
- Obituary: Ravi Dayal (1937-2006)
Rukun Advani
Outside the arcane area of legal philosophy, the
name of the Oxford scholar, H.L.A. Hart
(1907-92), does not ring much of a bell now.
Straying from philosophy into law, he happened to
write the foundational text of his discipline,
The Concept of Law (1961), and is sometimes
dutifully remembered for that reason.
Unknown to most, there is a far more interesting
reason for remembering H.L.A. Hart. In 1961, he
inadvertently laid the foundations of Indian
academic publishing. He managed to do this when
he dissuaded one of Oxford University's Indian
history graduates from taking up research,
persuading him instead to consider the
attractions of a career in publishing. Sensing
that the vacillating graduate needed a few
sensible words in his ear, Hart said Indian
publishing was uncharted terrain and the Oxford
University Press needed good men in India. And
so, quite by chance, in that far off era - long
before OUP India itself began looking like a good
man fallen among thieves, accountants, jumped-up
salesmen, and semi-literate editors - this
history graduate heeded Hart's advice and went on
to pioneer the field of Indian academic
publishing virtually single-handed. He was born
Ravindra Dayal; for most of his life and until
his death on June 3, 2006, he was known as Ravi
Dayal, the publisher.
'History of the book' is now a rapidly developing
academic field, and someday soon some Larkinian
Jake Balokowsky, sensing s/he can milk the Mellon
Foundation, will put up a Spivakian research
proposal arguing the indispensability of a
biography of Ravi Dayal for any 'hermeneutically
nuanced' and 'epistemologically problematized'
understanding of Indian academic publishing. In
the interim, a few lines of antique clarity about
this foot soldier, who did all the groundwork on
which an industry flourishes today, may serve as
a memorial in his honour.
Ravi Dayal lived much of his life in Delhi but
was at heart a pahadi. Kayasthas, like Kashmiri
Pandits, often became munshis in legal and
bureaucratic enclaves such as Allahabad, Lucknow
and Srinagar, but Dayal's family had a house in
Nainital and packed him off to attend Sherwood
College. He grew up loving the clatter of rain on
a cold tin roof and the sight of deodars blurred
by mountain mist. In his later years, he
inherited a family mansion in Ranikhet and
perversely loved being marooned there by the
monsoon, in the company of childhood friends,
reliving the joys of his growing-up years.
One early experience of his Nainital days in the
Forties was serendipitous: while walking to
school he accidentally bumped into a man whom he
had frequently seen on that road. On this
occasion the man asked the boy his name. When the
boy replied "Ravi Dayal", the man introduced
himself as Jim Corbett. "You're the man-eater!",
howled the confused boy, bolting in terror in the
direction of his school, leaving Corbett - as
Dayal put it in his impeccably articulate style
when recounting the story- "somewhat bemused".
Later, as head of OUP India, Dayal sold hundreds
of thousands of copies of the Corbett corpus,
published the best biography of Corbett, and gave
Corbett's biographer, D.C. Kala, the Ranikhet
rooms in which Kala still lives.
Corbett and Elwin were perhaps the only two major
OUP India bestseller-authors that Dayal did not
personally bring into the OUP: they had been
brought in by Roy Hawkins, OUP India's
Bombay-based head at the time, under whom Dayal
trained. Hawkins was apparently a great editor,
but Dayal found him intellectually stifling. He
soon accepted a posting in OUP's Madras branch,
where he worked alongside Girish Karnad, with
whom he became great friends and whose plays he
later published. In 1971, Dayal moved to Delhi to
set up OUP's new headquarters there.
Girish Karnad's view is that Ravi Dayal, though
something of a live wire in Madras, really came
into his own when he became head of OUP India
about thirty years ago. This is true. Dayal's
most singular and enduring achievement is that he
put India on the world's intellectual map. He did
this by transforming OUP India from being a
run-of-the mill textbook publisher dabbling in
higher learning into the world's most reputed
centre for South Asian academic publishing in the
social sciences and humanities.
In his time, and largely because of his eminence
and repute, OUP India became unquestionably the
first press of choice for anyone wanting to
publish in South Asian history, sociology,
politics, and economics. In the history of
post-independence Indian publishing, he is more
important than M.N. Srinivas is in the history of
Indian sociology or Irfan Habib in the history of
Medieval Studies. Srinivas and Habib had rivals
and followers who were roughly their equals. Ravi
Dayal was in a publisher's league of his own. He
created what was in his era an unrivalled
institution. He ran the institution. In his day,
he was the institution.
This opinion will be seconded by most people who
worked with Dayal between the early Seventies
until 1987, when he took early retirement to
start his own publishing company. Puffing
continuously at a bidi, he exhaled integrity and
commitment to publishing as a discipline. People
lucky enough to get in the way of his smoke
soaked in the craft of book-making tinged with
the aroma of tobacco. He sustained his
organization by creating and nurturing a creative
publishing ethos, advising and supervising
judiciously, delegating and encouraging all the
time. Working with him, people learned not a
business but a craft: editing, typesetting,
cost-estimating, printing, binding, everything.
His associates felt they were his friends: never,
ever, did he make colleagues feel that they were
subordinates or employees. He refused an
airconditioner in his room: like everyone else,
he sweated over scripts blown about by a fan,
holding them together by paperweights and
something weightier - his uncommon editorial
acumen. He never had a chauffeur, he drove his
own jalopy. No flunkeys carried his briefcase to
his office. This may have been because he never
had a briefcase: he despised corporate symbols
almost as much as neckties and kept clear of
them. Most importantly, he kept his British
bosses in Oxford at a clear distance, managing to
wrest for OUP India a degree of autonomy that has
been tamely surrendered by the house-slaves put
in place there more recently. Dayal's OUP was a
community of craftspeople first, a corporation
just by the way.
Lunchtime at the OUP canteen in the Eighties
should have been caught on film: it would show a
world completely at odds with the one run by
homo-hierarchicized head honchos who run
publishing corporations via power lunches in posh
hotels. If Amartya Sen or M.N. Srinivas or
Sukhomoy Chakravarty happened to drop in at
lunchtime, they would be stood in the OUP India
lunch queue and made to patiently shuffle towards
daal-chaval on a standard railway thaali behind
dispatch clerks and packers. This was Subaltern
Studies embodied. Those socialist lunches, the
product of a peculiarly Dayalian brand of brutal
egalitarianism, actually served as a shrewd
acquisitioning tool: they were, paradoxically,
among the many small reasons for the most
distinguished authors later lining up to have
Ravi Dayal publish their books.
On the skills of editing a manuscript he said,
reflectively: "Oddly enough, my experience is
that if you cut a manuscript down to half its
size it frequently becomes twice as readable."
The bulk of academics are prototypical
narcissists: when they are not in love with
themselves, they fall in love with their own
words. Dayal cut them down to size. He alone had
the authority to be as ruthless as he liked. If
Salman Rushdie had had the good fortune of being
edited by Ravi Dayal, his novels would have been
less prolix and twice as readable. The Almighty
had endowed Ravi Dayal with the 'Order of Carte
Blanche with the Blue Pencil, First Class', at
birth. What could mere academics do except
acquiesce and applaud when Dayal's pencil
shreddingly improved their writing beyond all
recognition? Besides, his spidery handwriting was
part calligraphic, part indecipherable. So, even
if you disagreed with some of his editing, you
gave in partly because it was so beautifully done
and partly because you couldn't make out what
he'd done. In any case, disagreeing with Ravi
Dayal was not something you wanted to do in a
hurry. Even if you won the day over some small
syntactical point, something about him made you
feel you'd actually lost. On his own turf, he
wasn't beatable.
On the skills required for acquisitioning
manuscripts, he said: "An editor should possess
the authority to seem to an author like an equal,
not a supplicant. A distinguished academic will
only give you his book to publish if he feels he
can trust you intellectually." The irony is that,
in fact, even the most eminent authors felt like
supplicants when facing Dayal: the aura of
distinction he carried made them sense he was
more equal than them all. They virtually lined up
to have their scripts considered for publication
by him: Sálim Ali, A.K. Ramanujan, Romila Thapar,
Burton Stein, Irfan Habib, Ranajit Guha, M.N.
Srinivas, Ashis Nandy. Every major academic was
in the queue unless he'd been turned down. (Dayal
hated visiting the India International Centre,
describing it as "that den of rejected authors".)
Even the elusive Bernard Cohn of Chicago, who had
resisted publishing a book, handed over to Ravi
Dayal, at their first meeting, the manuscript of
his hugely influential classic, An Anthropologist
Among the Historians and Other Essays (1987). It
was a coup: roughly, the academic publisher's
equivalent of Liz Calder bagging David Guterson's
incomparable Snow Falling on Cedars.
For charisma, style, elegance, and articulation,
there was no one like Ravi Dayal in publishing -
or outside. It was a class act: he could have
charged good money just to have people watch him
being himself. Listening to him, you got the
feeling he was an upper-class Bloomsbury Brit
togging himself down in Gandhian garb so that he
could feel at home conversing with Lalu Prasad,
when in fact his natural conversational companion
would have been Lytton Strachey. In profile, he
looked an amalgam of Bertrand Russell and Jiddu
Krishnamurti: forehead up Russell, eyebrows down
Krishnamurti. Shortness of stature never came in
his way: an atmosphere of authority extended his
height a couple of feet. His austere patrician
air gave you the feeling he was the publishing
world's Nehru. If Nehru was the last Englishman
to run India, Ravi Dayal was the last Englishman
to rule the Indian academic universe. His left
liberalism, his interest in ideas and history,
and his nationalism were all, like Nehru's, the
beliefs of a morally incorruptible nobleman
devoted to enriching the intellectual life of his
country in his own eccentric way.
Ravi Dayal was the second-last of the
intellectually respected heads of OUP India. (His
anointed successor, the saintly bhadra
intellectual, Santosh Mookerjee, who retired in
1992, was the last.) Over the nineteen years
after he left the OUP, Dayal published Amitav
Ghosh's novels, played the mouth organ with
incredible proficiency, gardened with zest, ran a
charitable trust which took medicine and literacy
to his homeland, Kumaon, and charmed those who
flocked to his house to breathe the same air as
he did.
All men are irreplaceable. Ravi Dayal is more irreplaceable than others.
____
[6]
The Guardian
June 14, 2006
INDIAN STATE BANS BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP
Maseeh Rahman in Delhi
A book of nursery rhymes. Photograph: Adam Butler/AP
Tens of thousands of children at Indian schools
have been told they can no longer sing popular
English nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep.
In an attempt to rid schools of what is perceived
as malign western influence, the school education
minister in the state of Madhya Pradesh, Narottam
Mishra, has commissioned a new set of rhymes
written by Indians to "infuse a sense of
patriotism" among five-year-olds.
Article continues
For the first time since English-language
education was introduced in India by Lord
Macaulay in the 19th century, children in Madhya
Pradesh state schools will not learn the
time-honoured rhymes imported from England.
But there has been no public discussion on the
change and some parents disagree. "The poems
[which are being axed] are only about nature,
they have nothing to do with patriotism," Anjali
Singh, a parent in the state capital Bhopal, told
a local television news channel on Wednesday.
"In these days of globalisation, a child should
be exposed to everything, not just what's local.
These poems are a door through which the children
can view the wider world."
A retired English teacher, Professor Zamiruddin,
said the rhymes were popular with children. "The
old rhymes have survived because we don't have
good ones written in English that are rhythmic
and easy-to-learn," he said. "The government's
decision is so churlish and thoughtless."
This is not the first time that the Hindu
nationalist BJP has stirred a controversy by
tinkering with the school curriculum. In
neighbouring Gujarat state, school textbooks were
rewritten to categorise religious minorities
including Muslims, Christians and Parsis as
"foreigners" and to extol aspects of Nazism and
fascism. A social studies textbook in Gujarat
said: "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the
German government within a short time,
establishing a strong administrative set-up."
But unlike in Gujarat, the BJP's latest move to
"nationalise" nursery rhymes may get the approval
of its usually vociferous opponents from the left.
"I don't mind if the rhymes are replaced by
equally good Indian poems," scientist Yash Pal
told the Hindustan Times.
Educationalist Anil Sadgopal, speaking on the
CNN-IBN news channel, said culturally specific
poems such as Baa Baa Black Sheep could go, but
asked: "What's wrong with Twinkle Twinkle Little
Star?"
_____
[7] Two recent volumes by OUP Pakistan
The News International
Books Received
Contested Representation
Punjabi Women in Feminist
Debate in Pakistan
By Tahmina Rashid
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Price: Rs.595 Pgs: 419
This book examines the legal rights, political
representation and socio-economic status of women
in Pakistan. It also looks at contested views on
the class structure of society and the manner in
which women are positioned. The aim of this book
is to cover the gap between the activists and the
women they represent. It is an addition to the
available literature on women in Pakistan as the
focus is more on lower and lower-middle class
rural as well as urban women rather than women
activists and organizations and their efforts.
The study brings to light the questions raised by
women participants regarding class differences
and its effects on approaches in dealing with
women by State structures and organizations. The
book highlights the need to include women from
various classes in mainstream feminist agendas of
organizations as well as donor agencies. It
asserts the need to make a distinction between
speaking 'on' women and 'for' women.
Democratization in Pakistan
A Study of the 2002 Elections
By: Mohammad Waseem
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Price: Rs.495 Pgs: 258
This book deals with the 2002 elections as part
of the process of democratization in terms of
transition from military to civilian rule. It
starts with an analysis of the way elections in
Pakistan have been studied over time by scholars
from inside and outside the country, and with the
theory and practice of elections in the global
and domestic contexts. It discusses the
accountability drive of the Musharraf government,
followed by the devolution plan, the presidential
referendum, the electoral reforms and
constitutional amendments as important milestones
on the way to the 2002 elections. It seeks to
analyze the way the ruling set-up shaped the
electoral dynamics. It also brings to the surface
the political undercurrents of partisan
de-alignment represented by a low level of voter
identification with political parties and a low
turnout. The study provides a comprehensive
analysis of the input of civil society in the
election process, including the role of media,
NGOs, the lawyers' community and intelligentsia
in general.
_____
[8]
Invitation to participate in the
Public Meeting on
Increasing Assaults on 'Right to Assembly and Protest'
(With special reference to BJP-led Jharkhand
Government's conspiracy to frame CPI(ML) General
Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya under patently
false charges, including 307 of IPC and Section
17 of the draconian Criminal Law Amendment Act)
Venue: Gandhi Peace Foundation,
Deendayal Upadhyay Marg,
near ITO, New Delhi
Time: 2 P.M.
Date: June 15, 2006
Amongst those who have confirmed their participation include:
Justice Sachar, Arundhati Roy, Gautam Navalakha,
Uma Chakravarty, Sumit Chakravarty, Sukumar
Muralidharan, Tripta Wahi, ND Pancholi, Lata
Jishnu, Jawed Naqvi.
Dear friend,
As you may be aware the Jharkhand government is
desperately trying to frame Comrade Dipankar
Bhattacharya, General Secretary of CPI(ML), and
other party activists under patently false
charges including 307 of IPC and Section 17 of
CLA. And that too for leading a peaceful march to
the Assembly(on 1st march 2001) to protest a
spate of incidents involving police brutality,
including the infamous and unprovoked firing on
Muslim youth at Doranda and the firing on tribals
at Tapkara for protesting displacement by the
Koel Karo Dam.
The charges against the CPI(ML) leaders and
activists- Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya (General
Secretary, CPIML), Om Prakash, Harsh Narayan
Singh and Sita Ram Singh as well as Motu Oraon, a
labouring tribal youth who was a bystander, under
Section 147, 114, 148, 149, 353, 323, 324, 307,
188, 431 of the IPC and Section 17 of the CLA
(Criminal Law Amendment Act)- is before a
fast-track court in Ranchi. The CLA, you may be
aware is incidentally a draconian act (which came
into force between TADA and POTA), which, despite
being repealed, nevertheless continues to be
frequently invoked in Jharkhand.
The CPI-ML leaders are being witch-hunted and
greeted with repression in Jharkhand for a mass
act of public political protest. The Assembly
March was brutally lathicharged; newspapers
carried photographs of dozens of CPI(ML)
activists lying bloody and battered, and of the
police dragging CPI(ML) General Secretary
Dipankar Bhattacharya and late Comrade Mahendra
Singh (CPIML's lone MLA in the Jharkhand
Assembly) by their clothes and hair. Comrade
Dipankar was detained in judicial custody in jail
for a week, and false charges were slapped
against the arrested activists. Now, charges have
been framed and the Jharkhand Government is
pursuing these false cases assiduously and in a
great hurry to clamp political dissent. Notably,
the Jharkhand Government has dropped the cases
against several activists of the Jharkhand
movement, and even against leaders of the Ram
Janmabhoomi agitation.
The slogans of 'Punish the police officials
guilty for Tapkara firing', 'Gherao the Assembly,
Punish the Killers' and 'Scrap the Koel Karo
Project' on the banners and placards are being
cited by the police, while claiming that Comrade
Dipankar and other activists were 'inciting'
protestors for a murderous attack on police and
Assembly!
If the Jharkhand Government allows the police to
punish and persecute leaders engaged in mass
democratic protests, there will be no democratic
means left to protest incidents like the police
firing at Tapkara and Doranda. The path for a
police State will be set in Jharkhand. For the
General Secretary of a recognised political
party, leading a political protest to voice
certain issues before an elected Assembly, to be
charged with abetting attempted murder, is
probably unprecedented in the annals of Indian
politics. The only comparable precedent can be
found in the arrests of political leaders during
emergency.
There is an urgent need to come together and
safeguard the democratic rights enshrined in the
Constitution if we have to ensure that people
protesting against the violation of their
fundamental rights are not shot down and those
who lead the voice of concern are not
witch-hunted and jailed in Jharkhand.
Yours in solidarity,
Prabhat Kumar
Central Committee,
COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST-LENINIST) (LIBERATION)
Central Office: U-90, Shakarpur,Delhi-110092,
Phone: 011 -22521067 Fax: 011 - 22518248;
E-mail: mail at cpiml.org : cpiml.lib at bol.net.in : Website: www.cpiml.org
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/
DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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