SACW | Jan. 1-2, 2007

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | January 1-2, 2007 | Dispatch No. 2342 - Year 8

[1]  Bangladesh / India:  Two Nations and a Dead Body (Sajal Nag)
[2]  India: BJP  - Back To Hindutva And Hatred (Praful Bidwai)
[3]  India : The tenable patriot (Shahid Amin)
[4]  Hindustani in the Time of Globalisation (Mukul Dube)
[5]  India: The ethos of teaching English - An 
educational agenda (Kancha Ilaiah)
[6]  India: Bhagat Singh Chair at JNU
[7]  Upcoming Events: 6th World Atheist 
Conference (Vijayawada, 5 - 7 January, 2007)

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[1]

Economic and Political Weekly
December 16, 2006

TWO NATIONS AND A DEAD BODY
MORTUARIAL RITES AND POST-COLONIAL MODES OF
NATION-MAKING IN SOUTH ASIA

by Sajal Nag

The discourse on nationalism has rarely examined the nation-making processes
in post-colonial, post-nationalist spaces. 
Although nation-making in these new states 
followed
the familiar method of "appropriation and 
application" as in the west, the construction and
legitimisation of a separate identity needed an 
entirely different engagement. This article
studies such an endeavour that took place in 
post-colonial south Asia in the context of the
death of a poet. The corpse of the dead poet, 
Kazi Nazrul Islam, became the contested site by
two sovereign nations. The conflict over 
appropriating Nazrul and his legacy also took 
place
at a crucial political juncture for Bangladesh, 
as it made the unlikely transition from
democracy towards totalitarianism, from secularism to fundamentalism.

http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=12&filename=10875&filetype=pdf

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[2]

Kashmir Times
January 1, 2007

BACK TO HINDUTVA AND HATRED
BJP'S UNRESOLVED CRISIS

By Praful Bidwai

If there is one political party in India which 
knows how to create the impression that it's 
laying down the national agenda when it isn't, 
it's surely the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 
That's the message its national council meeting 
in Lucknow sent out when Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee 
declared that "the road to power in New Delhi 
passes via Lucknow" and exhorted the party to win 
the coming elections to the Uttar Pradesh 
Assembly.
Senior BJP leaders themselves manufactured this 
upbeat appearance. They highlighted the issue of 
who would lead the party in the next Lok Sabha 
elections as if it were part of the real agenda. 
Mr LK Advani set the ball rolling in a recent 
television interview when he said he would be the 
natural candidate for the Prime Minister's job 
should the BJP come to power; yet he doesn't 
expect Mr Vajpayee to nominate him. Soon, Mr MM 
Joshi, another would-be PM, declared there's no 
dearth of prime ministerial candidates in the BJP.
It was left to Mr Rajnath Singh, anointed BJP 
president for three more years, to put in the 
next claim. Mr Singh used colourful, semi-rustic 
imagery, of baratis (the bridegroom's party) only 
waiting to carry the bride, satta ki sundari 
(deity of power) to Delhi, and hinted that he 
himself might be the dulah (bridegroom). 
Meanwhile, Mr Narendra Modi strutted around as if 
he were Mr Vajpayee's successor, being the only 
senior second-generation leader to wield state 
power.
However, it's preposterous to regard the issue of 
BJP leadership in 2009 as relevant today. One 
must be irrationally exuberant to be convinced 
that the BJP will probably return to power in the 
next general elections, or that leadership will 
be the main determinant of its fate.
The BJP has been in steep decline since its 2004 
Lok Sabha defeat. Many of its partners have 
deserted its National Democratic Alliance. The 
party's consistently poor performance in 
by-elections, its loss of power in Jharkhand, and 
the demoralisation of many of its state units all 
point to this. The murder of Pramod Mahajan, the 
party's brightest second-generation leader, by 
his own brother, and the defection of Ms Uma 
Bharati, the fiery leader with the widest OBC 
appeal, were major setbacks too.
It's only in urban UP that the BJP has registered 
gains. During recent three-tier municipal 
elections, it won eight out of 12 large-city 
mayoral positions. (It had won six even in 2001.) 
In smaller towns, it was comprehensively defeated 
by the Samajwadi Party.
Yet, BJP leaders presented these results as a 
triumph heralding the party's ascent to national 
power. In reality, the local elections weren't 
even representative because the Bahujan Samaj 
Party, one of UP's Big Two, didn't contest them. 
In fact, the BSP covertly backed select 
candidates, including many from the BJP, to 
defeat its principal rival, the SP.
The BJP benefited from two factors: 
anti-incumbency against Chief Minister Mulayam 
Singh Yadav, and communal polarisation triggered 
by the Haji Yakub episode (in which he offered Rs 
50 crores to kill the Danish cartoonist who had 
ridiculed Prophet Mohammed), and the government's 
refusal to ban the Students' Islamic Movement of 
India.
Ironically, a strange confluence of interests has 
developed between the two rivals, BJP and SP. The 
harder Mr Yadav tries to woo the Muslim 
constituency that's now suspicious of him, the 
more the upper-caste Hindu vote shifts towards 
the BJP. It's not for nothing that Mr Yadav 
offered 5-star hospitality in Lucknow to BJP top 
brass citing "protocol", and they accepted it.
Despite these advantages, the BJP only made 
modest gains in the local elections. It's unclear 
whether these will reverse its long downslide. 
The party's UP Assembly strength has plummeted 
from the 1991 peak of 221 (of 419 seats) to just 
88 (of a total of 403), and its Lok Sabha tally 
from UP shrunk from 51 to only 10. For a party 
long in the Number Three slot in UP, a reversal 
looks highly unlikely.
However, BJP leaders have taken heart from what 
they regard as the "Muslim appeasement" card 
played by the United Progressive Alliance 
government through the Sachar Committee, which 
recommends affirmative action for Muslims.
In Lucknow, there was full-throated condemnation 
of "Muslim appeasement", warnings about India's 
"second partition", fanatical appeals to build a 
grand Ram temple at Ayodhya, and contrived 
bemoaning of the alleged reduction of Hindus to 
the status of "second-class citizens". Leader 
after BJP leader spewed venom on Muslims and 
hysterically warned against a "sell-out" on 
Kashmir and Siachen.
The BJP should know better. Sachar is no Shah 
Bano. In 1984, the Congress government amended 
secular laws to please those clamouring against 
modest compensation for a poor, deserted old 
woman. The Sachar report is a serious, 
well-considered, solidly documented analysis of 
exclusion of and discrimination against Muslims. 
It pleads for diversity and pluralism-not for 
sectarian solutions. It should occasion sober 
reflection on Indian society's failure to prevent 
the creation of a new underclass of disadvantaged 
people and promote full representation of all 
social groups-without prejudice.
It's extremely unlikely that the "appeasement" 
card will work given the present national mood, 
which favours integration and respect for 
inclusion and equity. The mood also frowns upon 
paranoid notions of national identity. There is 
widespread support for a durable and just peace 
with Pakistan and a border settlement and broad 
cooperation with China.
It's even more unlikely that the Ayodhya plank 
will sell. As the Sangh Parivar's own countless 
futile attempts to organise yatras on the issue 
show, the public is simply not interested in this 
agenda of hatred and revenge. The agenda doesn't 
earn votes anywhere.
The BJP's return to hardline Hindutva represents 
a terrible retrogression. It's not in the 
interest of democracy and pluralism that India's 
largest opposition party should embrace such a 
narrow, divisive, communal agenda. This 
demolishes the hope that leaders like Mr Vajpayee 
would somehow neutralise the RSS's malign 
influence and push the BJP towards moderation. If 
he couldn't do this while in power, it's 
ludicrous to expect him to do so after he's lost 
it.
In line with this Rightward ideological-political 
shift, the BJP has also executed an 
organisational shift. It has amended its 
constitution so that all its secretaries at the 
national and state levels are pracharaks or 
full-time Sangh propagandists. The RSS influence 
has been starkly visible in all recent BJP 
campaigns.
Mr Rajnath Singh has further strengthened this 
influence-not least because he lacks an 
independent base and needs the Sangh's crutches. 
The RSS in turn is only too happy at the revival 
of the three contentious issues-Ram temple, 
Uniform Civil Code, and Article 370-which were 
put on hold in 1998 for dishonourable 
reasons-expediency and greed for power.
The Lucknow conclave leaves the BJP's structural 
crisis unresolved. Ideologically, the party is 
trapped between orthodox, Islamophobic, Hindutva 
typical of small-town traders and upper-caste 
groups, on the one hand, and pro-globalisation 
Big Business, on the other. Politically, it's 
divided between its identity as an 
ethno-religious movement, and electoral 
compulsions which propel it into opportunistic 
alliances. Organisationally, it cannot sever its 
umbilical chord with the Sangh Parivar.
As this Column has often argued, the BJP's 
ascendancy from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s 
was founded on three mutually reinforcing 
factors. First, the Congress's long-term decline 
owing to its compromises with communalism and 
market fundamentalism. This, coupled with the 
Left's stagnation after the Soviet Union's 
collapse, shifted India's political spectrum 
Rightwards.
Second, the BJP-VHP's mobilisation around Ayodhya 
in the late 1980s allowed Hindutva to percolate 
widely. For the first time, the BJP broke out of 
its narrow savarna Hindu-Hindi confines. And 
third, its "social engineering" strategy, of 
combining "Mandal" with "Kamandal", helped it 
attract OBC support in the Hindi belt.
None of these factors operates today. The 
Congress has revived itself. The Left has 
expanded. Regional parties with subaltern agendas 
have grown. And the centre of gravity of Indian 
politics has shifted Leftwards. Social justice 
has displaced Ayodhya.
The BJP is disoriented by all this. Until 
recently, it was in outright denial of its 2004 
defeat It still has no political strategy to 
revitalise itself. Its leadership crisis remain 
serious. Its president is a narrow-minded 
provincial Thakur politician. He isn't even 
remotely acquainted with the India that's outside 
the Hindi belt.
Lurking behind him is Mr Narendra Modi, who, 
sadly, enjoys a high level of acceptance within 
the BJP and behaves as its de facto Number Two, 
next only to Mr Vajpayee.
The BJP is caught between aspiring leaders of 
such appalling quality, and geriatric veterans 
who are increasingly out-of-sync with reality, 
but refuse to fade out. It's likely to remain 
suspended in this unenviable state for some time.

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[3]

Magazine Section /  The Hindu
Dec 03, 2006

THE TENABLE PATRIOT

by Shahid Amin

As we approach the 60th anniversary of our 
independence, it appears that some Indians can 
claim to be born citizens by virtue of belonging 
to the Hindu majority, while others must remain 
citizens-on-probation all their lives. Despite 
legal equality, members of minority communities 
are repeatedly subjected to a cricket-match or a 
national-song test of loyalty. Is the idea of 
India to be reduced to such a war of 
backward-looking symbolisms? What is the true 
measure of patriotism?

Patriotism for the oppressed

Photo: Vivek Bendre

Politics of language: A predominantly dalit slum in Mumbai.

OUR balding nation-state, a majority of whose 
persons-in-communities are on the right side of 
40, will soon turn 60. The consensual anxieties 
of inculcating a proper patriotism have begun 
already to yield sarkari fruit: a mixed bag of 
apples and oranges, to be sure. As the new year 
dawns, a long list of accredited past patriots 
will no doubt be drawn up, with a careful 
sprinkling of dalits, Muslims, women, Kashmiris, 
North-easterners and such like, i.e. those less 
empowered than their `naturally so' mainstream 
countrymen. Directives will flow down New Delhi's 
Raisina Hill; like-minded scholars will strive to 
ensure that a capacious yet stringent view from 
the Centre holds.

Deifying English

Could 19th-century peasants, whose vision, it is 
said, was no wider than the backside of their 
plough-bullocks, have been patriotic? Were Indian 
patriots the same as Indian nationalists? How are 
we to recognise patriotism before nationalism 
began to be talked about by our English-educated 
forbearers? The first President of the Republic 
was a Bihari democrat, but could Bahadur Shah, 
`the king of Delhi', to use the proper Company 
diminutive, conceivably have been India's first 
and last Mughal patriot? Or to shift focus: Is 
Chandrabhan Prasad, who recently launched a 
campaign for deifying English as a goddess, to be 
propitiated quite literally by the dalits of 
Hindustan, being simply gimmicky and provocative? 
Or is his proposal for a globalised English, 
personified as the kuladevi of all dalit 
households, announced on the 206th birth 
anniversary of Lord Macaulay, at bottom an 
unpatriotic act; a reneging from our common 
civilisational past; a deliberate turning away of 
dalits from things Hindi and Indian?

The tenor of a recent televised debate between 
Prasad and two Delhi-based bilingual 
intellectuals, conducted by one of our foremost 
current affairs anchors, suggests that, when 
faced with a transgressive idea to move radically 
beyond the horizon of possibility, most of us 
reach instinctively for our copybook notion of 
India. And very often this means throwing aside 
the opportunity of thinking with and through 
adversarial positions that emanate as challenges 
from the margins to our very sense of Indianness. 
Prasad's utopia is for future dalit babies to 
arrive into this world to the sound of the 
English alphabet: mantras or azaan being ruled 
out, of necessity. This is an idea stunning in 
its novelty. I am sure that, had it been 
expressed in a 19th-century document about a 
tribal revolt in Jharkhand, it would have 
elicited our attention as illustrative of the 
hegemonic apotheosis of colonial English. Wasn't 
one of the leaders of the great Santhal Rebellion 
of 1855 apprehended with an English book of a 
technical nature, `an old book on locomotive[s]', 
as the official record has it!

But as the debate with Chandrabhan Prasad 
unfolded over half-an-hour of late-night TV, no 
one engaged this dalit thinker on his own terms: 
how would poor, uneducated dalit parents in the 
villages of the north Indian cowbelt ensure that 
a Sesame Street version of fun alphabet-learning 
is beamed to the Sagri subdivision of Azamgarh 
District, where Chandrabhan grew up? Would it 
make sense for dalits to insist that the Central 
Institute of English and Foreign Languages, 
Hyderabad, now fashion audio-visual materials for 
what he would no doubt wish to be christened the 
`Universal English Education Mission'? Would 
there be any place for a less Sanskritic Hindi in 
dalit households, or would it involve an even 
more subversive and utopian demand for the 
valorisation of only particular north Indian 
dialects as a second language of home, a new 
diglossia comprising globalised corporate English 
and, say, Bhojpuri?

Instead, the discussion veered around such 
pan-Indian and patriotic concerns as: How would 
dalits then distinguish between maternal and 
paternal uncles, for English terms are so limited 
in their kin and affinal reach? What would happen 
to religions of and in India, if all of us 
(Prasad was concerned solely with dalits) spouted 
only English? Would not the resulting 
deracination harbinger fundamentalisms, as in 
Silicon Valley? Can English acquisition really 
put an end to deep-seated and long-enduring 
structures of caste oppression? But that was not, 
one felt like screaming though the picture tube, 
what the subversive proposal was about. For, 
except for the Pandits and Maulvis, no one lives 
by language alone. The dalit-English proposal is 
an unexpected challenge to the mainstream view of 
patriotism-in-an-Indian language, preferably a 
north-Indian language. And now that an American 
accent is de rigeur for luxury-item adverts on 
our TVs, whither linguistic patriotism?


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[4]

Indian Express,
1 Jan 2007

HINDUSTANI IN THE TIME OF GLOBALISATION

by Mukul Dube

I cannot afford to dislike English, and I would 
be an ingrate if I were to do that. As an editor, 
a writer and an academic, I have used the 
language to fill my stomach for three and a half 
decades.  That stomach turns, though, if 
figuratively, when English words are gratuitously 
introduced into Hindustani speech even when 
perfectly adequate and sometimes better 
Hindustani words are to be had.

Money makes the world go around. In our daily 
lives, we speak of it constantly. Few grocers in 
Delhi conduct their business in English: Punjabi 
is used, as well as Tamil and Bangla and so on in 
pockets, but Hindustani is the most common 
currency by far. When, after having completed my 
purchases of fruit juice and peanuts and safety 
matches and such things entirely in Hindustani, I 
ask how much I must pay, English jumps up like a 
Jack-in-the-box. "Seventy-two rupees" is the 
answer rather than "bahattar rupaiy." Similarly, 
when I ask a pretty young thing, in Hindustani, 
about her pretty garment or her pretty bag, she 
will say "Four hundred rupees" rather than "char 
sau rupaiy." Seldom is anything other than price 
mentioned, but that fact has nothing to do with 
language.

A child in a shopping area who feels like putting 
away a soft drink will say to his mother, "Mamma, 
please ten rupees dena." Money is never, never 
spoken of without the application of the 
anglicised-globalised name of our legal tender.

We live on food. It is only to be expected that 
Mrs. Khanna will say to Mrs. Tiwari, "Bhenji, 
paneer bahut tasty bana hai," throwing on to the 
heap of onion skins words like "svadishta" and 
"lazeez." To Mrs. Khurana, she might amplify with 
"vadda fine flavour hai ji."

There was a time when davais were used to deal 
with bimaris and assorted health-related matters. 
That was in the past. For several years now, when 
our chemist has put together the coming month's 
supply of drugs for my mother and me, he 
telephones to say, "Sir, apki medicines ready 
hain." Always "medicines"-"drugs" is a no-no, 
though not for the same reason as "davaiyan" is.

Personal adornment with "precious" materials- 
gold, silver, diamonds, etc.-is not new to India. 
When they are not displayed, such objects are 
hoarded and, of course, boasted about in words 
rather than visually. There has been a 
mushrooming of jewellery shops and brands of 
late, and on the channel which plays on my radio 
they are advertised constantly. The use of the 
words "gehne" and "zevarat" is apparently 
forbidden when listeners are invited to come and 
buy the glittering commodities. That there are 
still fools who believe that the joule is a 
measure of work done matters not: "jewellery" is 
pronounced invariably to rhyme with "fool+pee."

Then there is the young woman who has learnt to 
operate the family car and is measuring how many 
kilos or seers her papa's permission weighs 
before she begins to drive herself to late night 
parties.

English is, so to speak, the Bhasha Britannica of Delhi.

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[5]


Deccan Herald
November 23, 2006

THE ETHOS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
AN EDUCATIONAL AGENDA
by Kancha Ilaiah

The decision of the Karnataka Government to 
withdraw the recognition of 1400 English medium 
schools has set a tone for its backward move. It 
is also said that it stopped giving permission to 
any new English medium schools in the state. This 
only shows that the Kumarawsami's Government is 
effectively being run by the BJP.

One of the key areas that the BJP has chosen to 
put the wheels of the nation backward is through 
the means of primary education. We have seen the 
efforts of Murali Manohar Joshi, as the Minister 
of Human Resource Development to saffronize the 
education. One of the ways in which they want to 
safronise the mass education is to see that 
English does not become a language of the masses. 
The Karnataka Government is doing exactly the 
same.

Quite ironically even the top BJP leaders put 
their own children in English medium schools run 
by the Christian missionaries. This trend could 
be seen in every state where the elite keep 
beating their chest about the preserving the 
status of mother tongue vis-à-vis English. In 
Andhra Pradesh a similar debate is on. Those who 
have educated their children in English medium 
schools, saw to it that they settle down in 
America and Europe and their grand children have 
acquired the citizenship of the imperial nations, 
back home the grand parents keep working for the 
improvement of regional language.

They work for closing down English medium schools 
in the villages and urban slums as they are 
defined as anti-national. These people oppose the 
caste-based reservations but at the same time 
work for managing seats for money under the NRI 
quota. This is a new quota worked out by the very 
same nationalists. The courts have no problem 
with that quota as that serves their families 
well.

The forces that work around the right wing 
political parties are in the forefront of this 
duel mode of life. Not that the so called 
democrats oppose this process. They all see a 
danger to their regional culture in expanding 
English education.

The very same people see a close nexus between 
regional culture and language. Expansion of 
English language into the rural locations is seen 
as ultimate danger to the linguistic cultural 
ethos. For a long time such social forces saw 
women as the engines that carry their cultural 
bogies.

By and large the women among them moved into the 
realm of modernity with a process of English 
education. Now they see the rural masses, who 
study in Government schools, as the engines to 
carry the cultural bogies of their regional 
nationalism.

For some time they defined English as colonial 
language. Now it is being defined as unethical 
globaliser of Brtish-American culture, which they 
think is harmful to their nationalist self. Who 
should save from this danger of uprooting of the 
local cultures? Who should protect that 
nationalist self from the onslaught of American 
imperialism? They think that the children of 
urban slums, rural peasantry and labourers by 
remaining native - Kannadigas, Telugus and so 
on-i.e. by remaining away from learning English, 
should protect their linguistic nationalism.

Even the English media does not run a campaign 
against such Hippocratic nationalism, as this 
section constitutes the main English news paper 
readers and English TV channel watchers. It is 
this section that controls the corporate economy 
and the add finances. The dualism of the upper 
caste English educated is the main driving force 
of the Indian market economy.

At the core of this dualistic social discourse 
and economic practice is keeping the competition 
within the corporate job market limited to their 
own children. They, therefore, oppose reservation 
in private sector and also oppose the expansion 
of English education among the vast lower caste 
masses.

Since the lower caste mass children are not tied 
down to the Brahminic cultural ethos, they learn 
English more easily than the Brahminic kids can 
do. Since their cultural roots are not deep in 
Hindu ethos their modernisation and 
westernisation process would be quicker. For 
example, any Dalit-Bahujan boy or girl, who 
learns English at a right age and moves into 
global economy, does not suffer from 
vegetarianist hang-ups. They do not carry the 
Hindu idols with them to America or Europe. In 
one sense the fears of English educated 
globalised Hindu intellectuals (not just 
Hindutva) are genuine.

The possibility of the social mass moving into 
English education may lead to dismantling of 
Hindu culture and caste system in a shorter span 
of time. From Phule to Ambedkar to the present 
English educated lower caste intellectuals have 
thrown Hinduism into deeper and deeper crisis. 
But the Hindutva forces and even the so called 
secular Hindus cannot stop this process because 
they are caught up in a cobweb of globalised 
English education and market systems.

In this process of duel game of the cultural 
nationalists, the only way the Dalit-Bahujan 
social and political forces could get English 
education is by making uniform (both language and 
content) school education an election's issue.

At least some political parties must make 
teaching 50 percent of the syllabus in English 
and remaining 50 percent in the regional language 
part of their electoral manifesto. The rural 
voters should also make it clear that unless 
their children are given English education they 
would not keep quite. Then the poor and lower 
castes begin to get the power of English.

______


[6]


The Hindu
Dec 22, 2006

BHAGAT SINGH CHAIR AT JNU PROPOSED

Staff Reporter

Plan forwarded by Prof. Chaman Lal of the Centre for Indian Languages

NEW DELHI: A powerful figure in the freedom 
struggle and arguably one of the youngest and 
most charismatic revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh is 
all set to become "stronger". To give him a 
fitting tribute during his birth centenary year 
in 2007, a group of intellectuals have proposed 
to set up a Bhagat Singh Chair at Jawaharlal 
Nehru University here.

The proposed Chair would focus on "the 
anti-colonial, anti-feudal revolutionary 
movements in India during 1757-1947".

The proposal, spearheaded by Prof. Chaman Lal of 
the Centre for Indian Languages in JNU, seems to 
have found support from different quarters. Apart 
from leading historians Bipan Chandra and Mridula 
Mukherjee who have strongly endorsed the 
proposal, the Left leaders have also come out to 
lend their support.

"It is a very worthwhile proposal to set up a 
Chair in a Central University like JNU. As far as 
I know, there is no other such Chair. It would be 
a good idea to set it up especially in the birth 
centenary year of Bhagat Singh,'' said Communist 
Party of India (Marxist) general secretary 
Prakash Karat.

But despite the enthusiastic response to the 
proposal, there is still the question of funds. 
With finance still a stumbling block in this 
dream to showcase the intellectual aspect of 
Bhagat Singh, it is being hoped that the 
committee responsible for the upcoming centenary 
celebrations in 2007 established by the Centre 
will be able to make it come true.

"There is not a single chair or a university 
named after Bhagat Singh. All the other national 
leaders have educational institutions named after 
them. We are hoping that this committee, which is 
looking at the birth centenary celebrations of 
Bhagat Singh and the 60th year of Independence 
among others, will be able to provide us the 
funds. A member of the programme implementation 
committee has agreed to raise this in the meeting 
this Thursday,'' says Prof. Lal, who has also 
edited the freedom fighter's documents.

Taking his legacy forward to reach out to the 
youth, it is also suggested that the Chair be 
made functional in the School of Social Sciences 
with a "multi-disciplinary" approach. It has also 
been suggested that the Chair concentrate on 
research and offer more fellowships as and when 
it generates more funds. With grand plans for the 
Chair, Prof. Lal believes that the Punjabi 
community abroad can also be tapped to generate 
funds for a library.

"Bhagat Singh has always remained alive in the 
minds of people. He was well read and had a fine 
mind. The Chair will give us an opportunity to 
spread awareness about this side of him and do 
more,'' says Nehru Memorial Museum and Library 
director Mridula Mukherjee.

______


[7]

6TH WORLD ATHEIST CONFERENCE

5, 6 & 7 January, 2007
Atheist Centre, Vijayawada, A.P., INDIA

"The Necessity of Atheism"

Levi Fragell, Sonja Eggerickx, Dr. Veeramani, Roy 
Brown, Volker Mueller, Dr. P.M. Bhargava, Jim 
Herrick, Bill Cooke, Kjartan Selnes, Lavanam, Dr. 
Narendra Nayak, G.V.K. Asan, Prof. Dhaneswar 
Sahoo and many others will speak. Three day 
simple accommodation and food at the Atheist 
Centre

Further details from Dr. Vijayam, Executive Director

ATHEIST CENTRE, Benz Circle, Vijayawada 520010, A.P., India.
Phone +91 866 2472330, Fax: +91 866 2484850, Email: atheistcentre at yahoo.com


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