SACW | Jan. 14-15, 2007 | Freedom of Press and National Security

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | January 14-15, 2007 | Dispatch No. 2348 - Year 8

[1]  State of Emergency in Bangladesh: 
       - We can be repressed but not silenced (Mahfuz Anam)
       - Gagging the media is not the answer (Mahfuz Anam)
[2]  Pakistan's Silenced Press  (Bob Dietz)
[3]  India: Playing Cops and Reporters - Media 
Reportage and National Security (Nivedita Menon)
[4]  Bribe your way to the front of the queue in 
Britain and India (Mike Marqusee)
[5]  Book Review of 'Anthems of Resistance': 
Don't let the light go out (Vijay Prashad)

____


[1]  State of Emergency in Bangladesh:

Daily Star
January 15, 2007
  	 
WE CAN BE REPRESSED BUT NOT SILENCED
The hated press advisory calls should stop immediately

by Mahfuz Anam

Most regrettably, the newly formed caretaker 
government headed by Dr. Fakruddin Ahmed seems to 
be headed in the direction of a confrontation 
with the independent media, both electronic and 
print. For the first time in 16 years this writer 
received a call from the press information 
officer of the ministry of information very 
gently, saying: "I hope you are aware that we are 
in an emergency." I asked him what he meant and 
under what authority and on whose directive was 
he calling me. He avoided my questions and I told 
him never to call me again with anything that has 
to do with restricting press freedom.

Obviously this official was not calling me on his 
own. So who are pushing the just-born caretaker 
government towards an inevitable clash with the 
independent media? Let us make it unambiguously 
clear and say with as much forthrightness as 
possible that we will never accept censorship or 
any attempt to restrict the media. The media in 
Bangladesh will not allow even an iota of 
restriction imposed on them.

We understand what is national interest, what is 
good for our people and how people's rights can 
be better served. We also know our 
responsibilities and how to be restrained, if 
necessary. The fact that those in power felt the 
need to start the discredited and hateful system 
of issuing press advisory over the phone is not 
only shameful but also suicidal. Such advisory 
only protects those who are afraid of 
transparency and openness. They cannot be friends 
of Dr. Fakruddin's government, not for that 
matter of Bangladesh or of anybody who has the 
country's interest at heart.

It is a well-known experience and one that is 
globally applicable that media restrictions only 
serve the corrupt and the vested interest groups. 
Anybody or any group devoted to serving public 
interest has nothing to fear from a free press. 
In the past when media censorship existed in the 
country whom did it serve? Never the public. We 
accept that free media have not always succeeded 
in eliminating the corrupt and the criminal 
elements from the society. But that has been so 
because the people in power never used the media 
reports in investigating further and finding out 
the truth. The government of the day, 
irrespective of any party, in fact blamed the 
media for maligning them and as such protected 
the corrupt simply because of the nexus that grew 
between the politicians and the criminals. Even 
under such constraints, whatever little public 
interest has been served it was due to the 
relentless pursuit of the journalists to expose 
corruption. Few other groups did as much for 
public interest as the media.

Take the most recent political crisis. The nation 
would have had to suffer a one-sided election, 
with the most flawed voter list and partisan 
bureaucracy imaginable but for the media. If 
President Iajuddin really pursued public interest 
he would have gotten our full backing even after 
assuming power unconventionally, according to 
some illegally. But he got the very opposite from 
the media as a result of which people have been 
better served.

With the declaration of emergency, an overall 
legal cover has been brought into effect within 
which the government now has the power to 
institute some restrictive rules for the purpose 
of maintaining law and order and related 
governance issues, including restricting some 
fundamental rights. But it does not automatically 
mean that a government will have to issue 
restrictive rules in all the fields covered by 
the emergency provision of the constitution.

Therefore we urge Dr. Fakruddin not only NOT to 
go in the direction of press restrictions but 
also to issue a clear statement re-asserting the 
centrality of free media in his policies and 
categorically stating his government's full 
commitment to the highest degree of freedom for 
the media. Such a statement by the Chief Adviser 
is very necessary because the lower level 
government and law enforcement officials, 
especially those corrupt officials who have a lot 
of dirty linen to hide, may use the pretext of 
the emergency to harass the media professionals. 
They also sometimes act on behalf of the corrupt 
businessmen to intimidate the investigating 
journalists to desist them from following their 
stories.

We have said so in the past and repeat ourselves 
now that free media have greatly enhanced 
Bangladesh's prestige globally. It is a matter of 
pride for our people. Of the things that give a 
positive image of our country, free media is high 
among them. Restricting it in any way will come 
at a great cost to our international goodwill. 
Since the promulgation of emergency almost all 
the foreign press that contacted this writer for 
comments, and it was nearly two dozen, all 
invariably asking about the fate of press freedom 
under the present circumstances.

We wish the new caretaker government well. We 
pledge our full co-operation in all its 
pro-people and pro-democracy activities. We will 
vigorously support its good actions and criticise 
the bad ones. We may even be merciless on 
occasions. But all our actions will be solely 
guided by national interest and the desire to 
strengthen democracy and empower the people to 
have a greater say in running their country. As 
for the immediate task, all our effort will be 
directed to the holding of a free and fair 
election at the earliest. This, as we know, is 
also the number one task of the new caretaker 
government and in that sense we are allies. There 
cannot be any sense on part of Dr. Fakruddin's 
government to debilitate its ally, perhaps the 
most valuable one. So, Dr. Fakruddin, say NO to 
press restrictions, and say it repeatedly and 
loudly so that the whole world can hear it and 
the enemies of the free press lurking in the 
shadows know that they have no place in the 21st 
Century Bangladesh.

Postscript: After conclusion of this piece, the 
news came that the advisory council in its first 
meeting decided to uphold fundamental rights as 
much as possible under the purview of emergency. 
We are heartened by this decision, but we would 
have preferred if upholding press freedom was 
separately mentioned.

o o o

Daily Star
January 12, 2007

GAGGING THE MEDIA IS NOT THE ANSWER

by Mahfuz Anam

In a move reminiscent of the autocratic era of 
General Ershad, Bangabhaban yesterday issues a 
verbal instruction through an unidentified 
official of the Press Information Department 
(PID) to the TV news channels and the press not 
to print any news, pictures and cartoons and 
editorials critical of the present government. We 
want to categorically state that gagging the 
media is not the answer to solving the present 
political crisis. We all know who, how and by 
what means the present political crisis was 
created that forced the declaration of emergency. 
Throughout this crisis lasting over the last 
several months media played their patriotic and 
democratic role by pointing out the pitfalls of 
the position of the two alliances and the series 
of mistakes that the caretaker government was 
making, especially the mistakes that were being 
made by the chief advisor. We repeatedly warned 
against keeping the advisory council totally out 
of the picture and the unilateralism practiced by 
the chief advisor.

The public was served well by the role of the 
media. In fact but for the media people of this 
country would have been deprived of their "Right 
to Know" about how their country was being run. 
We can also proudly say that the media served the 
cause of democracy and of the constitution to 
uphold which the President was repeatedly saying 
that he was acting.

Today we cannot understand why this restricting 
verbal order has been issued against the media. 
We find the verbal nature of the order to be 
against the public interest and suspect the 
action is the brainchild of some particular 
officials and not of the government. Any order of 
a government is always written. Since it is not a 
written order we cannot consider it to have the 
backing of the law. This move cannot serve the 
cause of betterment of the country and definitely 
not the cause of democracy. If holding a free and 
fair election is the ultimate end of the 
emergency then gagging the press is the exact 
antithesis of that end.

There cannot be any public choice, public 
exercise of free judgement and practice of 
democracy with a censored press.

When there are so many problems to address, so 
many wrongs to right, so many manipulators of the 
election process to bring to book, so many 
abusers of power to identify and expose, the 
first action of emergency was a verbal order to 
gag the press.

Today one of the best achievements of Bangladesh 
is its free, responsible and independent press. 
The people feel proud of their media and the 
world rightfully praises and respects Bangladesh 
for that achievement. What an irony it will be if 
it should be the first victim of the new 
dispensation!

We believe this move to be against the interest 
of democracy and of Bangladesh. Just as mistakes 
after mistakes have brought us to this stage of 
political crisis, the decision of gagging the 
press is nothing but a continuation of those 
mistaken decisions. We demand an immediate verbal 
withdrawal of this decision, an apology to the 
media and punishment to those who are responsible 
for giving such a verbal order. Let the media 
continue to play its constructive and 
facilitating role to resolve the present 
political crisis. Friends of democracy never gag 
the press, only autocrats do. The people of 
Bangladesh will never accept autocrats. #

Mahfuz Anam is editor of Daily Star, published 
from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The article was published 
in Daily Star, January 12, 2007

_____


[2]

The Wall Street Journal Asia,
January 8, 2007

PAKISTAN'S SILENCED PRESS
By Bob Dietz
Committee to Protect Journalists

© 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
To see the edition in which this article 
appeared, click here http://awsj.com.hk/factiva-ns


As the Taliban embed themselves deeper into 
Pakistan's restive provinces along the border 
with Afghanistan, journalists covering the region 
are coming under attack and driven away from a 
story with global consequences for the U.S.-led 
coalition fighting militant Islamists.

On December 19 in Quetta, Baluchistan, New York 
Times reporter Carlotta Gall and her Pakistani 
photographer Akhtar Soomro were assaulted and 
harassed. Ms. Gall and Mr. Soomro were in Quetta 
seeking interviews with Taliban foot soldiers 
fighting in Afghanistan. The Taliban uses the 
province and its capital as a staging area for 
their attacks over the border. Ms. Gall says her 
attackers claimed they were from the government's 
Special Branch but did not show identification as 
they forced their way into her hotel room and 
assaulted her. Mr. Soomro, who they assaulted 
before Ms. Gall, has yet to identify his 
assailants. Instead, he returned home to Karachi 
and has not spoken publicly about the events.

While attacks on Western journalists are uncommon 
in Pakistan, the attack on the Times team is 
typical of what has been happening increasingly 
to Pakistani journalists. Virtually all the 
incidents have gone unexplained and apparently 
uninvestigated by the government.

Many Pakistani journalists are intimidated and 
reluctant to speak publicly about their 
attackers. But the few incidents that have been 
made public follow a similar pattern.

Mehruddin Mari, a correspondent for the 
Sindhi-language newspaper the Daily Kawish in 
Sindh province was grabbed by police and held for 
four months. The government refused to comment on 
the case during and after his detention. Mari 
told the British Broadcasting Company that he was 
interrogated, beaten, and subjected to electric 
shocks in an attempt to make him confess ties to 
the Baluch nationalist movement-a regional 
militia that has waged a protracted conflict with 
Islamabad.

A three-person delegation from the Committee to 
Protect Journalists, or CPJ, met with dozens of 
journalists in Islamabad and Peshawar last July 
and heard numerous complaints of government 
abuse. CPJ met with government officials after 
the high-profile slaying of tribal journalist 
Hayatullah Khan in June. Khan had embarrassed the 
government with pictures of the apparent remnants 
of a Hellfire missile that killed a senior al 
Qaeda commander, Abu Hamza Rabia, in North 
Waziristan, along the Afghan border. Khan's 
pictures contradicted the government's claim that 
the explosion came from a bomb in the house, 
rather than a missile fired by U.S. forces at a 
target in Pakistani territory.

Hayatullah Khan was the eighth journalist to be 
killed in Pakistan since the murder of Wall 
Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, 
according to CPJ research. The Pearl case has 
been the only case investigated competently and 
reported. Pakistani journalists deserve the same 
attention. Government officials promised to make 
public all information they had on our lengthy 
list of unexplained cases. Now, almost six months 
later, they still have no explanations.

Talk to officials in Pervez Musharraf's 
government and you will hear how the media are 
freer now than they have ever been. And while 
there has been an explosion of television and 
radio stations in a country with an already 
well-established print tradition, a pattern of 
brutal attacks is silencing those journalists who 
pursue stories that make the government 
uncomfortable.

As Mr. Musharraf's government balances its 
precarious domestic political position and its 
fight against militant Islam, it is Pakistan's 
journalists who are increasingly terrorized. 
Today, many Pakistani journalists fear their 
government's intelligence agencies more than any 
Islamic militant.

(Mr. Dietz is the Asia program director for the 
Committee to Protect Journalists.)


_____


[3]

The Telegraph
December 05, 2006

PLAYING COPS AND REPORTERS
Nivedita Menon wonders what happens to police 
procedures and media reportage when nothing less 
than national security is at stake The author is 
reader in political science, Delhi University
Get the real picture

Here's an amusing little story. According to 
reports in a leading daily (August 26 and 
September 4), Hoshangabad police charged a couple 
with the murder of their twelve-year-old son. 
Their son was indeed missing, and a body was 
found near the railway track. The parents 
confessed to the crime, and spent over 45 days in 
jail. Six months after his murder, young Gabbar 
turned up in town. He had fallen asleep while 
selling peanuts on trains, and woke up in 
Jalgaon. There he was put into a correctional 
institution, and later, sent to Bhopal. Finally, 
he managed to convince someone to send him back 
home. Present in court, he listened to the 
government pleader arguing that the parents had 
confessed to the murder, so he could not be 
Gabbar; that the body found near the railway 
track was not that of Kallu alias Tufan, as 
claimed; and that neighbours had identified the 
dead body as that of Gabbar. The neighbours, 
meanwhile, told the reporter that they had never 
identified the dead body as his, and that this 
boy was indeed Gabbar. "We know him since he was 
born," said one of them simply, "how could we 
make such a mistake?"

As for the parents who confessed to the murder of 
a son who was alive - "They broke three of my 
fingers with sticks," said the father. The 
parents were tortured in custody for a night and 
made to sign a confessional statement the next 
morning.

A routine investigation in a poor neighbourhood, 
of a small boy's murder. Nothing at stake in it 
for the police but that of showing a solved case. 
And police pursuit of this mundane, low-profile 
incident involved torture, a forced false 
confession and falsified evidence (neighbours' 
supposed identification of the dead body). It 
further involved, in the face of incontrovertible 
evidence of the boy being alive, reiterations in 
court of the police version under oath, urging 
the court instead to prosecute Gabbar's family 
for producing another person as Gabbar.

Would this blatant miscarriage of justice have 
been reported in the media if the parents had 
been arrested on a different sort of charge? If 
Gabbar himself had not turned up alive? What if 
Gabbar had been killed in an encounter? So the 
amusing little story metamorphoses into a 
nightmarish question: what happens to police 
procedures and media reportage when nothing less 
than national security is at stake?

Last month, a woman widely known in academic and 
activist circles in Delhi - Sunita of Daanish 
Books, a small alternative publisher - was 
detained by the police in Chandrapur, where she 
had set up a book exhibition at an annual 
festival celebrating B.R. Ambedkar's conversion.
Books from her stall were seized, and she was 
interrogated for several hours over two days. She 
was able to contact friends and family in Delhi, 
and when concerned phone calls and faxes started 
pouring in, the police claimed that they had 
"clinching evidence" (a phrase they repeatedly 
used) that this Sunita was a Maoist activist from 
Jehanabad, where her Maoist husband had been 
killed some years ago in an encounter. During her 
interrogation, the official insisted that she 
admit she was from Jehanabad, despite her 
assertion that she is from Bhagalpur, and that 
she had never lost a husband to police bullets. A 
policeman told her confidently at one point, "Hum 
saabit kar ke rahenge ki aap vohi Sunita hain, 
Jehanabad ki (We will prove that you are the 
Sunita from Jehanabad)." Reports in local Hindi 
newspapers published the police version without 
any further comment or corroboration.
Let me pass quickly over the alarming fact that 
the books that were "seized" as threatening to 
national security were books by and on Marx, 
Lenin, Mao, Clara Zetkin and Bhagat Singh. That 
during interrogation Sunita was asked, "Why do 
you sell books on Bhagat Singh? The British have 
left, haven't they?" That other questions 
included demands that she explain why she does 
not use a surname and why she wears a bindi when 
her husband is dead (the one killed in Jehanabad, 
remember?) We will pass over these questions only 
because the one that concerns me here is this. 
Sunita is a well-known figure among people who 
can make a noise in high places, and so the 
police attempt to manipulate her identity failed. 
What of all the others?

In September, three letter-bombs went off hours 
before the president visited Kerala. Immediately, 
several Muslim youths were arrested and kept in 
police custody for weeks, being interrogated to 
reveal their links with Islamic organizations. 
But as investigations continued, the culprit 
turned out to be a Hindu man with personal 
grudges to settle. The slick website of the 
Thiruvananthapuram city police announced the 
closing of the case with the information that the 
accused was a "meek character with a scientific 
temperament, using an innovative method to 
intimidate his enemies." In psychoanalytic mode, 
the police statement adds: "The accused always 
aspired for peer respect as an innovator. The 
mail bombs seemed to be a 'deviant expression' of 
the desire to seek revenge and prove oneself at 
the same time."

So, not a word about the wrongly detained and 
most probably tortured Muslims, and a veritable 
certificate of merit for the Hindu culprit. Maybe 
they should induct him into the police force so 
that he can redirect his lack of self-esteem and 
scientific temperament more fruitfully - in 
hunting down the real anti-national elements.

Like, for example, Mohammad Afzal? All those 
members of India's democratic public, filling the 
coffers of mobile phone companies by SMS-ing TV 
channels that Afzal should hang - what is the 
basis of their informed decision?

The media, of course, pliantly reproduce police 
hand-outs as news. The police say they have 
arrested two Pakistani nationals, and Pakistani 
nationals they become for ever after, in 
newspapers and on TV screens, with not a single 
"alleged", "claimed", and after the first time 
(and sometimes not even then), "according to 
police reports". Even in stories that use the 
last phrase, the total lack of analysis and 
commentary makes them news items rather than 
reports of police briefings. A recent story in a 
national daily reported in alarmist style that 
senior police officers informed the paper on the 
basis of intelligence tip-offs that Maoists have 
"launched a campaign" across Jharkand, Bihar and 
Chhatisgarh - a campaign to do what? Exterminate 
the class enemy? Blow up police stations? Turns 
out the "extremists", as the police call them, 
have a sinister plan to concentrate on local 
weekly markets and perform plays and sing songs 
in local dialects! Further, taking advantage of 
the villagers' newly acquired literacy, the 
police said disapprovingly, they sell books on 
and by communist thinkers, some of which have 
been vigilantly seized. So there they are, the 
Maoist extremists, singing and performing in 
public places, and selling widely available books 
at local markets - you need "intelligence 
tip-offs" to know this? And why does the reporter 
not have an intelligence tip-off from his own 
intelligence, to add one single word more than 
what the police gave him? This story carried a 
by-line, mind you.

Of course, not always do the media simply report 
police briefings as news. Sometimes, they are 
proactive. A new Hindi TV channel last week 
indignantly reported that dangerous leftist 
literature is freely available in the cultural 
festivals that are a tradition in Punjab. Having 
spoken to the person handling one such stall - 
who acknowledged that they do use these occasions 
to propagate their political ideology - the 
channel then interviewed the SSP of police. What 
was the police doing about this blatant 
availability of books and CDs that incite people 
against the state? The SSP assured the reporter 
that he would act immediately.

People of India, I give you the media - democracy is safe in their hands.

_____


[4]

The Guardian
January 13, 2007

BRIBE YOUR WAY TO THE FRONT OF THE QUEUE IN BRITAIN AND INDIA

Why does the Home Office allow first-class air 
passengers to see immigration officers first? 
It's a fast track too far

Mike Marqusee

After a long flight, I took my place in a slow 
moving but orderly queue waiting to pass through 
Indian immigration at Chennai airport. A 
middle-aged man with an attache case strode 
calmly past our ranks to insert himself at the 
front, blithely oblivious to the objections of 
those prepared to follow the rules. Darting 
across the yellow line that is supposed to keep 
the public at bay, he placed his passport on the 
immigration officer's desk, then stepped back and 
waited. Inside the passport there appeared to be 
a wad of folded notes. After a moment, the 
officer called him forward to the desk, stamped 
his now slimmer-looking passport, and let him 
into the country.

A cultural thing, you might think. Or a reminder 
that despite impressive growth rates and 
investment opportunities, India remains saddled 
with a corrupt bureaucracy. At the least, a mark 
of the gulf that still separates British and 
Indian societies.

But think again. On my way back from India, I 
found myself upgraded to club class (the economy 
section was overbooked). There was the flat bed, 
the champagne, the menu designed by celebrity 
chefs. And a perk I hadn't expected. As we 
approached Heathrow, those of us in club and 
first class who were not EU nationals were given 
a glossy voucher promising "a simpler, smoother 
journey through immigration control."

All I had to do was present the voucher to an 
official to gain access to the arrivals fast 
track, and hey presto, I'd be standing before an 
immigration officer, while my fellow passengers 
languished in the general queue.

For non-EU nationals, this can be snail-like, 
since arrivals from Africa and Asia are often 
quizzed at length. As someone who has spent many 
an hour waiting for admission to this country, I 
found the offer to "speed through immigration 
control" (illustrated with a blurry snapshot of a 
helmeted bobsleigh team) mighty tempting. But 
while I am happy to take advantage of flat beds 
and free booze, I draw the line at privileged 
access to a state official. As an upgraded 
passenger, I hadn't personally paid for it, but 
it still seemed a fast track too far. I decided 
to take my chances with the hoi polloi.

Most air travellers know that a business or 
first-class ticket buys a fast track through 
check-in and security (the former, 
understandable; the latter, questionable), but I 
wonder how many are aware that it can also buy 
near instant access to an immigration official?

The Home Office explains that BA covers the cost 
of the extra member of staff, that there is no 
burden on the taxpayer and no diminution of 
existing services to the public. They also insist 
that once in front of an immigration officer, 
everyone is treated exactly the same.

But a quicker service is a significantly better 
service. And will an Indian or Pakistani passport 
holder presenting himself to immigration officers 
as part of an exclusive business- and first-class 
queue really be treated the same as his 
counterpart in the undifferentiated melee 
outside? What's more, by extending the apartheid 
of the airport lounge into the domain of the 
state, the arrivals fast track sets a worrying 
precedent. Will corporations soon be able to buy 
vouchers for fast-track access to police or 
courts?

Whatever the dilemmas surrounding queue-jumping 
when it comes to health or education, they're 
multiplied many times over when the queue being 
jumped is an immigration one. Here personal 
wealth is used not to opt out of state provision 
but to purchase special access to it.

The advantage of the Heathrow scheme for BA, 
locked in fierce competition for the lucrative 
high end of the market (frequent and corporate 
flyers), is obvious. But why should the state get 
involved? Where's the advantage to the taxpayer, 
even discounting quibbles about the principle of 
equality before the law? The arrivals fast track 
also gives the prime minister's championing of 
guilt-free air travel a further cynical twist, as 
those who fly most are given greater inducements 
to take to the air, while those who fly least 
suffer mounting discomfort and inconvenience.

It's all part of the creeping self-segregation of 
the affluent minority, desperate to immunise 
themselves against the deficiencies of public 
services; in this case, the growing stress of 
immigration procedures.

The gated community is a global phenomenon, and 
nowhere more salient than in India, where the 
rich buy their way out of dependence on virtually 
all public services, including water and 
electricity supply. Bribing one's way to the 
front of the immigration queue is an extreme and 
particularly crass form of the same social drive. 
It is also, of course, illegal and officially 
frowned upon, whereas in the UK, the custom is 
effectively institutionalised, taking the form of 
a lawful contract between the state and a private 
company.

The point at issue is clearly not about cultural 
differences, but about the universal fact that 
money talks and can buy a preferential hearing 
even from the most developed nation states.

· Mike Marqusee writes a fortnightly column for 
The Hindu and is the author of Wicked Messenger: 
Bob Dylan and the 1960s.


______


[5]

Himal South Asian
January 2007

Review

DON'T LET THE LIGHT GO OUT

by | Vijay Prashad

Anthems of Resistance:
A celebration of progressive Urdu poetry
by Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir
Roli Books, 2006

In 1981, the cinema theatre near my home in 
Calcutta became a mehfil-e-mushaira. At the end 
of each show, majnoohs walked out of the darkness 
humming tunes and reciting ghazals. Muzaffar 
Ali's Umrao Jaan allowed non-Urdu speakers to 
revel in the richness of Urdu culture, which most 
of us non-Muslims saw as exotic and attractive, 
yet distant. (Muslim culture would be further 
rendered exotic in 1982 in two films, Nikaah and 
Deedar-e-yaar.) These are all films of decline, 
where a supposedly homogenous Muslim culture is 
rife with problems - some easy to overcome 
(divorce rates), and others intractable (the 
demise of the kotha culture). The elegance of the 
language thrilled many urbane Indians, who 
enjoyed the patois but felt uncomfortable with 
the working-class and rural sections that 
actually spoke it.

As Ali's movie thrilled, Biharsharif burned. The 
local Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chapter 
provoked a major fight over cemetery land, the 
first confrontation since 1945. The riot that 
ensued left many dead, and inaugurated a new 
dynamic in Indian politics. In the mid-1980s, 60 
riots shook the small towns and cities of Uttar 
Pradesh. Late in that decade, in 1987, Ramanand 
Sagar's Ramayana (written by Rahi Masoom Raza) 
entered the homes of millions of people. All this 
prepared the terrain for the rise of Hindutva, 
and for the mayhem of the 1990s.

Umrao Jaan's lyricist Shahryar anticipated this 
evolution, as the courtesan travels to Faridabad, 
the town that neighbours Ayodhya, and sings, "Yeh 
kya jageh hai, doston." What kind of place is 
this, friends?

With Anthems of Resistance, Ali Husain Mir and 
Raza Mir, two brothers hailing from Hyderabad, in 
the Deccan, come bearing a substantial gift. 
Archaeologists of a lost sensibility, they tear 
the wild foliage of communal hatred aside and 
take us to a promised land: this is not freedom 
itself, but the articulation of revolution by a 
generation of poets. The story begins in 1934, at 
a Chinese restaurant in London, where some of the 
greatest artists of the day met to found the 
Progressive Writers' Association (PWA). Their 
unabashedly modernist manifesto called upon 
artists to "rescue literature and other arts from 
the priestly, academic and decadent classes in 
whose hands they have degenerated so long; to 
bring the arts into the closest touch with the 
people; and to make them the vital organs which 
will register the actualities of life, as well as 
lead us to the future."

The Urdu writers in the group inaugurated a 
tradition known as taraqqi-pasandi 
(progressivism), and poets such as Firaq 
Gorakhpuri and Josh Malihabadi wrote 
revolutionary anthems to shake off the cobwebs of 
custom for the creation of an enlightened future. 
Majaz, in 1933, offered "1917" as example:

Kohsaaron ki taraf se surkh aandhi aayegi
Jabaja aabaadiyon mein aag si lag jaayegi
Aur is rang-e shafaq mein ba-hazaraan aab-o taab
Jagmagaaega vatan ki hurriyat ka aaftaab

A red storm is approaching from over the mountains
Sparking a fire in the settlements
And on this horizon, amidst a thousand tumults
Shall shine the sun of our land's freedom.

The progressive writers, who delved into the rich 
resource of the Urdu language and the imagery of 
Urdu poetry, delivered verse at a prodigious 
rate. During the 1930s and 1940s, there remained 
spaces for poets to enthral (mostly male) 
audiences, and to find their couplets on the lips 
of millions who went in search of freedom. These 
were, as Ali and Raza Mir put it, "anthems of 
resistance". But from the start, they came with 
equal parts hope and disappointment. A decade 
after the inauguration of the PWA, the 
Subcontinent parted and the full freedom of the 
socialist imagination never happened. Sahir 
Ludhianvi bemoaned the "same procession of 
robbers", who now "wear new clothes". Faiz Ahmed 
Faiz's evocative "1947" poem begins wearily and 
despondently, "Yeh daagh, daagh ujaala, ye shab 
gazeeda sahar" (This tarnished light, this ashen 
dawn), and then asks, "Where did the morning 
breeze come from, which way did it depart?"

Cinema ghazals
But their grief did not last long. Ali and Raza 
Mir tell us that the poets were "disillusioned by 
the nation-state" - although it seems from their 
own evidence that they were merely angered at the 
direction taken by the new countries. Strong 
poems for the Telengana fighters (from Makhdoom) 
or against religious obscurantism (from Kaifi 
Azmi) indicate that these poets sought to throw 
in their lot with the struggles of the people to 
build a better world. Their despondency did not 
remove them from the fight - too much was at 
stake. The claustrophobia of their feudal 
society, the chimera of capitalist freedom and 
the frustrations of thwarted desire for 
independence led them, as with Sikandar from M S 
Sathyu's 1973 Garam Hawa, into the arms of the 
communist and people's struggles.

Theirs is the tradition of song, the ghazal, and 
it is fitting that the poets found employment 
writing songs for Hindi cinema. Sahir, Kaifi 
Azmi, Majrooh and others took to the medium with 
gusto. Pyaasa, from 1957, was the apex, with 
Sahir's red-hot indictment of the political class:

Zara mulk ke rahbaron ko bulaao
Ye kooche, ye galiyaan, ye manzar dikhaao
Jinhen naaz hai Hind par unko laao
Jinhen naaz hai Hind par voh kahaan hai?

Go, fetch the leaders of the nation
Show them these streets, these lanes, these sights
Summon them, those who are proud of India
Those who are proud of India, where are they?

Currents that had borne this generation of poets 
along and extended their political horizon now 
began to shift. Between 1947 and the early 1970s, 
the dominant classes in India were held back from 
self-exertion by the clamp of secular, socialist 
nationalism. The state did not move in a 
communist direction, but it also did not move 
toward full-fledged market capitalism. The 
freedom movement charged the government with the 
regulation of license and the sheltering of the 
indigent. By the 1970s, the freedom movement's 
coalition exhausted its potential, and its 
objective basis withered; globalisation's lures 
smashed the import-substitution industrialisation 
model. The patriotism of the bottom line 
dominated over forms of national solidarity.

The thug was now as much a hero as the outcast 
(Awara) and the inherently socialist farmer (Do 
Bighaa Zamin). Cinema's Muslim, for instance, was 
not to be the exotic nobleman or the nationalist 
partisan, but rather the gangster's ruthless 
henchman, the miyanbhai. Cinema's music also 
withered. Repetitive beats and meaningless lyrics 
pulsated through storylines that reflected either 
the pursuit of wealth or the individualistic 
revenge of the slum child. The poet no longer 
controlled the lyric, but was told to produce a 
set piece. "It is like being told that a grave 
has already been dug," Kaifi Azmi grunted, "and 
now an appropriately sized corpse has to be found 
to fit in it."

Living tradition
As the progressives died, their tradition 
appeared to die with them. But Ali and Raza Mir 
point us in two particular directions, from both 
sides of the Indo-Pakistani border. Pakistan's 
Kishwar Naheed and India's Javed Akhtar, both 
born in the early 1940s, are heirs of the 
tradition, but marked by their different 
locations. Anthems of Resistance offers a chapter 
dedicated to the work of the latter, who stands 
in for an entire tradition. Akhtar commands a 
large audience - not only because he is one of 
the premier songwriters for Hindi cinema, but 
also because he has parlayed his success into a 
poetry career. He does not mimic the tradition 
that he comes from, but has produced a style in 
keeping with the modern age. A mirror placed 
before the world shows it to be venal and 
hypocritical. Akhtar also inherited the tradition 
from his family (his father wrote for the cinema, 
and his maternal uncle was Majaz), and it was 
perhaps irrelevant that the broader culture had 
begun to turn away from the mehfil and its charms.

Kishwar Naheed, on the other hand, worked within 
a different social framework, where Urdu had not 
lost its central place. Naheed and other feminist 
poets (Femida Riyaz, Ishrat Afreen, etc), Ali and 
Raza Mir explain, "are the true inheritors of the 
tradition of progressive poetry, its champions, 
and its trailblazers". Pakistani arts cultivated 
that milieu, and its social conditions produced 
its poets. Zia-ul Huq's misogynist laws, the 
disembowelment of Pakistani civil society and the 
increased militarisation of the state created the 
objective conditions for sentiments such as this, 
by Kishwar Naheed:

Ye hum gunahgaar auraten hain
Ke sach ka parcham utha ke niklen
To jhoot se shaah-raahen ati mile hain
Hare k dahleez pe sazaaon ki daastaanen rakhi mile hain
Jo bol sakti theen voh zubaanen kati mile hain

It is we sinful women
Who, when we emerge carrying aloft the flag of truth
Find highways strewn with lies
Find tales of punishment placed at every doorstep
Find tongues which could have spoken, severed.

In May 2002, Kaifi Azmi passed on. The fires from 
Gujarat continued to smoulder, and the anguish of 
those bitten by the snake of communalism weighed 
heavily on progressive hearts. A generation had 
passed away, but its problems had been bequeathed 
to another. The generation of the PWA poets had 
worked in an internationalist era where poetry 
had been meaningful to a broad segment of 
society; the same could be said for Chile's Pablo 
Neruda or Turkey's Nazim Hikmet. Now, outside the 
lyrics of cinema music, poetry does not command 
the kind of mass audience that it once did.

Not for nothing, then, is Anthems of Resistance a 
celebration - a nostalgic look at a combative 
tradition that no longer has a popular appeal. 
The feminist poets of Pakistan and Javed Akhtar's 
verse continue the form of the Progressive 
Writers' Association, but they cannot have its 
impact on the broader culture. The medium has 
shifted, and others, in different media than 
poetry, will carry forward the values of the PWA. 
That is the hope of Ali and Raza Mir's evocative 
and powerful book. If not, what kind of place is 
this, friends?

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[6]



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[7]


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Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), 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.