INDIA 

CITIZENSHIP TANGLE
How Assam linked CAA protests to Maoists – to justify sweeping arrests of land rights activists

One organisation is being blamed for all the violence during the December protests in Assam.


1/2/2020 Arunabh Saikia


The crackdown began on the evening of December 11.

Manas Konwar and Lakhyajyoti Gogoi, the working president and vice-president of the Chatra Mukti Sangram Samiti, the student wing of the peasants’ rights organisation Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, were the first to be picked up from the house of an acquaintance in Jorhat in Assam.

In the police records, they had not been arrested – only detained. They were released the next afternoon.

By then, however, a case had been lodged in the Jorhat police station. Apart from Konwar and Lakhyajyoti Gogoi, it indicted two other people: Dibjyajyoti Sarmah and Akhil Gogoi. While Sarmah is a senior leader of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, Akhil Gogoi is the group’s founder, advisor and face. The left-leaning peasant organisation was founded in 2005. Its activism centres largely around securing land titles for the landless but in recent months it has been part of the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

A total of 14 sections were slapped against the four activists in the First Information Report filed on December 12. They ranged from criminal conspiracy to rioting to unlawful assembly to public nuisance to promoting enmity between groups and more.

The previous day, protests against the Citizenship Act had exploded in violence in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city that functions as the state’s capital. Agitators had brought the city to a standstill and marched menacingly towards the state secretariat. The administration responded by clamping a curfew and shutting down internet services.

Yet, the violence spread. On December 12, in Dibrugarh’s Chabua town, protesters obliterated almost all state-run establishments including the railway station, the local post office and the circle office. They even torched the local legislator’s house.

Not too long after that, Akhil Gogoi, Dibjyajyoti Sarmah, Manas Konwar and Lakhyajyoti Gogoi were arrested while heading out of another protest meeting against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Jorhat.

This was just the beginning.

Akhil Gogoi at a public meeting. Photo: Special arrangement

Terrorism charge

Around an hour before midnight on December 13, a sub-inspector by the name of Manoranjan Majumdar filed a fresh FIR in Guwahati’s Chandmari police station.

“A source input has been received,” claimed Majumdar, that Akhil Gogoi had “secretly merged” the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti with a Maoist outfit called Revolutionary Communist Centre in 2009. This outfit was then merged with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). Ever since, Gogoi had arranged several meetings and “visited several parts of India including Delhi…to further the activities of the proscribed organisation”, the FIR alleges.

Then the charges get graver. “As part of the larger conspiracy of CPI (Maoist), he and others have knowingly abetted, conspired, advocated, incited the acts preparatory to commission of terrorist acts,” the FIR goes on to say.

In the penultimate paragraph, the FIR accuses three other people of being party to the “conspiracy”: Manas Konwar, Dharjya Konwar and Bittu Sonowal. Dharjya Konwar is the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti’s general secretary and Sonowal, the president of its student wing.

All four of them, the FIR finally concludes, used the “passage of the CAB [Citizenship Amendment Bill] as an opportunity” to foment trouble “endangering the security and sovereignty of the state”, threatening “national integration”.

Apart from criminal conspiracy and unlawful assembly, this FIR adds another charge: sedition. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act – usually reserved for terrorism-related matters – was also invoked.

The next day, December 14, the Ministry of Home Affairs would step in directing the National Investigation Agency – a specialised central counter-terrorism unit – to take over the case “considering the gravity of the offence and its state and national ramifications”.

Dharjya Konwar at a public meeting. Photo: Special arrangement

Why the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti? KMSS

Many organisations in Assam have hit the streets to protest against the Citizenship Act, which expedites Indian citizenship for undocumented non-Muslim migrants from the three neighbouring countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While protests against the Act in the rest of India have revolved around the law’s discrimination against Muslims, ethnic groups in Assam and the North East fear they will be physically and culturally swamped by migrants from Bangladesh.

Yet, few senior-level leaders of any of the other outfits have been arrested. Both the All Assam Students’ Union and the Asom Jatiyatabadi Chatra Parishad – the two most influential civil society groups in Assam that have been at the forefront of the protests – confirmed that none of their high-ranking functionaries has been arrested by the police so far.

The police maintain the affiliations of the arrested people were incidental. “We have arrested over 500 people in connection with the violence so far,” said Assam police chief Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta. “We are not going after groups. We have arrested people against who we have found evidence of participating in or instigating violence.”

However, not everyone is quite willing to buy that. Many discern a special animosity towards the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti. The organisation has long been a source of annoyance to governments in Assam. Under the previous Congress regime, it rallied for land rights for the landless and led the resistance to big dam projects in the North East.

But after the BJP came to power in April 2016, the confrontation with the state government turned more acute, partly because the Samiti had exhorted people to not vote for the BJP. Gogoi was repeatedly arrested: he spent 70 days behind bars in 2016; in September 2017, he was charged with sedition and jailed for more than two months; in January 2019, the government invoked sedition charges against him once again.

Hiren Gohain, a veteran political commentator who is seen as Akhil Gogoi’s mentor, pointed out that Gogoi was not even present at the spot where violence took place during the Citizenship Act protests for which he stands accused.

Gogoi “does not have that much influence” to trigger such a “spontaneous explosion of popular anger” that the state witnessed on December 11 and 12, said Gohain.

A KMSS protest from 2017 demanding land rights for Assamese people.

A string of arrests

Besides, it is not just Gogoi who has been arrested. Ever since the protests of December 11, in district after district of Assam, a whole gamut of leaders of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti have been kept behind the bars. Most face multiple cases with similar charges – if they are granted bail in one, they are arrested in another almost immediately.

For instance, Guwahati police slapped another case on Dharjya Konwar and Bittu Sonowal on December 14, accusing them of being the “main instigators” of the December 11 violence in Guwahati. They were charged with unlawful assembly, rioting, defying curfew, endangering life or personal safety of others, and assaulting a public servant – a total of nine sections under the Indian Penal Code.

On December 16, the two activists were released on bail, but only to be arrested minutes later in yet another case. It mirrored almost the same charges but was filed in a separate police station in the city.

Weeks later, on January 7, the National Investigation Agency took them in custody. Manas Konwar, who had been granted bail in the Jorhat case, was also arrested on January 23 by the agency.

 

Bittu Sonowal addresses the media. Photo: Special Arrangement.

These arrests are of a pattern. Away from the state capital, in Lower Assam’s Bongaingaon, three leaders of the outfit’s district committee, Mahidhar Ray, Nanda Deb Nath and Sailen Das, have been in jail for over a month now. Nath is implicated in four similar cases, where he is accused of almost identical charges that range from rioting to “promoting enmity between different religious groups”; Ray and Das in two cases, again with similar charges.

The outfit’s Dibrugarh unit leaders Sashi Sensua and Debojit Baruah, currently in jail, face five cases each. While Sensua was arrested on January 20, Baruah has been in jail for several weeks now. While he got bail in one case on January 10, he continues to be in jail for another.

Another of its leader from the same unit, Biju Tamuli, is also in jail. One of the ten sections he has been charged is non-bailable: it pertains to “putting a person in fear of death or of grievous hurt, in order to commit extortion”.

The list goes on.

Mansas Konwar leading a protest in Assam. Photo: Special arrangement.

‘A greater militancy’

The real reason why the KMSS has been targeted, insisted Gohain, who was charged with sedition along with Gogoi in 2019 for opposing the Citizenship Act, is because it represents “a greater militancy than the other [agitating] organisations”.

“The KMSS’s ideas represent a much wider base than narrow indigenous ethnicity. In the long run, therefore, the organisation poses a much greater threat to the power that be,” he said.

Social scientist Sanjay Barbora agreed. “The KMSS is talking about land and resources and that is greatly disturbing for the government,” he said. “Less radical organisations will hold on to the letter of the law and that is in some ways more manageable dissent for the government to deal with.”

A 10-year old confession surfaces

Members of the organisation say the accusation that it adheres to the Maoist ideology is “totally baseless”. “This is what governments do – brand people,” said Bhasco De Saikia, the outfit’s co-president and one of the few senior office bearers to not be arrested yet. “Because as it is people get suspicious when they hear the word communist, and when it is Maoist, it is just plain scary for the average person. The Congress did it earlier; the BJP is doing it now.”

Under the previous Congress regime, Gogoi had been arrested several times on a range of charges. In 2010, an intelligence report by the Assam police accused Gogoi of having links with Maoists.

In fact, this current FIR too seems to draw from the same report, which is based on a 2010 confessional statement of a former National Investigation Authority approver, an erstwhile Communist Party of India (Maoist) “part-timer”.

In his confession, seen by Scroll.in, the approver refers to a meeting in 2009 in Middle Assam’s Golaghat which he organised between some Communist Party of India (Maoist) functionaries and members of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti. After the meeting, according to the approver, some members of the peasants’ rights organisation joined the proscribed group.

However, the confessional statement does not identify those members by name. The nine-page confessional letter only mentions Gogoi’s name once.

Senior officials in the police machinery concede privately that while Gogoi may have met Maoist leaders a long time ago, there is little evidence to suggest he was involved with them currently or even in the recent past.

What then was the basis of the FIR that resulted in the NIA getting involved? Why did it cite information from a 10-year old approver statement as a new “secret input”?

Majumdar, the sub-inspector who filed the FIR, said he was not at liberty to talk and directed the query to Putul Baishya, the officer who had led the investigation for Assam police.

Baishya, however, claimed he could not work on the case as it was transferred to the National Investigation Agency in less than a day. On being asked about the FIR’s details, he said, “Why don’t you ask Majumdar who filed it?”

The National Investigation Agency superintendent of Guwahati, Bibekananda Das, did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment.

Another senior state police official, who requested anonymity, was more forthcoming. “The government wanted Akhil in and that was decided on [December 11] itself,” he said. “There is little point doing a technical dissection of the FIR.”
Role in the violence?

The officer, though, was convinced of Gogoi’s role in the violence. “We have call recordings that are incriminating – we will release them when we deem necessary,” he said. “And everyone has heard his speeches exhorting people to come out to the streets and disrupt the system.”

In terms of publicly available records, there is a brief interview that Gogoi gave to local television reporters on December 9, the day the Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha. In it, he makes a fervent case for civil disobedience. “Block the highways, the railway lines in front of you,” he can be heard saying. “Try and paralyse the state administrative machinery. That is the only way out now from preventing the BJP government from passing the bill in the Rajya Sabha.”

On December 10, he updated his Facebook status – the last time he would do so before the internet was shut down. He wrote: “Organise a total shutdown; all you people come out to the streets.”

His associate Saikia dismissed police claims of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti being involved in or orchestrating the violence. “That is simply untrue,” he said. “People had poured out to the streets on their own. It was for everyone to see.”

A graffiti at Delhi's Jamia Milia University demanding Gogoi's release. 

Photo: Facebook

Down and alone

Akhil Gogoi’s arrest has gained some national attention, with calls for his release being made at several protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act across India. But a popular movement demanding the release of Gogoi and his associates is yet to build up in Assam.

This may have something to do with the fact that Gogoi’s popularity with Assam’s middle class has been on the decline for some time now. Observers claim that one reason for this is Gogoi’s perceived sympathy for Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, whom the Assamese middle-class view as a threat to their majority status in the state. That sentiment gained currency when Gogoi defended people facing eviction in Kaziranga in 2016. The local media widely claimed that these people were illegal migrants squatting on forest land.

Even groups like the All Assam Students’ Union and Asom Jatiyatabadi Chatra Parishad have not been particularly vocal in expressing support for him, beyond making perfunctory calls for his release in a few protest rallies. “We have said repeatedly that we demand the release of everyone arrested during these protests,” said the All Assam Students’ Union’s Lurinjyoti Gogoi. “But the focus of the protests has to be the abrogation of the Act, not the release of one particular person in my opinion.”

In private, other Assamese nationalist leaders are less charitable. “He is perennially calling us agents of the Indian state,” said a senior leader of an Assamese nationalist group. “Why should we stick our neck out for him now?”

Indeed, Gogoi’s somewhat abrasive brand of politics has meant that he and his group stand isolated. For instance, during the wave of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill in the winter of 2018, the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti was part of an alliance of 70 ethnic outfits.This time, though, most of those organisations have instead rallied around the All Assam Students’ Union instead.

A leader of the Samiti said they had called for at least two meetings to work out a coalition once again, but “only a handful of organisations” participated in it. “Maybe the government doesn’t want it to happen,” he said.

Palash Changmai, general secretary of the most prominent of them, the Asom Jatiyatabadi Chatra Parishad, however, scoffed at the suggestion that it had anything to do with government pressure. “It was an executive decision that we should start the movement on our own this time and nobody knew then it was going to turn out like this,” said Changmai.

The Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti is alone in its darkest moment. Most of its members are keeping low and have not switched on their phones for weeks. “The atmosphere is such that we are wary of even addressing the press,” said Saikia. “We have been marked as the enemy by the BJP.”

Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HINDUISM 

IS FASCISM, CASTISM AND RACISM

MEET THE WRITER
‘Does upper caste society acknowledge the private reservations it has had for years?’: Yashica Dutt
An interview with the writer of ‘Coming Out As Dalit’.

Yashica Dutt. | Calvin Tso Admerasia
2/2/2020 · Vighnesh Hampapura

I read Yashica Dutt’s memoir Coming Out As Dalit when Professor Rita Kothari suggested it as additional reading for our Dalit Literatures course at Ashoka University. Dutt’s was an unusual story: She had hidden her caste from others, disengaging from conversations around caste in the fear that it might reveal her identity. After graduating from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Dutt went to Columbia University, New York, and has been living and working in the US since then.

But with Rohith Vemula’s death in 2016, much of what had remained within her – the experiences in childhood, the courses at Columbia, the wish to write and record – burst forth in a stunning memoir. To me, the book stood out for two reasons. One, it wove the stories of a diverse group of Dalits into Dutt’s own journey. Two, along with the sharp journalism there was her critical insight into the relationship between caste and education, which, as a student whose caste supposedly had no bearing – and thus all the bearing historically – on education, was of great consequence.
I met Dutt at the Jaipur Literary Fest, where she spoke about her book, her experiences, the systems that fail people, reservations, and the current government’s appropriation of the Dalit identity. Our conversation, however, was focused on questions that surround the education system and the looming presence of caste everywhere.

People talk about “merit” when they talk about education. And there is, via “merit”, an argument against reservation in educational institutions, that “merit” does not get enough seats, that universities should value only “merit”. Even today we have such an argument, say with respect to JNU: The university should be shut down because there is no real merit there. What they mean is that the students who go to JNU are mostly from the “reserved” categories. Could you unpack this idea of “merit” for us?

Yeah, let’s talk about what they mean by “merit”. Are they talking about IITs? That is, clearing the entrance exams there, the JEE – is this “merit”? Anybody who has taken the entrance exam or done some preparation for them has probably gone through the experience of going to coaching centres. Do you know what exactly happens at coaching centres?

Oh, I do, yeah…

You look like you do. They give you...there are these designed questions, these tricks and formulae and methods and ways to solve them. It isn’t that people who cannot solve them are dumb. It’s just that the people who end up solving them have practised them, have been coached, have been mentored, have had the ways to solve the equations in less than two minutes. How did they get this education? With money. Somebody who does not have access to money does not have access to “merit”.

So, I think, before we talk about Dalit students not being “intelligent”, we need to talk about how we became “intelligent” in the first place. This is a question about the caste system, but also a question about India’s education system: Does it promote critical thought? If it did that, and entrances were based on critical arguments, then we could say: This argument makes sense, while that does not.

But it does not do that. Here we are talking about the tools to build a skillset to solve a set of problems on paper: Without these tools, you cannot do well here. Instead of saying, then, that Dalit students are not meritorious and thus diluting the campus space, let us be the socialist state that we are, and help students to have access to a system that they don’t.

One of the arguments made once we talk about the economic factor is that there are students who are poor in the “unreserved” categories too. What would your response be to that? Because it’s a very alluring argument for people to mount against reservation.
Absolutely, and that is a totally valid argument – that there are poor “general” quota students as well. But how are they treated by the teachers? What kinds of support systems do they have access to? Do they have a teacher who asks your last names and decides on grace marks, for instance? If you’re a “quota” student, how are you seen and treated?

Of course, money is the primary issue. Dalit students who have money access coaching centres too. But that’s not the only question. We are asking how these Dalit students are treated once they are inside. Who are the students dropping out of universities and educational spaces? Most of them are Dalits. SC and ST students.

And it’s not because they are unintelligent…

Exactly, not because they’re bad [students]. Studies and surveys document how casteism is institutionalised in these spaces. When you enter these hostile spaces as reservation students, your mental health takes a big hit. There’s first the conversation we need to have about mental health in general, which we don’t; and then about the fact that students with no resources, students who are institutionally disadvantaged, are affected the most. And you may be rich or poor, but if you’re a “quota” student, you’re institutionally disadvantaged.

Yes, you lack other forms of capital that may not just be money. You touched upon many topics that I wanted to discuss. “Merit” has another narrative, and that is to paint a rosy picture of university spaces, that they are about education, that they treat all students equally, for all students are meritorious. In other words, universities do not harbour caste discrimination. And one has to only…

Oh, look at Rohith Vemula.

Exactly, one has to only read Rohith Vemula’s letter. How have you seen caste discrimination in these elite spaces of education?

Personal experience?

Anything – personal experience or experiences you know about.
Okay, personal experience. I went to St Stephen’s and Columbia. Stephen’s is caste-agnostic, as I mentioned in my session: It’s not caste-neutral or caste-blind, but caste is concealed very well. As far as other institutions are concerned, if you’ve read my book, I talk about this professor who constructed a well, and it was called the Brahmin’s well. And you could draw water only if you were upper-caste.

I have another professor who is Dalit talk about people not sitting on the chair he sat on despite his being the head of the department. Dalit students – this happened to Rohith – don’t get their fellowships. There was a study by [Surinder S] Jodhka – if I remember correctly – where he revealed that Dalit students were told when they applied for the Rajiv Gandhi fellowship that they did not deserve a government handout.

I know students who have waited for years and years for a PhD guide. These are all examples of institutional casteism. In fact, quotas have become a way for people to identify who a Dalit student is. And once you’re recognised, you are a Dalit student; ergo you are merit-less.

And merit on their terms. Tell me, what would merit ideally be?

What would I consider merit? Diversity. Diversity is merit, quality, excellence. Not only in terms of the Dalit experience, but everybody’s experience. Let’s get a poor upper-caste person who farms; let’s get someone who knows how to till the land to teach, give us their experiences. Have a Dalit person who has different ideas of knowledge production show you how to create art. That’s how you create a just and equal society with equal properties for all.

That expands the field of knowledge itself. It has only constituted the written word and theory.

And is also limited to a certain caste.

Yes. A review of your book states that one of the common threads in the stories of Yashica Dutt, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, or Sujatha Gidla has been about their mothers working really hard to get them a “ticket out of their caste”.

And Rohith’s mother, Radhika aunty.

Yes. I want to think about that phrase: “ticket out of caste”. And this goes back to one of our classes where we discussed caste and privilege. If you don’t know your caste, if you can say that you don’t know your caste, then it’s mostly true that you’re privileged.
Most likely. There are instances, though, where a lot of Dalit parents conceal caste to shield their children from discrimination, and inevitably when the children find out, they feel disgust, revulsion and shame. But most likely, if you can afford to say, “I’m so progressive that I don’t know my caste”, then you probably are upper-caste.

I want to discuss that difference between these privileges. You write in your book how you could lie about your caste, which is a very different kind of privilege from not knowing your caste at all, and both these are different from being able to conceal caste to shield children from discrimination. And these differences are important to register, because one can mix all of this up and say: ah, everyone is now a part of equal society.
But they’re not. I had the unique privilege of being able to use other caste labels because I pass off easily. If I didn’t pass off easily, nobody would believe me even if I tried. Or if I lived in a rural setting where the village would be divided according to jats, like Valmiki village or so on, everyone would know even without my telling them that I belonged to the Valmiki caste, or this or that caste. There are gradients. And of course we all have our privileges. Urban Dalits have more privilege than rural Dalits; richer Dalits than poorer Dalits – but before we get into discussing privileges among Dalits, let’s examine the larger society.

Of course. To question Dalit privilege and homogenise it with upper-caste privilege is to derail the conversation.

Exactly. Is society confronting itself at how caste has existed within its folds for years and how different people have either benefited or have been disadvantaged? Are we – the “general” upper-caste society – acknowledging how we have had private reservations because of our caste for centuries? Let’s reckon with that, right?

Cases like mine are rare: Can a Dalit girl in rural Bilwada, Rajasthan hide her caste like I did? No, she can’t. She doesn’t have the same opportunities that I did. And the question is: How do I use this opportunity? Can I use my marginalised voice with a relative privilege to make a noise in a world that I have somehow gained access to, a world that didn’t want me in the first place?

And you are indeed, even here at JLF. That was fascinating. A few minutes ago, you talked about being institutionally disadvantaged. And that seems odd, because institutions are supposed to do otherwise. Reservation, which is a guarantee to one’s right to education – because it has been historically denied to you – turns to be, in the way we speak or think of it, a favour, as you yourself said, “a government handout”. Society’s perspective on reservation is so negative that its perspective on a “quota” student is the same, because she seen as actively exercising a right but as passively receiving a favour. Is there a way we can address this issue institutionally? What can colleges and universities do?

I think that’s a really good question. Most universities have this, but all of them should have SC-ST cells in place, support systems for Dalits, treat them as people who are overcoming their generational trauma rather than as beneficiaries of a system that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Let’s remember that they are now equal stakeholders now in this system.

Compassion, empathy – all these of course should come from everywhere. And professors, especially professors, need to let go of their casteist mindsets and do their job as teachers, to really uplift all students. All students will not have equal abilities and that’s why teachers must focus of those who don’t have and know enough. They need upliftment.

Not as a favour, but because they deserve it. Yes. Now my last question, and this is from your book. You say there that more often than not your success is mixed with a sense of guilt. And what would you tell students who may feel this same sense of guilt? Because while it’s understandable, it’s misplaced as you point out yourself. When people go to their rooms and say, “oh, this isn’t mine, this success isn’t me”, it’s even more destabilising.
Success is yours. You worked really hard to be here. You came here against all odds, and you beat all of them to become a part of a society that had structural barriers for you. Don’t allow anybody to diminish that struggle, even yourself. Be kind to yourself – I know this is a lot of therapy talk, but I’ve been through it all – and just own the struggle, own the journey, and own the success too. It’s really funny, er, you might have noticed I’ve suddenly become emotional…

I’m really sorry if I…

No, no, no, please don’t be. You see, something happened this morning, and you can see this if you go to my twitter handle: I’ve been attacked for coming to lit-fests, talking about my book and “promoting myself”. There is a section of twitter handles – I’m not sure of their caste location, but they say they are from the “lower castes”, and that’s probably true – that say that I don’t deserve to have the voice that I do, that I’m not a representative of the movement.

Hmm, if you include this part, I just want to say: I have never claimed to represent anybody but myself. If you have an opinion about the book, don’t just go with what the title says. Please read the book – it’s a work of journalism, a work of non-fiction, there’s research, data and analysis. Of course there’s a thread of my own story, but I’ve also used other stories and voices to amplify the story. I’m not centring myself in this discourse.

As somebody who now seems enormously privileged, not only am I feeling bad about the book and all this – sitting here and talking to you – but I’m also being made to feel bad about it. All of this is seen as personal promotion and book-tour, and that’s gross and tasteless. And this is from within the community.

All of this does work into guilt: should I feel happy about myself? Do I deserve this? But these aren’t the right questions, and this isn’t how we should be thinking about it. If I worked hard, I deserve credit, as everybody else does. There are so many other stories that deserve to be told, and I had great privilege to get published that many others don’t. But it isn’t my fault, it’s how the system is built. And we’re fighting it. I have clawed my way in. I had certain advantages. And let’s work together to bring those advantages to everyone. I can do my part.

Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HINDUISM 

IS FASCISM, CASTISM AND RACISM

QUIRKY SCIENCE
A mathematical equation hidden in rat whiskers can be used to design railway tracks
The Euler spiral is a unique natural structure that can display multiple shapes.

Dawn Huczek/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Feb 01, 2020 · Robyn Grant, The Conversatio


Rats have up to 70 whiskers on their faces, varying hugely in size and shape. Almost every mammal possesses whiskers, but these rodents are what we call “whisker specialists”, meaning they have super-sensitive, moveable hairs that they use to explore and sense their surroundings.

Rat whiskers can vary hugely. In our recent research, my colleagues and I analysed 523 whiskers from 15 rats and found that each whisker had a different length and shape. We wanted to investigate more about the shape of these hairs as a first step in understanding what rats feel through their whiskers.Rat whisker movements.

We found that rat whiskers can be accurately described by a simple mathematical equation known as the Euler spiral. It’s an example of how special spiral patterns are found throughout the natural world. And spotting them can help us not only understand nature better, but also improve our own engineering.

The Euler spiral – also called the Cornu spiral, Spiros or Clothoid – is a shape whose curvature changes linearly with its length. It looks quite like an s-shape, where the tips of the “s” carry on curving in to spirals that get rapidly tighter. As a result, aspects of the curve can fit a wide variety of shapes including those that are straight or s-shaped, those that increase in curvature and those that decrease in curvature.

This is why the Euler spiral can be used to describe all types of rat whiskers, even though they come in many different shapes. Some are s-shaped, some get more curly towards the tip and some get less curly towards the tip.The Euler spiral. Credit: The Conversation
Spirals in nature

Most natural structures don’t display all of these three shapes. But there are many spirals in nature that get more curved along their length. Many sea shells, sheep and antelope horns, sea horse and lizard tails and even the cochlear in our own ears have all been shown to have a linear radius of curvature along their length, making them into a shape called a logarithmic spiral.Tightening spirals in nature. Credit: The Conversation

Although it is named after Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, the Euler spiral was actually first described by his countryman James Bernoulli in 1694 who was trying to solve a mathematical problem related to elasticity. But Bernoulli didn’t plot or draw the spiral, didn’t put any numbers in to his equation, nor provide any workings to show why it was true.

Euler discovered Bernoulli’s equation and started to characterise aspects of the curve that it describes in 1744. In 1818, the French physicist Augustin Fresnel independently derived aspects of the Euler spiral as he was describing the shape of light diffracting through a slit. And American civil engineer Arthur Talbot discovered it again in 1890 when designing railway tracks that would produce a smoother journey.

In particular, because the Euler curve has a transition from flat to curved, it has been used for designing the parts of railway tracks or roads that make this transition. It has even been used for finding the best route a racing car should take through a corner. The Euler spiral also has applications in working out how to project maps onto globes, and improving the operation of microwaves.

Rat essentials

But how can it help us to study the rat? Describing the shapes and patterns of natural structures using simple mathematical equation can help us to understand their function. Whiskers are actually made up of dead hair cells but they sit within a specialised sensitive follicle. The follicle is what extracts information about the force and direction of the whisker as it touches objects, and transfers that information to the brain. This information is what the rat uses to perceive objects and judge their shape, size and texture.

The size and natural shape of each whisker will strongly influence the way it deforms and the tactile signals that reach the follicle. This means that being able to describe the whisker’s shape with a mathematical equation will help us understand the signals that the follicle receives. We can also tell from the equation that rat whiskers probably grow from the base by the same amount each day – although this might also be affected by the seasons and how much food the rat has eaten.

Nature is full of mathematical patterns. Given how rat whiskers follow the Euler spiral, and that spirals are so common in nature, we think there’s a good chance the whiskers of other mammals probably follow similar rules and may also be described by Euler spirals. In this way, maths can give us a special insight into how biological structures and systems work.

Robyn Grant, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Physiology & Behaviour, Manchester Metropolitan University.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize controversy makes one ask whether literature has a moral responsibility

Handke’s award has triggered journalists and survivors of the Srebrenica genocide.

2019 Nobel Laureate for literature Peter Handke delivers his lecture.

 | TT News Agency / Reuters

Feb 01, 2020 · Ervin Malakaj, The Conversation

Austrian writer Peter Handke received the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature. The award is for “a writer’s life work” and Handke has written novels, travelogues, theatre plays, screenplays and poetry.

Hundreds protested the award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall. This was not an isolated protest.

The announcement of the award generated public uproar.

Handke’s critics say some of his published work has advanced and fuelled genocide apologetics and they point to his choice to speak at the 2006 funeral of Serbian ethno-nationalist politician Slobodan Milošević. When Milošević died, he was on trial facing 66 charges including for crimes against humanity and genocide.

The controversy has spurred long-standing debates about where stories come from, who is responsible for them and what it means as a writer to bear witness to truth – and also, which persons or institutions have the authority to do so.

These events unfolded at a time of rising ethnonationalism across Europe.
Sustained dissent

Handke’s controversial book, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, translated from German, attracted particular criticism. The publisher of the English-language 1997 translation describes the book on its jacket as both a “sensitive and nuanced meditative travelogue through Serbia,” and a “scathing criticism of western war reporting.”

In the book, Handke writes: “all too many of the reporters on Bosnia and on the war there...are not only proud chroniclers, but false ones.” In his search for a “common remembering” he writes, “To record the evil facts, that’s good. But something else is needed for a peace, something not less important than the facts.”

Handke’s Nobel nomination particularly inflamed journalists and survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, where more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995, during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. Various intellectuals, as well as the broader public voiced their dissent about Handke receiving the award on Twitter following the award announcement.

I reported all the Yugo wars. Saw monstrous crimes. #BosniaWarJournalists #Handke #NobelPrize Later testified at war crimes trials, inc those of Bosnian Serb leaders Karadzic & Mladic. The grim detail in court records https://t.co/nfiRcCPbMk— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) December 9, 2019

The bigger context is that some perpetrators denied findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, sometimes referred to as the Hague Tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands – and the tribunal documented atrocious strategies to conceal crimes, such as moving mass graves. Denials of the Srebrenica genocide continue today.

Media reported that Emir Suljagić, a survivor of the Srebrenica genocide who wrote Postcards from the Grave, said after the announcement of Handke’s award: “I am in Stockholm to protest the award being given to a man who negates my suffering and the suffering of so many others.” During a press conference in December, Handke did not provide direct answers to questions about the controversy.


Academy’s defence

In an October 10, 2019, press release, the Swedish Academy announced it had awarded Handke the Nobel for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Following the protests and uproar, both Swedish Academy and Nobel Committee for Literature members defended the decision. Two academy members wrote in a Swedish newspaper that Handke had “definitely made provocative, inappropriate and unclear statements on political issues,” but added: “The Swedish Academy has obviously not intended to reward a war criminal and denier of war crimes or genocide.”

In an op-ed, writing as an individual, one of the members of the committee said Handke in his writing was “radically unpolitical,” according to a story from Agence France-Presse. British Broadcasting Corp reported that another member said, “When we give the award to Handke, we argue that the task of literature is other than to confirm and reproduce what society’s central view believes is morally right.”

Suhrkamp Verlag, Handke’s publisher, circulated a defence of his work following the controversy, but did not release it publicly, journalist Peter Maass wrote in The Intercept. Many statements in defence of the award echo earlier French and British 20th century literary criticism.

The language debate

The French philosopher Roland Barthes’s influential 1967 essay The Death of the Author served to elevate literary work and its language. Barthes wrote: “It is language which speaks, not the author.”

For French philosopher Michel Foucault, the author is a kind of scribe who commits language to paper. The implication is that the author is writing down the realities of the world outside. In his view, “the function of the author is to characterise the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society” – meaning, ideas and messaging, as he elaborated in his 1969 essay What is an Author?

Before them, TS Eliot proclaimed in 1919 that writing “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

As feminist literary scholar Cheryl Walker has noted, independence-of-the-text critiques have, to a certain extent, helped “liberate the text for multiple uses” like re-reading canonical texts from critical feminist perspectives. But such critiques have also been at odds with literary traditions on the margins.

Historically, the significance of lived personal and collective experiences have been central features of texts by women, Black, Indigenous and people of colour, queer or transgender writers. These literatures, their readers and their institutions of criticism have long resisted calls to separate author, text and political or social impact. They have have asserted either that the personal is political or that perspective is situational – and rejected the notion that literary work can be considered unpolitical.
Ethnonationalist politics

Critics of Handke’s receipt of the Nobel award challenge the notion that Handke’s literary work can be evaluated apart from its political implications. Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon has questioned what he calls the academy’s belief in a “literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death.”

PEN America issued a statement decrying the academy’s support for Handke, saying the body is “dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide.”

Among the alarming developments in the Handke affair has been the news that the award fuelled far-right ethnonationalist sympathies.

How or if the Swedish Academy will respond to these developments as the public demands it approach the award more cautiously remains to be seen. It seems unlikely that it will rescind Handke’s award.

But the Academy is implicated in this affair no matter what.

Ervin Malakaj, Assistant Professor of German Studies, University of British Columbia.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. 

INDIA
Muslim Law Board says women are free to pray in mosques – but most women have been told the opposite

The Law Board has admitted in the Supreme Court that Islam permits women to enter mosques. But the reality on the ground is starkly different.

Muslim women praying.

Feb 01, 2020 · Aarefa Johari

All her life, Shakira Sheikh believed that as a woman, she was not allowed to pray namaz inside a mosque. A housewife with four young children, Sheikh grew up in Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, and moved to a slum in Mumbai five years ago. In both places, she had never seen or heard of a woman entering a mosque.

This is why Sheikh did a double take when she heard that the All India Muslim Personal Law Board had stated that Islam allows women to pray in mosques.

“It does?” she asked in wonder. “If we are really allowed, I would like to go.”

Sheikh’s ignorance about her religious right to worship in a mosque highlights the irony of the official statement that the All India Muslim Personal Law Board submitted in an affidavit to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. In the statement, the Law Board – a non-profit organisation claiming to represent all Indian Muslim sects – claimed that Islamic texts do not restrict women from entering and praying in mosques.

“A Muslim woman is free to enter Masjid for prayers. It is her option to exercise her right to avail such facilities as available for prayers in Masjid,” the statement said, adding that previous fatwas barring the entry of women in mosques must be “ignored”. While it is considered mandatory for Muslim men to offer Friday prayers in a congregation at a mosque, the statement said that there is no obligation for women to do the same.

The Law Board’s affidavit was in response to a petition filed by a Muslim couple from Pune, seeking legal rights for Muslim women to pray in mosques. A nine-judge Supreme Court bench will begin hearing this matter in the first week of February, along with other cases pitting religious freedom against fundamental rights. This includes the right of Hindu women to enter Kerala’s Sabarimala temple, the right of Parsi women in interfaith marriages to enter fire temples and the practice of female genital cutting among Dawoodi Bohras.

In its affidavit, the Law Board’s main argument was that the Supreme Court did not have the authority to adjudicate on a religious matter that is dealt with in Islamic texts. However, it is the Board’s other statements that have caught the attention of many Muslim women.
Women kept in the dark

“If the Law Board is admitting that women are allowed to pray in mosques, then why isn’t it making any arrangements for women to do that?” said Shaista Ambar, president of the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board, an organisation that Ambar founded in 2005 in response to the Law Board’s patriarchy. “Most women in India don’t have any idea that they have the right to enter a masjid, because the clerics have always told us that we are not allowed.”

The question of whether women can pray in mosques has been frequently asked to Islamic scholars and priests, who then respond to those questions with fatwas – non-binding legal opinions based on an interpretation of Islamic texts.

Darul Uloom Deoband, the seat of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam, has issued numerous fatwas on this topic over the years. The closest that any of these fatwas have come to admitting that women are, in fact, allowed to enter mosques, is one in which it claims that it is “better” for women to pray at home rather than in a mosque. Other fatwas have categorically claimed that it is ”prohibited” for women to visit mosques, and that if any Muslim sect allows women to pray in mosques, it is a “wrong practice” that “should be stopped”.

“I too had got a fatwa from Deoband long ago, telling me I could not go to a mosque,” said Ambar, who chose to ignore the fatwa. “I tried to go to pray in a masjid along with my child, but the men there did not even let me get close – they told me it was a pure place where people were praying.”

In 1997, Ambar bought land in Lucknow to set up her own unique mosque which is open to women and men of all Muslim sects. “If men and women can pray together in Mecca [holy Islamic city in Saudi Arabia], then why not here?”

Besides the Ambar Mosque in Lucknow, there are a few other mosques in India that allow women to offer prayers, although they are few and far between.

“I have prayed in Sunni mosques in Solapur and Jaipur, where they have small, separate enclosures for women,” said Noorjehan Safia Niaz, the co-founder and trustee of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, a non-profit group that has previously fought for Muslim women’s right to enter dargahs or mausoleums, and for a legal ban on triple talaq.

Making room for women

Some Islamic sects, like the Bohra Shias, have traditionally allowed women to pray in mosques, and their masjids are built with separate halls or floors for women. In most Sunni mosques across India, however, even small prayer rooms for women are not made available. Given this lack of infrastructure, activists like Niaz see the Muslim Personal Law Board’s claim that women are “free” to pray in mosques as mere lip service.

“The Muslim Personal Law Board is deeply patriarchal, so it will not go out of its way to create space for women to pray in all mosques,” said Niaz.

Scroll.in spoke to several Muslim women in suburban Mumbai and found that even though most of them were unaware that Islam allows them to pray in mosques, almost all of them claimed they would like facilities to be created for them.

“I would not like to pray in the same room as men, but I hope the Supreme Court tells masjids to make rooms for women,” said Shakira Sheikh.

Arifa Aslam, a 33-year-old housewife from a suburban Mumbai slum, was among the women who was aware of Islamic rules on this topic. “As such, it is jaiz [permissible] for women to pray in mosques, but no one goes because confusion is created about it,” said Aslam. “But if space is created and other women start going, I would love to go – why not?”

In sharp contrast to the women, Muslim men in the same slum as Aslam offered a glimpse into the thick wall of patriarchy that has distorted Islamic rules to impose restrictions on women.

“Islam has very strict rules against women praying in the same place as men,” said Mohammed Hanif, a daily-wage labourer. “Even if women are given separate prayer rooms in mosques, there could be incidents that could lead to all kinds of cases of harassment. And then everyone will point fingers at the women.”

---30---

Bangladesh allows formal education in Rohingya camps to reduce risk of child trafficking
DUH OH
The move is a reversal of an earlier order and has been welcomed by child rights experts.

Rohingya children at a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar. | Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

Jan 31, 2020 Naimul Karim, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Some 10,000 Rohingya children in the world’s largest refugee camp will start formal schooling in April, reducing their risk of trafficking and exploitation, officials said on Wednesday.

Bangladesh, which hosts some 900,000 Rohingya who fled persecution and a military crackdown in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, believes education can protect the young refugees from traffickers’ false promises of work and better lives.

“It will definitely help,” said Mahbub Alam Talukder, the government’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner. “When they start studying the [Myanmar] curriculum, parents will be more serious about sending their children to school...The decision to put more focus on education is a positive change. It will help the Rohingya children in the future.”

United Nations figures show that more than 700,000 Rohingya – 400,000 of them children – arrived in Bangladesh in 2017, in a mass exodus from Myanmar, which regards the Muslim minority as illegal migrants.
Exploitation at camps

Trafficking is on the rise in the sprawling 6,000-acre camps with more than 350 cases identified in 2019, about 15% of which involved children, according to the UN migration agency.

Human rights campaigners say the figure is just a fraction of the actual numbers. According to police records, 529 Rohingya were rescued from trafficking last year in the camps near Cox’s Bazar, some 400km south of the capital, Dhaka.

On Sunday, the police said they rescued 13 Rohingya girls in Dhaka from two suspected traffickers. The children, who had been living in Cox’s Bazar, were promised jobs in Dhaka but instead were going to be trafficked abroad, police said.

Bangladesh had forbidden charities and the UN from giving formal teaching in the camps as it could give the impression that the refugees would be there permanently, raising fears that a generation would miss out on education. This week’s reversal was welcomed by child rights experts.

“[This] will help strengthen their sense of purpose in life, build hope for the future, reduce frustration and despair and thereby reduce associated protection risks,” said UN children’s agency, UNICEF, spokeswoman Yenny Gamming.

“With no hope or access to learning...refugees may take risks. Children and adolescents may be sent out to work or face child marriage or other forms of exploitation and abuse, as their families struggle to cope.”

Hundreds of informal learning centres in the camps officially offer early primary school lessons but it is mostly unstructured learning and playtime, children and parents say.

“Once formal education begins, things will be more orderly and children and parents will be more serious about school,” said Shamima Bibi, a refugee who founded the Rohingya Women’s Education Initiative, which runs several schools in the camps. “They will have hope for their futures and that will deter traffickers.”

This article first appeared on Thomson Reuters Foundation News.

BOOK EXCERPT
How India’s British rulers prevented Muslims from joining the Congress to seek independence
An excerpt from ‘Republic Of Religion: The Rise And Fall Of Colonial Secularism In India’ by Abhinav Chandrachud.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jan 31, 2020 · Abhinav Chandrachud

In 1906, Viceroy Minto and Secretary of State John Morley were getting worried that the Congress, which they saw as a predominantly Hindu body, was becoming too powerful. They believed that the British Empire in India would weaken if Muslims joined the Congress movement. Against this backdrop, they possibly devised a scheme to exploit the schism between Hindus and Muslims to consolidate the British hold over India, all in the name of secularism.
On 28 May 1906, Minto wrote to Morley and said that though “we must recognise [the Congress] and be friends with the best of them, yet I am afraid there is much that is absolutely disloyal in the movement and that there is danger for the future”. “I have been thinking a good deal lately,” he continued, “of a possible counterpoise to Congress aims.”

At this time, Minto thought that the Indian princes and landholders could be organised as an opposition to the Congress. On 6 June, Morley wrote back and said that his advisors were worried that Muslims would soon join the Congress movement, which would spell doom for the British Empire. “Everybody warns us that a new spirit is growing and spreading over India”, he wrote. “Lawrence, Chirol, Sidney Low”, who were his advisors, “all sing the same song...Be sure that before long the Mahommedans will throw in their lot with the Congressmen against you,” they had said to Morley. On 27 June, Minto wrote to Morley about the “disloyal tone of the Native Press” with which Congressmen were “so largely connected”.

On 26 July 1906, Morley made a speech in the House of Commons in which he hinted at reforms in the Indian legislative councils. A few days later, on 4 August, the secretary of Aligarh College, Nawab Mehdi Ali Khan (better known as Mohsin-ul- Mulk), wrote a letter to Mr WA Archbold, the British principal of the college, who was at the time spending his summer vacation in Simla. In it, he asked whether it would be advisable for a delegation of Muslims to meet Viceroy Minto in order to speak to him about the rights of Muslims in India.
“You are aware,” he wrote, “that the...young educated Mohammedans seem to have a sympathy for the ‘Congress’, and [Morley’s] speech [in the House of Commons] will produce a great tendency in them to join the ‘Congress’.” He also wrote that if elections to the legislative councils were introduced under the new proposals, “the Mohammedans will hardly get a seat while the Hindus will carry off the palm by dint of their majority”.

A few days later, this letter reached Viceroy’s Minto’s desk. On 8 August, Minto forwarded the letter to Morley and told him that he was inclined to grant the “proposed deputation” an audience. This was unusual because very rarely, if ever, had a viceroy met a deputation consisting of only one religious community or group. In 1901, for instance, Viceroy Curzon had refused to meet a deputation consisting only of Muslims, and no viceroy had met a deputation consisting only of members of the Congress.

Between 9–10 August, Archbold and JR Dunlop Smith, the private secretary to Viceroy Minto, exchanged letters, in which Dunlop Smith informed Archbold that he had obtained permission for the Muslim delegation to visit Viceroy Minto. On 10 August, a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council by the name of Denzil Ibbetson advised Minto to receive the deputation. It could be a “calamity”, said Ibbetson, if the younger generation of Muslims were driven into the “arms of the Congress party...for at present, the educated Mohammedan is the most conservative element in Indian society.”

On 10 August, Archbold wrote back to Mohsin-ul-Mulk, and advised him to prepare a memorial to ask Viceroy Minto for special privileges for Muslims in elections to legislative councils. He wrote that the memorial must begin “with a solemn expression of loyalty”, perhaps to address Minto’s unhappiness with the disloyal tone of the Congress. The memorial was to say that elections “would prove detrimental to the interest of the Muslim minority.

“It should respectfully be suggested”, he wrote, “that nomination or representation by religion be introduced to meet Muslim opinion”. However, he warned Mohsin-ul-Mulk that Archbold’s role in this process must not become publicly known. “[I]n all these views I must be in the background”, he wrote, “[t]hey must come from you”.

“I can prepare for you the draft of the address or revise it,” he wrote, since “I know how to phrase these things in proper language.” A formal letter requesting an appointment with the viceroy should be prepared, he wrote, which “should be sent with the signatures of some representative Mussalmans”. The deputation which goes to meet the viceroy, he added, must “consist of the representatives of all the Provinces”.

On 1 October 1906, thirty-five Muslim representatives from different provinces and princely states met Minto at his Viceregal Lodge in Simla. The memorial, which had probably been edited by Archbold, was read out to the viceroy by the Aga Khan. Among other things, the memorial asked the viceroy for special privileges in elections.

Muslim seats in the legislative councils, said the Aga Khan, “should be commensurate, not merely with [the] political strength [of Muslims in India], but also, with their political importance and the value of the contribution which they make to the defence of the Empire.” “[D]ue consideration” must also be given, he said, “to the position which [Muslims] occupied in India, a little more than a hundred years ago, and of which the traditions have naturally not faded from their minds”.

In other words, the Muslim delegation requested Viceroy Minto to give Muslims weightage in legislative councils because the Muslim community was politically important, because it contributed to the defence of the British Empire, and because Muslims were, before the British arrived, the ruling race in India.

Minto had been advised by Dunlop Smith and Archbold to give the deputation a “reassuring reply”. He responded by agreeing with the deputation’s demands on the subject of elections and said that “any electoral representation in India would be doomed to mischievous failure” if this were not so. Later that day, Minto’s wife received a letter from an official (probably Dunlop Smith) which said that Minto’s decision was a “work of statesmanship” which prevented “sixty-two millions of people from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition”, ie it prevented Muslims (there were 62 million Muslims in India at this time, according to the 1901 census) from joining hands with the Congress.

Dunlop Smith wrote a letter to another British official the following day in which he said that “the [Muslims] declared to the [viceroy] that they would not join the Congress, [and] that they preferred appealing to their Ma Bap.” The Muslim League itself was founded ninety days after this deputation met Minto (though Muslim opposition to the Congress was decades old, spearheaded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan).

Tellingly, on 15 September 1909, Chief Justice Lawrence Jenkins wrote a letter to Morley, in which he said, “[F]rom all I hear...I incline to the view that the Muhammedan demand was prompted in the first instance from other sources, and has been skilfully engineered.”
There is, therefore, some evidence that the Muslim demand for special protection in elections was devised by colonial officials as part of a divide and rule policy. This was certainly the view taken by nationalist leaders and observers. On 4 October 1906, the Amrita Bazar Patrika wrote that this entire episode appeared “to be a got-up affair and fully engineered by interested officials”.

In 1923, a Khilafat leader and president of the Congress, Maulana Muhammad Ali, called the Muslim deputation’s visit to the viceroy a “command performance”, akin to a play being put up at the request of the royal family. These words were repeated by Vallabhbhai Patel in the Constituent Assembly in May 1949.

Another member of the Constituent Assembly, KM Munshi, called this an “unholy alliance” between “British rulers” and “the leaders of a section of the Muslims in North India”, and a “command performance” planned by Archbold and Dunlop Smith, “among others”.

Of course, it cannot be said that the colonial British administration manufactured Mohsin-ul-Mulk’s fears that Muslims would be left behind in the reformed legislative councils. However, colonial officials like the viceroy bent over backwards to accommodate the demands of the Simla deputation. In the words of historian BR Nanda, ‘[W]hat is surprising is not that the Muslim leaders should have wanted to lead a deputation and submit a memorial to the Viceroy, but that they should have been so warmly welcomed and given such wide-ranging assurances so hastily on constitutional issues of which the full implications were yet to be worked out by the Viceroy and his advisers.” 

Excerpted with permission from Republic Of Religion: The Rise And Fall Of Colonial Secularism In India, Abhinav Chandrachud, Penguin Viking.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. 

COMPASSIONATE CAPITALISM

Leila Janah Dies; Companies Hired Thousands of the Poor

Entrepreneur tapped world's 'biggest untapped resource'


By Bob Cronin, Newser Staff
Posted Feb 2, 2020


Leila Janah, far right, in a panel discussion in New York in 2015. (Stuart Ramson/AP Images for UN Foundation)


(NEWSER) – "Let’s build an export industry but only for poor women," Leila Janah said on a trip to West Africa, after seeing people growing nuts that can be used in skin-care products. "We can solve poverty while also making our skin better." That led to projects in which Janah, who died Jan. 24 in New York of cancer at age 37, employed thousands of poor people in India and Africa, the New York Times reports. The child of Indian immigrants, Janah had another epiphany in Mumbai about 15 years ago. Working as a management consultant at an outsourcing center, she realized the staff was educated and middle-class and didn't include anyone from the nearby slums. "Couldn't the people from the slums do some of this work?" she wondered. The minds of the world's poorest people are its "biggest untapped resource," Janah said. She put her belief that employment was the best route out of poverty to work.

One of the companies she started, Samasource Impact Sourcing, employs people in Kenya, Uganda and India, per the Wall Street Journal, on contracts with Microsoft, Google, Facebook and other companies. The workers handle tasks for artificial intelligence projects, such as tagging photos and choosing focal points for face-recognition software. "Leila had a vision about bringing the dignity of work and the promise of a living wage to the world’s most vulnerable," said the founder of an organization in Kenya that works with Samasource. "Young people began to see different possibilities for their futures." In a 2018 blog post, Janah wrote about the challenges her startups face. "We are fighting the battle of birthing a new venture," the social entrepreneur wrote, "while at the same time trying to show the world that we can inject a sense of justice into the business itself, rather than merely trying to rack up profit."

Trump Promises To ‘Look At’ Social Security And Medicare Cuts


Josh Israel January 23, 2020


Donald Trump ran on an absolute promise not to cut entitlement and social safety net programs. On Wednesday, he said he hopes to do just that — and soon.

Asked by CNBC if entitlement cuts were something he would consider, Trump said he would “toward the end of the year

“At the right time we will take a look at that,” he said. “You know that’s actually the easiest all things, if you look, because it’s such a low percentage.”

Mandatory programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security actually make up about half of the federal government’s spending each year.

BULLSHIT

Trump also dismissed concerns that he would follow through on past promises not to cut Medicare and other mandatory spending programs, claiming the economy under his administration was the world’s “hottest.”

“We also have assets that we never had. I mean we never had growth like that. We never had a consumer that was taking in through different means over $10,000 per family,” he claimed. “African American, Asian American, Hispanics are doing so incredibly. Best they’ve ever done. Black, best they’ve ever done. African American, the numbers are incredible.”

Where Trump admits to CNBC’s Joe Kernen this AM that he is looking to CUT Social Security and Medicare at the end of this year. https://t.co/Ce1mkhB2RA pic.twitter.com/pV6AuNAtcm— Jennifer Baty (@JenBaty) January 22, 2020

Trump’s has repeatedly promised not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, never once conditioning that promise on a good economy.

In 2011, Trump tweeted that a “robust growing economy is how to fix Social Security and Medicare—not cuts on Seniors.”

Throughout his 2016 campaign, he used it to differentiate himself from the rest of his party and even Democrats.

“Every Republican wants to do a big number of Social Security. They want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid,” Trump said in an April 2015 speech, not long before launching his White House bid. “And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years.”

In May 2015, he once again claimed, “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.”

And days later, he told the conservative Daily Signal, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.”

“Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do. I do,” he said.That June, upon launching his campaign, Trump boasted that he could save those programs — with no cuts — by getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.

“The Republicans who want to cut SS & Medicaid are wrong. A robust economy will Make America Great Again!” he tweeted in July that year.

Days before the 2016 election, Trump once again claimed that “Hillary Clinton is going to destroy your Social Security and Medicare. I am going to protect and save your Social Security and your Medicare.” Again, in December 2017, Trump’s then-legislative affairs director Marc Short reaffirmed that the campaign promise not to cut Medicare would be honored, though he embraced cuts to Medicaid to “protect the program.”

As recently as October 2018, Trump claimed that he alone could defend Medicare from attacks, tweeting, “Democrats will destroy your Medicare, and I will keep it healthy and well!” he said.

In addition to contradicting his past promises, Trump’s suggestion now, that the robust economy makes it easier to cut entitlements, also makes little sense.
While Medicaid provides healthcare to poorer Americans, Medicare and Social Security provide health and retirement income for older Americans of all economic levels.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

FROM THE RIGHT


President Donald Trump called Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders “a communist” and blasted other Democrats in an interview that aired Sunday before Super Bowl LIV.

Speaking with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump was asked to respond to some of the names of Democrats who are seeking their party’s presidential nomination. When asked about Sanders, Trump replied, “Well, I think he’s a communist. I mean you know, look. I think of communism when I think of Bernie. Now you could say socialist, but didn’t he get married in Moscow?”

EVER HELPFUL HANNITY

Hannity reminded the president that Sanders and his wife honeymooned in Moscow. 

(RELATED: Billionaire Democratic Donor Calls Bernie ‘A Communist’ And ‘A Disaster Zone’)

“I’m not knocking it, but I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist.”

But Trump allowed that Sanders is “true to what he believes,” which is more than the president could say about Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“You mention now, Elizabeth Warren. She’s not true to it. I call her fairy tale because everything is a fairy tale. That’s how Pocahontas got started. Everything is a fairy tale. This woman can’t tell the truth.”

As for fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who was just cleared to enter the next Democratic presidential debate when the Democratic National Committee changed its rules, Trump dismissed him as diminutive.


Democratic presidential candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks about affordable housing during a campaign event where he received an endorsement from District of Columbia Mayor, Muriel Bowser, on Jan. 30, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

“I just think of little. You know, now he wants a box for the debates to stand on. Okay, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong. You can be short. Why should he get a box to stand on, okay? He wants a box for the debates. Why should he be entitled to that? Really. Does that mean everyone else gets a box?”

Trump also went after the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter, who has been scrutinized for accepting a lucrative seat on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma, while his father was then-President Barack Obama’s point man in that country. Hunter has said his only regret for fulfilling that role is that people believe “ridiculous conspiracy theories.”

(RELATED: Trump Lawyer Pamela Bondi Delivers Indictment Of Joe And Hunter Biden’s Role In Ukraine)

“Where’s Hunter?” Trump asked.

“He made millions of dollars, he went from having no job, no income. He had nothing. As you know, he had a very sad experience in the military. He had nothing. To making millions and millions of dollars a year. Not just from Ukraine, but from China and from other countries. How can you do this? This is crooked as hell. What they did is very dishonest.”

DAVID KRAYDEN  DAILY CALLER 2/2/2020

ON BERNIE SANDERS

ON BLOOMBERG