INDIA

‘The Children Are Going to Work...’

Shubham Kumar | 14 Oct 2024

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A walk through Silimal village in Odisha brought home the troubling tragedy of tribal children dropping out of school and working as labour, even in other states.

A tribal village in Odisha where only women live. Young people are forced to do slave labour and small children are forced to do child labour. (Image Credit: Shubham Kumar)

“Bachche Kam Par Ja Rahe Hain…”

The title is a line from a poem, the meaning of which can be understood later in this article.

This writer has been engaged in research in Koraput, a corner of Odisha, for the past three months.

When one moves from Koraput toward Malkangiri, there’s a scary thrill, a feeling that the chest of the mountains has been ripped apart like a drain, and a thick coat of tar has been applied to it. On both sides of the road surrounded by mountain forests, groups of monkeys and, in a smaller number, transgenders can be seen standing -- awaiting restlessly, for food and some monetary help, respectively.

After walking 50 kilometers, there’s a block named Baipariguda. There is a crossroad; one road goes toward Malkangiri and the other toward Bastar/Sukma. The crossing is surrounded by mountains on all sides. An old man can be seen makes tea near the crossing. Being close to Bastar (Left Wing Extremism or LWE area), paramilitary jawans come here and for drinking tea. Usually, the jawans are in plain clothes.

A few days ago, the grandson of the old tea vendor (who studies in 7th grade) told this writer that his father used to live in the jungle. After further probing, one came to know that the old tea vendor was once a Naxalite, who later surrendered. Since then, the sight of a jawan drinking tea at that place reminded one of poet Devi Prasad Mishra: “Jo bedkhal ki tamtmae akal hai use aap kahte ho ki Naxal” hai (You call the infuriated mind of the dispossessed a Naxal.)

This writer has been living in two villages for the past one month, as part of a project to get children who have dropped out of school re-admitted and to investigate the reasons why these children are leaving school. In technical terms, we are working on dropout children.

Socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia had said that what is visible is the country. But the country that is visible in these Odisha tribal villages is living in a strange tragedy.

Headed to a village called Silimal on a two-wheeler, this writer was told by several people that many children of this village had stopped going to school. As an open truck passes, in which about 40 to 50 people are standing or sitting, many children, too, could be seen sitting squatting. It was evident that those on the truck were going to work as labourers.

Silimal is a tribal village. At first look, it comes across as a prosperous village.  When asked about children not going to school, the village head said he would take this writer to a tribal settlement.

As we approached the settlement, the smell of rotten liquor emanated from some distance. A woman, about 25 years old, wearing three or more nose rings, and without a blouse, was grinding something. Her 3-year-old son was playing next to her. Whenever the son cried, the woman would make the child drink some watery substance kept in a bowl.

The sarpanch (village head) whispered in broken Hindi, “She is feeding liquor to her child.” The woman got up, but before that, drank the remaining liquor in the bowl.

 When asked why her two children did not go to school, the woman replied in Odiya, which one could understand from her gestures as, “We don't need education, we need bread.”

The sarpanch helps translate what she said into Hindi. She said, “I have a 15-year-old daughter who works in the fields and takes care of the children. This time the contractor has taken my 14-year-old son out for Rs.1,800/month.”

When asked where her minor son had gone to earn money, the woman said she did not know.

The sarpanch added, “To tell you the truth, the boys from here go to Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. Coconut is cultivated in abundance there; small children can easily climb coconut trees due to their low weight and can also load and board coconuts very easily. Apart from this, many companies in Visakhapatnam and Hyderabad make these children work for their companies, such as biscuit packing, picking empty water or liquor bottles, and working in cashew factories.”

This remined one of a smuggling case in Kalahandi in July 1985. A woman there had given away her 14-year-old child for just Rs 40. The then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Kalahandi. But at the same time, the then Chief Minister of Odisha, J. B. Patnaik, gave a shocking statement in an interview. He said there was an “old tradition of selling children” in some tribal areas of western Odisha.

The question is whether this tradition has ended. Or has its character changed?

The smell of alcohol was present everywhere in that village. No man or boy was visible anywhere. A strange kind of dead silence pervaded the village. Pani-bhaat (rice water) and hand-made alcohol are the main foods here.

Later, a teacher said only one child from this village had attended school till date, and there are many such villages in the tribal areas of Odisha where children are never able to go to school. He smiled and added that perhaps “government food” (mid-day meal) was not able to satisfy their hunger.

I drove my two-wheeler out that tribal town and reach the road, where life was running at the same pace as every day, with vehicles plying back and forth, unaware of the nearby tribal village. A slogan written on the wall of a school -- Sab Padhenge, Sab Badhenge– catches attention. This, when there are many villages in the country where no one is studying.

This article ends with same line from the poem with which it started:

“On the fog-covered road, (Kohare se dhaki sadak par)

children are going to work. (bachhe kam par ja rhe hain)

Early in the morning, children are going to work. (subah subah bachhe kam par ja rhe hain)

This is the most terrifying line of our times. (hamare samay ki sabse bhyanak pankti hain yah)

It is terrifying to write it like a description. (bhayanak hai ese vivran ki tarah likha jana)

It should be written as a question. (likha jana chahiye ese sawal ki tarah)….

The writer studied in Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, and is currently working as a fellow in Odisha.

Imperialist Expansion, Wars and Neo-Fascism

Prabhat Patnaik | 12 Oct 2024

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  GAZA SCHOOL MASSACRE

  
  

Imposition of a neo-liberal economic order and engaging in wars

The “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing, of course, in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the form of a competitive struggle between rival finance capitals that speedily completed the partitioning of the world, leaving no “empty spaces”; only a repartitioning of the world was thenceforth possible, through wars among rival financial oligarchies. The wars that were actually unleashed, however, led to a weakening of imperialism and the splitting off of parts of the world from its hegemony, through socialist revolutions and the process of decolonisation that socialism helped to usher in.

The further development of the centralisation of capital, leading to its consolidation, has on the one hand muted inter-imperialist rivalry, since capital now wants the entire world, not broken up into spheres of influence of rival powers, as the domain for its unrestricted movement. On the other hand, it has also led to an attempt on the part of now-united imperialism to reassert its hegemony over the territories that had broken off from it earlier.

The two weapons that imperialism uses for this latter objective are: the imposition of a neo-liberal order on the world that essentially negates the effects of decolonisation, and the unleashing of wars where the first weapon alone does not suffice for its purpose.

The neo-liberal regime has meant a weakening of the working class everywhere. In the advanced countries it has placed before the workers the threat of relocation to lower-wage Third World countries saddled with vast labour reserves, because of which their wages have stagnated.

In the Third World countries, such relocation has not reduced the relative size of the labour reserves, because of which the real wages have stagnated there too. Thus, while the vector of real wages across the world has stagnated, labour productivities have increased everywhere (which, after, all is the reason for the relative size of Third World labour reserves not decreasing), causing a rise in the share of economic surplus both for the world economy as a whole as well as in individual countries.

This has not only brought about a sharp rise in economic inequality (and over much of the Third World even an increase in the proportion of the population suffering from absolute nutritional deprivation), but precisely for that reason a tendency toward over-production (since the working people consume a larger proportion of their incomes than those living off the surplus).

The standard Keynesian remedy for over-production, namely larger government spending, does not work under the neo-liberal regime, since the two possible ways in which such spending has to be financed, if it is to boost aggregate demand, viz. a larger fiscal deficit or larger taxation of the rich, are both ruled out under this regime. Both are anathema for finance capital and the nation-state confronted with globalised finance capital that can leave its shores at the drop of a hat, must kow-tow to the caprices of such finance capital.

With this tendency toward over-production, immanent in neo-liberal capitalism, pushing the world economy toward stagnation, there has been an upsurge of neo-fascism, with corporate capital tending to ally itself with neo-fascist elements who provide a diversionary discourse. This discourse is concerned not with the material conditions of life, but with generating hatred against some hapless religious or ethnic minority that is portrayed as the “other”.

Neo-fascist elements have captured power in some countries, and are waiting in the wings in others, though the journey from their capturing power within a liberal democracy to building a fascist state remains a more or less prolonged one.

But even neo-fascist elements being in power within a country does not overcome this tendency toward over-production: as the State remains a nation-state facing globally-mobile finance, its incapacity, even under a neo-fascist government, to increase aggregate demand through government spending that is financed either by a larger fiscal deficit or by taxes on the rich, remains as before.

It may be asked: why should the blame for this inability on the part of the nation-state to counter the tendency toward stagnation, and hence the ascendancy of neo-fascism, be laid at the door of imperialism? The simple answer is that any attempt on the part of any nation to delink itself from the vortex of global finance and use the State to boost demand would be met with the imposition of economic sanctions by the phalanx of imperial states, led by the United States. The first weapon used by imperialism to reassert its hegemony, in short, leads to acute misery for the people everywhere and a neo-fascist denouement.

The second way of reasserting its hegemony over parts of the world that had split off, which is through wars, is now pushing the world towards a catastrophe. Both the two wars that are going on at present are promoted and sustained by imperialism and have the potential to escalate to nuclear confrontations.

Take the Ukraine War first. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev was given the assurance that there would be no expansion of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) eastward. But NATO did expand eastward right up to Ukraine. Ukraine itself did not want to join NATO; its duly-elected president Viktor Yanukovich, who was opposed to any such idea, was ousted in a coup, engineered under the supervision of US official Victoria Nuland, that brought in to government supporters of Stepan Bandera who had collaborated with Hitler’s troops during the Second World War. The new government not only expressed a desire to join NATO but also started a conflict with the Russian-speaking Donbas region that claimed thousands of lives before Russia intervened.

Let us ask the question that is a litmus test in these matters: who stands for a peace agreement in the Ukraine conflict and who opposes it? The Minsk Agreement which had been reached between Russia and Ukraine with the help of France and Germany was torpedoed by the US and Britain, with Boris Johnson, the then British Prime Minister, even flying down to Kiev to dissuade Ukraine from accepting it.

And lest it be thought that different imperialist powers were speaking in different voices, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor of that time, has now admitted that the Minsk Agreement was a ruse merely to buy time for Ukraine until it became war-ready.

What indubitably stands out is that the war in Ukraine is basically a means of bringing Russia under the hegemony of imperialism, which had been the imperialist project after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which almost got accomplished under the presidentship of Boris Yeltsin.

Now take the other war, unleashed with staggering brutality and ruthlessness by Israel against the Palestinian people and now against Lebanon. Total backing for Israel by US imperialism appears at first sight to be a reflection of the strength of the Zionist lobby in American politics, rather than of any imperialist plans per se. This impression, however, is erroneous. Imperialism is not just complicit in Israeli “settler colonialism”, for promoting which Israel is carrying out a genocide today and preparing for mass ethnic cleansing tomorrow; its project is to control the entire region via Israel.

Here again the litmus test is: who stands in the way of peace today? The US formally accepts a “two-State” solution, but every time the proposal to accept Palestine as the 194th member-state of the United Nations has come up in the General Assembly, which would be the first step toward implementing the “two-State” solution, the US has voted against it; clearly it would veto such a move in the Security Council. Its support for an authentic “two-State” solution therefore is a sham.

What is more, whenever some critical point is reached in truce negotiations between Israel and its opponents, whether Ismael Hanieh or Hassan Nasrallah, these leaders are assassinated by Israel. The negotiations for truce, in short, are again just a sham as far as Israel is concerned; and US imperialism is clearly complicit in this charade.

Israel’s own settler colonialism jells with the role earmarked for it by US imperialism, of being the local gendarme of imperialism. And with the war escalating, the danger of a nuclear confrontation looms larger every day.

I mentioned that the imposition of a neo-liberal economic order and engaging in wars were the two weapons used by the now-united imperialism to reassert its hegemony. But if one is leading to neo-fascism, the other is pushing mankind toward a catastrophe.

Nobel laureate Han Kang drives readers to bookstores, online and offline

Korean bookstore websites experienced service outages and connection delays as she topped real-time bestseller lists.

ANN | The Korea Herald
14 Oct, 2024

Major bookstores in South Korea are experiencing a surge in sales of all of Han Kang’s works following the announcement of her Nobel Prize in literature.

On Friday morning at Kyobo Bookstore in Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, people had lined up in front of the branch before it opened. Shortly after business began at 9:30am, Han’s books were already sold out, and the special display set up to commemorate the award from the day before was empty.

By around 10:30am that day, the shelves had been restocked with Han’s books. The area in front of the display, as well as outside the bookstore, was bustling with people eager to purchase her works.

The websites of major bookstores such as Kyobo Bookstore and Yes24 even experienced service outages and connection delays.

On the real-time bestseller lists of Kyobo Bookstore and Yes24, Han Kang was perched in the respective top spots.

More than 130,000 copies of the Nobel laureate’s works had already been sold across two platforms in less than half a day. A majority of the available inventory was exhausted due to the surge in orders, leading to most of her books to be sold on backorder.

According to data from Yes24, all top 10 spots on the real-time bestseller list were occupied by Han Kang immediately following the recent Nobel Prize announcement. Sales of her major works saw significant increases, with Human Acts rising 784 times, The Vegetarian increasing 696 times and We Do Not Part soaring 3,422 times compared to the day before the award announcement.

Additionally, as of Friday, the day after the award was announced, five of Han Kang’s works ranked within the top 10 in the overall bestseller list. Yes24’s bestseller list is a ranking that considers data of the previous seven days. The explosive sales in just a few hours pushed her books on to the weekly bestseller list.

In the real-time bestseller list of Kyobo Bookstore, her landmark The Vegetarian was followed by her other works in the second to ninth spots: Human Acts, We Do Not Part, The White Book, Greek Lessons, I Put the Evening in the Drawer, The Vegetarian (Revised Edition), Human Acts (E-book), and The Essentials: Han Kang.

Originally published in Dawn, October 14th, 2024

BOOK REVIEW

NON-FICTION: HUBRIS AND MISCALCULATION

Ahmad Faruqui 

Published October 13, 2024

DAWN

The Achilles Trap
By Steve Coll
Penguin
ISBN: 978-0525562269
576pp.

The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. In The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of nine books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the decisions that led to the war.

The book is based on more than 100 interviews with several individuals who had first-hand involvement in the invasion of Iraq and transcripts of tape recordings made by the regime of Saddam Hussain. This allows Coll to take a deep dive into the minds of the two men who made the war possible: US President George W. Bush and Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.


The book is a searing indictment of how Saddam governed Iraq and an even bigger indictment of Bush. Not only were some of George W.’s senior advisers opposed to the war, so also was the former President George H.W. Bush, his father. The elder Bush expressed his opposition via his former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who penned an editorial, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam’ in the Wall Street Journal.

Coll concludes that “The president careered toward an unnecessary war… based on unabashed fear-mongering.” None of Iraq’s neighbours wanted the US to invade Iraq, worried that it would destabilise the region.

The US did not have any evidence that Iraq had ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and Saddam assumed the CIA knew that and thus the US was unlikely to attack Iraq. The book is entitled The Achilles Trap because both sides assumed the other had a fatal weakness, which did not exist.

Washington assumed that Saddam did not have the guts to fight the US. Saddam assumed that the US would never attack Iraq because it did not have the guts to incur large-scale battlefield casualties: “Saddam thought of the CIA as all-knowing. This contributed to his misunderstandings of America, which were at least as profound as America’s misunderstandings of him.”

The CIA’s record in Iraq after 1991 “was mostly one of operational and analytical calamities.” Even within the agency, the Iraq Operations Group was known as “the ‘House of Broken Toys’.” Of course, that did not stop the CIA from being ruthless. As one observer put it, the agency was “completely prepared to burn down your house to light a cigarette.”

Bush just wanted to get rid of Saddam. When his secretary of state presented some made-up evidence on WMDs to the UN, he was met with scepticism. Iraq had no connection with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, yet the US thought it would carry out an even deadlier attack against the US.

Almost to the very end, citing new evidence, the book shows that the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was opposed to the invasion. But Bush was determined to attack Iraq to implement regime change, to turn Iraq into a Western-style democracy.

Saddam comes across as a dual-faced man wallowing in hubris. On the one hand, he had created an extensive social/welfare system within Iraq. On the other hand, he had created an equal system of terror, directed at his political opponents. If anyone dared speak against him, they could be arrested, tortured and executed within a matter of days. He did not have the slightest qualms in killing nearly 200,000 Kurds.

Soon after he came to power in 1979, Saddam plunged Iraq into a senseless war against Iran. It lasted for eight years and cost $500 billion. It left Iraq saddled with a debt of $80 billion, of which $35 billion was owed to Saudi Arabia and $10 billion to Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides.

US troops pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad | Reuters

Unable to repay the debt, Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The US failed to anticipate Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but neither did Saddam realise that the invasion would turn the world against him. After the US captured him, Saddam left his US investigators befuddled by saying: “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”

Equally naïve was the king of Saudi Arabia. King Fahd knew that the presence of American and European troops on Saudi soil would upset many Saudis and the clergy. But under US pressure, he caved in. Later, Osama bin Laden would capitalise on anti-Saudi sentiments to launch the 9/11 attacks. As shown in the book by Nelly Lahoud, The Bin Laden Papers, he did not expect the US would invade the Muslim world. He thought the US would withdraw from the region.

In March 2003, when the US finally attacked Iraq, Saddam invoked the “Mother of all Battles” metaphor and thought he would defeat “the treacherous criminal Bush … because this is a fight between good and evil.” He also thought the Iraqi army would go underground and fight a guerilla war on his behalf.

But there was no love lost between the conscripts and the dictator. After the US dropped 150,000 “dumb” gravity bombs, killing some 10-12,000 Iraqi soldiers, most surviving soldiers simply took off their uniforms and went home.

The book also paints a damning picture of other actors in the tragedy. King Hussein of Jordan had served as America’s lackey in the Arab world. He fancifully thought that “by helping engineer a regime change in Baghdad, he might somehow restore his own extended family’s royal rule in Iraq.”

Earlier, in 1996, Madeleine Albright, the former US ambassador to the UN, said that even though the economic sanctions imposed by the US after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had killed 500,000 Iraqi children, the price was worth it.

In April 2003, Scott McLaughlin, the former weapons inspector in Iraq and now a CIA analyst, cross-examined the head of Iraq’s nuclear programme, Jafar Dhia Jafar, and said: “We made a terrible mistake.” But that did not slow down the US invasion of Iraq, which would then turn into a multi-year occupation. More than 200,000 Iraqi civilians eventually died. More than 4,400 US servicemen died and more than 30,000 were wounded.

Early on, when Iraq was looking for nuclear weapons, its leaders would often cite the example of Pakistan, which they believed had moved to acquire a bomb to deter and balance India. An Iraqi scientist said that Iraq was at least as advanced as Pakistan and should be able to do it.

Dr A.Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, sensed an opportunity and reached out to Iraq with an offer of assistance that was spurned by Iraq, according Coll. Meanwhile, Israel, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha without the knowledge, let alone the permission, of the US.

There are several lessons to be learned from the tragic history of the Iraq War, which this book vividly brings out. First, wars, instead of solving problems, create more problems. Second, wars are often based on faulty assumptions. Third, military superiority does not guarantee victory. Fourth, the US understands the Middle East even less than the UK, which colonised the region for decades. Finally, dictators, who rule through fear, delude themselves into believing that the population would rise to support them when a war breaks out.

The book leaves some big questions unanswered, however. How competent is US intelligence about other parts of the globe, given how incompetent it was about Iraq? When will the US ever learn any lessons from the wars it wages around the globe? Is it necessary to spend nearly a trillion dollars on the US military, which exceeds the sum of the next 10 countries combined? Would that money not be better spent on human, social and economic development of the US?

Even despite these unanswered questions, the book is a great read for anyone with a serious interest in US foreign policy. It will also interest the general reader, since it reads like a thriller.

The reviewer is the author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan:
The Price of Strategic Myopia.
X: @ahmadfaruqui

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024

NON-FICTION: FISK’S FINAL WORDS

Sahar Shehryar 

Published September 22, 2024

DAWN




Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Fourth Estate
ISBN: 978-0007255481
672pp.

Robert Fisk’s book Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East was published posthumously and is a reminder of the strength and courage of his voice and words, not only as a journalist but also as a historian.

In the Night Of Power, Fisk ponders over the 35 years he spent as a Middle East correspondent for The Independent, witnessing an almost Dante’s Inferno-level of darkness, bloodshed and tragedy wrought upon that part of the world. His constant struggle to stay true to what he saw underlies all his writing, as he acknowledges, “Our own cowardice, the manufacture of deceit, the safe, formulaic expressions used to mask the reality of this tragic place, have turned us journalists into blood-soaked brothers of the politicians who go to war.”

That is who he was, a journalist who reported from the dangerous side, the ‘other’ side.

It would be convenient to qualify this book as a memoir of an award-winning journalist reflecting upon events that he covered, but it is so much more than that. Night Of Power outlines the cataclysmic events of post-invasion Iraq and its impact on the Middle East as a whole. Fisk navigates his way through a country where, “Killings were now like heartbeats in Iraq”, witnessing the callousness of the occupiers who showed wanton disregard for the path of destruction they paved on their way to their ‘Emerald Cities’, the green zones they allocated themselves.

Journalist Robert Fisk’s posthumously published book about the Middle East is an analysis of his decades of reporting from that part of the world and a reminder of the power his words wielded

He takes stock: the bodies that pile up because of the shootings, bomb blasts, private contractors who kill with a blood lust that would rival the Saddam-era secret police. Then there are the diseases and cancers left behind, children born with deformities, stillbirths, birth defects, a result of the use of phosphorus shells and other uranium-laced weapons. Fisk is matter of fact; he does not allow his pain to distract him from his purpose. He writes, “You go on a story in a war and you’re there to report on the atrocity, to speak for the dead, but not to cry.”

It will be pertinent to mention here that Robert Fisk was perhaps one of the most significant voices of our time. His ability to look past innate biases and identify the context in which events occur has always been immaculate. In the chapter ‘Walking on Windows’, he reminds us of the plague that was Blackwater and other private defence contractors. He recorded their actions with meticulous detail, the contempt and arrogance they showed towards the Iraqis and the shooting down of innocent people with complete impunity.

He reminds us that, “like all wars…[the Iraq war’s] reasons [were] fraudulent, its occupation ferocious, its ‘victors’ ever more cruel in responding to the insurgency that overwhelmed them…” Mercenary casualties were not included in the military fatality/injury lists put out by occupation authorities.

The duplicity is enraging and, as one continues to read the book, Fisk’s own anger is very much tangible. With meticulous detail, he deconstructs the ‘truths’ we have been fed by the media and by our governments and politicians. Language is weaponised, as he illustrates how mainstream Western media has toed the line when it comes to ‘selling’ the Iraq invasion to the public.

Later, when news of torture cells, black sites, mercenaries, and terrifying rebellions began creeping into headlines, many prominent newspapers provided space for advocacy of war crimes that were being committed by occupation soldiers, under the pretext that Saddam’s torturers were attacking US troops. Even today, mainstream media stands accused of promoting a one-sided narrative and working to drown Palestinian voices as the assault on Gaza continues.

Robert Fisk | AP

Mainstream media has never been less reliable and, as governments rush to curtail free speech, we are reminded by Fisk that, “I always believed that those who suffered on the ‘other’ side deserved to have their story told, that Western powers should not have the press corps as their foot-soldiers.”

Fisk was that rare journalist who had the ability to comprehend the enormity of what he was witnessing, stepping back and placing it into context. In this book, he lays it out, calling the Iraq invasion for what it was, a “vast and lamentable occupation.” He makes it clear though that, while Britain and the US have consistently denied that this was also an ‘oil-grab’, let’s be abundantly clear: “if the major export of Iraq had been beetroot, did anyone believe the American 82nd Airborne would really have gone to Fallujah and Mosul?”

Fisk’s ability to use words that cut like the sword of a samurai is, frankly, inimitable. He credits author and activist Naomi Klein for being one of the first to recognise “the boldest attempt at crisis exploration” in Iraq by the US and Britain, as they prepared to re-organise the country’s oil exports.

Fisk is detailed and judicious in his condemnation of the many ‘client states’ of the West, the despots and dictators of the Middle East and South Asia. He explains in great depth how the Middle East has been carved up and divided amongst authoritarian figures who are in a constant state of war with their own citizens. They are tolerated, armed even, and oftentimes ignored for their crimes by the ‘upright, civilised’ world for as long as they maintain a status quo for the US and its allies.

He writes of how the depravity of the Assads, Saddams and Mobaraks birthed a network of ruthless secret police and ‘elite’ army units that work within the shadows, stoking the fires of sectarianism, weaponising religion and crushing even a whisper of dissent. And yet, all dictators are not created equal. The West decides who becomes a liability and when. In the case of Saddam, it was the invasion of Kuwait and not his feared torture cells or use of chemical weapons against fellow Iraqis that made him unacceptable.

Night of Power is a testimony from one of the most prominent journalists of our time. Robert Fisk had called the Arab world home for more than 40 years and so stands as a giant among his peers. One of the first witnesses of history in the making, he was an analyst and interpreter par excellence. Each chapter in this book looks back on moments in history that have shaped the Middle East in one way or the other.

Fisk’s words are clinical and succinct, yet there is heartbreak and pain as he faces the bloody abyss that is the Middle East at the hands of its own leaders and the West. Fisk reminds the reader that this book is not about him, it is not a memoir, instead it is a cautionary tale, a tragedy and the story of betrayal and deceit. He tells the story as it stands, regardless of consequences.

If Robert Fisk were alive today, I wonder what he would report when confronted by the more than 40,000 innocent civilians viciously killed in Gaza and the tens of thousands more buried under the rubble since October 7, 2023? What would Fisk think after seeing photographs of the Haditha Massacre that were acquired and published by The New Yorker on August 28, 2024, showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage carried out by US Marines.

Fisk had covered the Haditha atrocity extensively in 2005, where he asked his readers if this could be the “tip of the mass grave?” (It is pertinent to note that not a single perpetrator spent a day in prison.) How would he respond to the horrific images coming from Gaza that flood our social media timelines? How would he have reported on the brave young men and women studying in high profile universities scattered across the Western world, as they risked their futures to set up encampments in protest for a free Palestine, for an end to the siege that he and many others had reported on and that imprisons the people of Gaza?

It is difficult to read when he writes about the Nakba, and the pain behind his words is difficult to hide. “Keys must always be the symbol of the Palestinian Nakba,” he writes. “That terrible last turning of the lock of those front doors. Goodbye — only for a few days.”

Simple words, but they complete the job and, like a dagger, strike the heart of their reader. This was the power of the pen yielded by Robert Fisk.

The reviewer is a freelance writer with a background in law and literature. X: @ShehryarSahar

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 22nd, 2024

COLUMN: THE FIRE OF LUCKNOW

Harris Khalique 

Published October 13, 2024


Out of the three principal centres of Indo-Persian civilisation that evolved from a fusion of multiple Vedic and Arabo-Persian cultures over centuries, Delhi and Lahore continue to be celebrated, while Lucknow is both celebrated and mourned. During the last millennium, all these cities enjoyed their share of primacy, glory, splendour and opulence, but also experienced bloodletting, conquests, loot and plunder.

Delhi and Lahore regained their significance and survived during and in the aftermath of colonialism. Lucknow could never fully recover from the colonial shock — perhaps also paying the price for being one of the fiercest battle grounds during the 1857 War of Independence against the British.

The region comprising Awadh, which includes Lucknow, is a part of the state of Uttar Pradesh (which was earlier called United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) created during the British Raj. Awadh has a legendary religious and intellectual significance in Indian history. But compared to Lucknow, the cities of Delhi and Lahore had longer histories, bigger cosmopolitan spaces and wider cultural markers to draw upon.

Lucknow had one long period of glory, which was decimated by the British. That period spanned from 1722 to 1856 when Lucknow, which earlier was the capital of the Mughal province of Awadh, became Awadh as a local Indian sultanate. Those 134 years of Awadh inscribed indelible marks on South Asian culture and history.

In post-Independence India, the city remains the capital city of the state of Uttar Pradesh but efforts to erase the historically inclusive and secular cultural milieu of Lucknow continued by constantly invoking communalism, not only incrementally but also systematically. For Lucknow, the journey from Wajid Ali Shah to Yogi Aditya Nath must have been excruciatingly painful and terribly tedious.

In the 19th century, the British particularly vilified three local rulers in India. They humiliated Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi, the emperor whose Mughal empire had shrunk to a city but whose two sons and eldest grandson had to be killed to establish British supremacy. The second ruler was Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab, who had contained the British to the left bank of the Sutlej river until he was alive. It was only 10 years after the death of the maharaja, in 1849, that Punjab could be annexed by the British East India Company.

The third ruler who was ridiculed was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, whose state was indomitable in terms of both society and culture. He was a musician par excellence, a fine poet, a benevolent ruler and quite popular among his subjects. His wife, Hazrat Mahal, played a significant role in the 1857 War of Independence, after the Nawab had been exiled from Awadh.

The British and those local writers who were inspired by their brush with European modernism or those who decided to collaborate with the new colonial rulers, portrayed the emperor, the maharaja and the nawab as decadent, debauched, devious and disingenuous.

Since the victor writes the history of the vanquished, the three local Indian rulers still hold the same reputation in the imagination of not all but many native South Asians today that was propagated by the British. This remains the case even after alternative accounts of history have been made available by a range of Western and South Asian historians and writers over the last many years — beginning from Bari Alig’s seminal work Company Ki Hakoomat [The Rule of the Company], first published from Lahore in 1937.

This year, Jhelum Book Corner has published an incredible tale of Lucknow in two large volumes. It is a meticulously organised collection of writings by the late Maulana Muhammad Baqar Shams. His grandson, Vaqar Haider, who is now based in New York, has painstakingly collected, chronicled and compiled the two volumes of Shams’ writings, titled Dastan-i-Lucknow [The Lucknow Story] and Dabistan-i-Lucknow [The Lucknow School]. From ancient history to pre-Sultanate days to the rule of the nawabs in the Sultanate of Avadh to the British Raj followed by independence, the collections bring us to the 1980s.

Written in an idiomatic and lucid language, these two volumes bring together incredible details of the Awadhi habitat with Lucknow at the centre. Nothing seems to have been missed in the areas of knowledge, sociology, culture, art or sports. Scholars and their scholarship, religious schools of thought and their leaders, physicians, traders and businesspersons, artisans, artists, poets, linguists, writers, musicians, academics, theatre and its performers and jesters etc, are not only introduced to the reader, their contribution and skills are also mentioned and commented upon. There are some other good works but Shams has written the most comprehensive social history of Lucknow.

In English, the books on Lucknow’s art, culture, music, history, political economy and architecture that are worth looking at, in my opinion, include King Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh (two volumes) by Mirza Ali Azhar, published in 1982 by the Royal Book Company in Karachi, Amaresh Misra’s Lucknow: Fire of Grace — The Story of its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath, first published in 1998 by Harper Collins Publishers India, and a coffee table book on the city’s history and architecture, Lucknow: City of Illusion, edited by Rosie Llewllyn-Jones under the supervision of Ebrahim Alkazi and published by Prestel in 2006.

The fire of grace is perhaps now out but it has left some glowing embers behind.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024

COLUMN: HUMANISING THROUGH CULTURE

From InpaperMagazine

Published September 30, 2024

During the 1970s and 1980s, some popular slogans among politically charged progressive students in Pakistan included ‘Jamhooriyat ke teen nishaan/ Talaba, mazdoor aur kisaan [The three markers of democracy/ Students, labour and peasants]’ and ‘Loot khasoot ke raj ko badlo/ Chehray nahin samaaj ko badlo [Change the system of loot and plunder/ Don’t change faces, change the order].’ In Urdu, these slogans rhyme perfectly well.

Those were the times when the struggles for democracy and economic justice were waged in unison by students, labour movements, journalist federations and artists and writers’ associations. The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) came about in the early 1980s to challenge the anti-women laws that were enacted under Gen Zia’s martial rule and then to continue the struggle for the realisation of women’s fundamental rights, leading to their empowerment. WAF joined the existing fold of labour and student activists.

We saw a sharp decline in this unity between different class and identity movements after trade unions were suffocated to the level that now less than two percent of our labour is left with collective bargaining agency. Student unions were banned during the same martial rule and journalists and writers were systematically divided within their ranks.


Consequently, the link between literary writers and artists, journalists, labour and students became weaker and weaker. In present times, there is a demonstrated desire in some quarters to strengthen that link, but it still needs a lot of painstaking effort.

Among the very few activists of the old school left from the 1970s and 1980s who remain equally active now, one prominent name is that of Akram Kaimkhani. He was a left-wing student leader in Karachi and a pro-democracy activist after Gen Zia’s coup d’etat.

Kaimkhani was born in Tharparkar and moved to Karachi with his parents at a young age. He studied at Jamia Millia College, Malir, and the University of Karachi. Kaimkhani’s polio-affected leg, which limited his ability to run away in case of a police raid, neither had an effect on his own fervour nor inspired any sympathy in the hearts of the martial law operatives, who tortured him and kept him in prison.

After getting political asylum in the UK, Kaimkhani worked hard to make ends meet. Over the years, he managed to raise his family in a decent, respectable way. Now in his mid-60s, he continues to work long hours to run his household with dignity. All along, nothing could stop him from contributing to just political and social causes in Pakistan and the UK, and towards peace and development in the South Asian region.

From supporting struggles for democracy and economic justice to being a key volunteer for organisations such as the Edhi Foundation in London, he has invested his time, energy and finances beyond the extent of any normal person. Kaimkhani was a part of street politics and also remained a close confidante of both Mairaj Mohammed Khan and Benazir Bhutto, among other political leaders from Pakistan.

Some years ago, Kaimkhani realised that he should focus more of his energies towards promoting art, culture and literature, because they have the innate ability to humanise people of different ilks, which confrontational politics can seldom do. He had always been committed to promoting a culture of dialogue to strengthen democracy and the larger wellbeing of society.

Therefore, he spearheaded the establishment of the Faiz Foundation Trust, along with his friends from the Pakistani diaspora in the UK. They organised some outstanding cultural and literary events in pre-Covid 19 years, and brought together people from different countries, who were provided an opportunity to further the dialogue and deliberate upon issues that common people in South Asia and the developing world face.

Recently, Kaimkhani, along with podcaster Yousuf Abraham, chartered accountant Anjum Raza and physician Dr Umar Daraz mobilised political workers, artists, writers, journalists, culture aficionados and professionals of South Asian origin, along with his other British comrades, to establish the Voices of South Asian Art and Literature (VSAAL) in London.

VSAAL, after coming into being, took only a few months to organise, on September 14, the First South Asian Festival at the prestigious Bloomsbury Theatre in the heart of London, which I too attended. The Bloomsbury Theatre was filled to capacity for the event. Leading Indian dance and theatre curator and promoter Mira Misra Kaushik managed the event.

There was a panel discussion on the composite heritage of South Asian languages, involving writer Jami Chandio, British-Italian academic Prof Francesca Orsin and poet Uruj Asif. It was candid and sharp. Veteran journalist and trade unionist Mazhar Abbas spoke to another accomplished journalist and broadcaster Javed Soomro on current politics, journalism and censorship in South Asia.

There was a discussion led by British-Indian broadcaster Pervaiz Alam on a book by Dr Salman Akhtar, which does a psycho-literary analysis of four master poets Akhtar is related to — Muztar Khairabadi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Javed Akhtar and Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz. There was a launch of a book of poetry by Dr Razi Mohammed. Author and lawyer Saif Mehmood from Delhi made an exquisite presentation on Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir and Bangla poet Qazi Nazrul Islam.

A session was dedicated to veteran journalist, filmmaker, author and former secretary-general of the Progressive Writers Association, Hameed Akhtar, to mark his 100th birth anniversary. Leading actor (and Akhtar’s daughter) Saba Hameed and poet Iftikhar Arif recounted their memories of the times when Hameed Akhtar lived a life with pure ideological commitment and spent three terms in prison. Saba Hameed also read excerpts from her father’s witty pen portrait, written by himself.

The conversations on languages, literature and culture were followed by music performances of singers from South Asia. The mood in the crowd confirmed that it is the composite South Asian cultural heritage that unifies us across our ideological divides. If pursued consistently, it can perhaps make feuding states in the region shed their egos and come together for the sake of common people and their long-lasting prosperity.

The columnist is a poet and essayist. His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 29th, 2024