[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy in Karachi

[Vedavati Jogi]

Dear All,
I am thrilled to know that 
'contact between  sections of the armed forces and the Hindutva 'Parivar' is not  
exactly a figure of fancy' .
 
Yes ! This is the need of the hour! 
Jay ho Fauji Bhai!
Vedavati

--- On Wed, 13/5/09, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net> wrote:


From: Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy in Karachi
To: "Pawan Durani" <pawan.durani at gmail.com>
Cc: "reader-list at sarai.net list" <>
Date: Wednesday, 13 May, 2009, 2:38 PM


Dear All,

The statement attributed to Ms. Roy comes from a reporters summary in  
the Dawn newspaper of her interactions at the Karachi Womens Action  
Forum meeting. While its exact contents do need to be verified, the  
fact that there is a synergy between the broader Hindutva  
'Parivar' (Family) and sections of the armed forces in India (just as  
there is between Islamists and broad sections of the military  
estabishment in Pakistan, which the report does refer to) should not  
in itself be seen as surprising.

Perhaps memories are short, but the 'Abhinav Bharat' episode and the  
Malegaon Blast case, in which a serving miiitary intelligence officer  
Col. S.P. Purohit is one of the accused (and whose involvement in the  
attack on the Samjhauta Train to Pakistan is also under  
invesitgation) is an indication of the fact that contact between  
sections of the armed forces and the Hindutva 'Parivar' is not  
exactly a figure of fancy. As of now, the murky realities of the  
Malegaon case suggests that we only know the tip of an iceberg.

And finally, is there a problem in spelling a person's name as it  
should be spelled, or has Pawan Durani been somehow rendered  
incapable of such a simple task? Have we come to such a pass that  
along with everything else, this list will now also have to undertake  
the burden of conducting object lessons in orthography and spelling?

regards,

Shuddha




On 13-May-09, at 11:27 AM, Pawan Durani wrote:

> I am surprised ....."RSS has inflitrated the Indian  
> Army" ........What are the basis on which such a general statement  
> is made by Aran-Dhat-Tri-Ki-Roy ?
>
> Pawan
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta  
> <shuddha at sarai.net> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> The Delhi based writer Arundhati Roy has recently been in Karachi,
> Pakistan at the invitation of civil society organizations and womens
> rights groups. Here are two reports from Dawn, a Karachi based daily,
> about meetings she attended (with an organization titled 'Womens
> Action Forum') and interactions she had. I hope that they will be of
> interest to people on the list.
>
> regards,
>
> Shuddha
> ------------------------------
> 1.
>
> Arundhati Roy and the WAF
> By Zubeida Mustafa
> Wednesday, 13 May, 2009
> http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/
> pakistan/11-arundhati-roy-and-the-waf--02
>
> ‘WOMEN to reclaim public spaces: a programme of defiance and
> resistance.’ That is how the Women’s Action Forum defined the meeting
> it held last Friday to mobilise public opinion against extremism.
>
> Although WAF’s concern to protect the space women have created in the
> public mainstream has been on its agenda for some time, this goal has
> acquired urgency in the wake of the events in Swat. The Nizam-i-Adl
> Regulation in Malakand Division has brought people face to face with
> the ugly reality of the Talibanisation phenomenon in the rural
> backwaters as well as in modern urban centres.
>
> The Karachi meeting was well-attended by WAF’s standards. It is not
> easy to mobilise women for any cause in this city of multiple
> identities. The metropolis has a diversity of populations, cultures,
> languages and economic interests posing a challenge to bring women
> together on a single platform. Learning from its experience of the
> lawyers’ movement that had succeeded in uniting the extreme right and
> centrist political parties and the professionals on a single-point
> agenda for two years, WAF also decided to make Talibanisation and
> women the focal issue.
>
> That strategy paid off. Women had already been galvanised by the
> video showing the flogging of a teenaged girl in Swat that activist
> Samar Minallah courageously brought to the world media’s attention,
> invoking in the process the wrath of the Taliban whose fatwa declared
> her as wajibul qatl. The oppression of women is an issue that cuts
> across classes to touch every female raw nerve. Whether it is the
> smartly turned-out high-society woman or the working woman who slaves
> all day long to feed an army of children and a drug-addict husband or
> even the heavily veiled orthodox woman, each type, with few
> exceptions, has expressed her horror at the flogging incident.
>
> Hence on this occasion WAF managed to bring a diverse crowd together
> — the activists reaching out to the grassroots such as Amar Sindhu
> from Sindh University Hyderabad, Parveen Rahman from the Orangi Pilot
> Project and Sadiqa Salahuddin whose Indus Resource Centre runs
> schools in the interior of Sindh, as well as the elites sitting side
> by side with the three van-loads of women from Neelum Colony who
> clean the homes of the rich and will be starting their adult literacy
> classes from next week, courtesy Shabina’s Garage School.
>
> The variety of speakers focusing on the theme of women’s oppression
> by the Taliban found a responsive audience. But the question that
> made many ponder was: what next? Can this interest be sustained? If
> they had not already started probing for answers, the thought-
> provoking speech by Arundhati Roy, the renowned Indian writer and
> activist, did the trick. Coming from New Delhi on a solidarity
> mission to WAF’s meeting. Roy raised four issues:
>
> • What do we mean by the Taliban and what gave birth to them?
>
> • Define your own space and do not surrender it.
>
> • Don’t allow yourself to be forced into making choices of the ‘with
> us or against us’ type.
>
> • Don’t be selective in your injustices.
>
> These should provide food for thought for those struggling against
> oppression. Without being specific, Roy exhorted her audience to look
> into the structures and systems that lead to a situation of such
> extreme oppression, some of which is rooted in the class conflict.
> She believes one has to take a ‘total view’ of the matter, which she
> admitted she had come to Pakistan to understand.
>
> The fact is that we live in a largely grey area where the lines are
> not sharply drawn. There is a lot of overlapping between issues
> touching gender, class, ethnicity, culture, political power and
> economic gains. It is this reality one has to recognise and see how
> the contradictions can be addressed. The demand to take sides
> unambiguously, expressed so vividly in the days following 9/11 by
> George Bush as ‘You are with us or against us,’ can create a dilemma
> for people when negotiating these grey areas.
>
> Roy’s advice to avoid being ‘with us or against us’ has implications
> she didn’t elucidate. In times when action is needed and a position
> has to be taken — even if verbally — inaction or neutrality
> unwittingly props up the status quo. If the status quo has been
> created by inimical forces ostensibly now fighting their self-created
> Frankenstein, where does one go?
>
> The practical approach would be to prioritise strategies that can be
> adapted to changing circumstances. And what should these be? Here Roy
> has a point when she says that one cannot be selective in the
> justices one espouses and the injustices one denounces. In this
> context Pakistanis find themselves trapped between the devil and the
> deep sea. Attempting to rectify a problem here and another there
> really doesn’t help because our entire state structure is colonial,
> as a booklet titled Making Pakistan a Tenable State points out.
>
> Produced by 17 intellectuals, with Dr Mubashir Hasan as the driving
> force, the book describes the state structure as being ‘based on the
> concentration of political and administrative power in the steel
> frame of the civil services under the protection of the armed forces.
> The structure could be defined as feudal-military-bureaucratic.’
>
> The problem is systemic. In a state ruled by ‘a government of the
> elites, by the elites, for the elites’ it is inevitable that it is
> authoritarian and exploitative. Change can come when there is
> mobilisation of the people for change. When WAF mobilises women to
> fight against injustices it prepares them to also fight for change.
> The need is to empower them and instill confidence in them.
>
> Two women I have written about who are fighting for change come from
> the poorest of the poor and theirs is not a feminist agenda. They are
> fighting to have a roof above their heads. One is the wife of Walidad
> from Muhammad Essa Khaskheli who came all the way to Karachi in the
> heat of summer to save her goth from being snapped up by a feudal in
> the neighbourhood.
>
> The other is Parveen whose one-room ‘mansion’ in a katchi abadi of
> Clifton is now under threat of demolition. She is resisting the
> exploitative system that cannot provide shelter to the poor.
> Initially she hesitated — was it ‘proper’ for a woman to protest she
> had asked me. When encouraged she decided it was. These are women on
> the way to empowerment and that is WAF’s agenda.
>
>  2.
>
> ‘I’m here to understand what you mean by Taliban’
> by Salman Siddiqui
> Friday, 08 May, 2009
> http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/
> pakistan/arundhati-roy-sal-02
>
> Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region?
>
> I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need
> for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanisation). In
> India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and
> the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask,
> what do they mean by it.
>
> In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When
> we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it
> mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do
> you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that
> is being fought? That needs to be clarified.
>
> I think both needs to be fought. But if it’s an ideology it has to be
> fought differently, while if it’s a person with a gun then it has to
> be fought differently. We know from the history of the war on terror
> that a military strategy is only making matters worse all over the
> world. The war on terror has made the world a more dangerous place.
> In India, they have been fighting insurgencies military since 1947
> and it has become a more dangerous place.
>
> Swat and the Taliban boy
>
> It is very important for me to understand what exactly is going in
> Swat. How did it start? A Taliban boy asked me why women can’t be
> like plastic bags and banned. The point is that the plastic bag was
> made in a factory but so was the boy. He was made in a factory that
> is producing this kind of mind(set). (The question is) who owns that
> factory, who funds it? Unless we deal with that factory, dealing with
> the boy doesn’t help us.
>
> Water is the main issue
>
> One danger in Pakistan is that we talk about the threat of Taliban so
> much that other important issues lose focus. In my view, the problem
> of water in the world will become the most important problem.  I
> think big dams are economically unviable, environmentally
> unsustainable and politically undemocratic. They are a way of taking
> away a river from the poor and giving it to the rich. Like in India,
> there’s an issue of SEZs (Special Economic Zones), whereby the land
> of the people are given to corporations. But the bigger problem is
> that there are making dams and giving water to the industries. This
> way the people who live in villages by the streams and rivers have no
> water for themselves. So building dams is one of the most
> ecologically destructive things that you can do.
>
> Fight over Siachen glacier
>
> There are thousands of Pakistani and Indian soldiers deployed on the
> Siachen glacier. Both of our countries are spending billions of
> dollars on high altitude warfare and weapons. The whole of the
> Siachen glacier is sort of an icy monument to human folly. Each day
> it is being filled with ice axes, old boots, tents and so on.
> Meanwhile, that battlefield is melting. Siachen glacier is about half
> its size now. It’s not melting because the Indian and Pakistani
> soldiers are on it. But it’s because people somewhere on the other
> side of the world are leading a good life….in countries that call
> themselves democracies that believe in human rights and free speech.
> Their economies depend on selling weapons to both of us. Now, when
> that glacier melts, there will be floods first, then there will be a
> drought and then we’ll have even more reasons to fight. We’ll buy
> more weapons from those democracies and in this way human beings will
> prove themselves to be the stupidest animals on earth.
>
> Money and the Indian elections
>
> Whatever system of government you have, whether it is a military
> dictatorship or a democracy, and you have that for a long time,
> eventually big money manages to subvert it. That has begun to happen
> even in a democracy (like India). For example, political parties need
> a lot of publicity, but the media is also run by corporate money. If
> you look at the big political parties like the Congress and the BJP,
> you see how much money is being put out just in their advertising
> budgets. Now where does all that come from?
>
> RSS and the Indian establishment
>
> The RSS has infiltrated everything to a great extent. In India, we
> have 120-150 million Muslims and it’s considered a minority…It’s
> impossible to not belong to a minority of some sort in India. Caste
> or ethnicity or religion or whatever, in some way everyone belongs to
> a minority. The fights that many of us are waging against the RSS and
> against the BJP are to say that we live in a society which
> accommodates everybody. Everybody doesn’t have to love everybody, but
> everybody has to be accommodated.  The RSS has infiltrated the
> (Indian) army as much as various kinds of Wahabism or other kinds of
> religious ideology have infiltrated the ISI or the armed forces in
> Pakistan. They are human beings like everyone else and they too get
> influenced.
>
> Indian media and sensationalizing of news coming out from Pakistan
>
> I think the media in both countries play this game. Whenever
> something happens here, they hype it up there, while when something
> happens there, they hype the news here. We say that we live in times
> of an information revolution and free press, but even then nobody
> gets to know the complete picture…
>
> The Pakistani media is a little different from the Indian media. They
> stand on a slightly different foundation. But both share the problem
> of a lack of accountability…The trouble in India is that 90 per cent
> of their revenue comes from the corporate sector…there’s increasing
> privatization and corporatization of governance, education, health,
> infrastructure and water management. So in India you see an open
> criticism of governance, but very rarely criticism of corporations.
> It’s a structural problem. It’s not about good people or bad people.
> It’s just that you can’t expect a company to work against itself.
> This is a very serious issue which needs to be sorted out.
>
> Is the Indian army a sacred cow?
>
> The Indian army is quite a sacred cow especially on TV and Bollywood.
> But at the same time if you talk to the people in the Indian army,
> they say that they feel that the media is very critical of them. I
> don’t share that view. I think it is a sacred cow. People are willing
> to give them a lot of leeway.
>
> Women and their fight for justice
>
> When women fight for justice, we must fight for every kind of justice…
> We must fight for justice for men and justice for children. Because
> if you fight for one kind of justice and you tolerate another, then
> it’s a pretty hollow fight. You may not be able to fight every
> battle, but you should be able to put yourself on the line and say I
> believe this.
>
>
>
> Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> The Sarai Programme at CSDS
> Raqs Media Collective
> shuddha at sarai.net
> www.sarai.net
> www.raqsmediacollective.net
>
>
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Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net


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