[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy in Karachi

[Pawan Durani]

Dear Shuddha ,

Is Indian army controlled by Let ? Have not some lunatic Islamic fanatics of
Indian army joined Let ?

Does it amount to a general statement ?

Aran - Dhat -Teri -Ki Roys statement of RSS is pathetic and whosover
supports that , i pity that intelligence.

Yes , i would spell her as I wish .......i usually misspell "dustbins"

Pawan
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:45 PM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>wrote:

> Pawan,
> You are being specious in your arguments here. In the report, Roy is
> reported as discussiing some specific points of equivalence  - of the way in
> which the media behaves in both countries, of the influence of far right
> politics in the making of military and security agendas, this does not
> amount to an equivalence of India and Pakistan. In any case, the two
> entitities, as states, are not arithmetical sums that add up to identitites,
> two things do not have to be identical for one to maintain a critical
> perspective towards both.
>
> As for the Taliban, Roy is explicitly critical (in this report) of the way
> it treats women, and she states (again) explicitly that the Taliban is a
> form of terror that needs to be fought. Please read the text again if this
> is not clear to you on first reading.
>
>  She merely asks us to try and undertake a more sopisticated understanding
> of the phonomenon (like Ashis Nandy in the other text that I had forwarded
> earlier this morning). In order to combat it, it needs to be understood. And
> the factors that give rise to phenomena like the Taliban, which are more
> than simply, the instrumentalities of realpolitik and the actions of states,
> need to be accounted for.
>
> Shuddha
>
>
>
>
> Roy is reported in the text as saying that the Taliban needs to be fought.
> I don't see how
>
> Roy says - "
>   On 13-May-09, at 8:08 PM, Rahul Asthana wrote:
>
>
> The hallmark of Arundhati's "analysis" is try to force an equivalence of
> whatever is happening in Pakistan to that in India.It seems to be  some
> kind of a game for her, like crossword puzzle.So she has to ignore reason
> from time to time.
> Secondly,she somehow develops cold feet in discussing the role of the
> Pakistani establishment in using terrorism as a matter of state
> policy.Probably she doesn't read newspapers.Her root cause analysis only
> involves India's occupation of Kashmir.
> Thirdly,for her Taliban are only freedom fighters who were created with
> funding from the big,bad America.Pakistan's role in the creation of Taliban
> is overlooked again.Also overlooked is the various news items like this one(
> http://www.rawa.org/mazar6.htm),which expose the Islamic fascist nature of
> Taliban.Again,probably she doesn't read newspapers.
>
> Here is the transcript of her talk with BBC Urdu.
> http://blog.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?ddm=10&pid=1758&eid=5
>
>
> --- On Wed, 5/13/09, 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" <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 12:08 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
>
>
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the
> city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net
> with subscribe in the subject header.
> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
> List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>
>
>
>
>
>  Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> The Sarai Programme at CSDS
> Raqs Media Collective
> shuddha at sarai.net
> www.sarai.net
> www.raqsmediacollective.net
>
>
>