This is a guest post by SHRIMOYEE NANDINI GHOSH
Impressions of the Hearing of the Public Interest Petition on the Mass Rapes at Kunan Poshpora
Day 1: 7th May 2013: I happen to be in Srinagar. I hear through a friend that a Public Interest Petition has been filed by a group of fifty odd Kashmiri women, before the Srinagar Bench of the High Court, asking that the Kunan Poshpora mass rape case be reopened, and re-investigated. It would take a group of very odd women indeed, to ask for something so far fetched. They are students, housewives, teachers, doctors, some of whom were not even born in 1991, when the rape took place on the ‘intervening night’ (as such records always read) of the 23rd and 24th of February during a ‘search and cordon’ operation by personnel of the Indian army.
This is a guest post by Anonymous
I went to the CDS campus today hearing of the great tumult there, news of which has been appearing off and on in the press. I was just curious. I know personally one of the SEWA ladies; she told me her version of events. The students, of course, have been venting their ire amply. In the past few days, I have also seen many of their comments in FB which made me want to puke, partly because of the fact that the faculty members who they revile now were fawned upon just a few days back. Normal people cannot help marveling at such extraordinary ability to reverse emotions towards the same object and at the same time, land on all four emotional feet. Read more…
Naya Pakistan, an old fable: Ayesha Siddiqa
Guest post by AYESHA SIDDIQA: The renowned television anchor Quatrina Hosain was in tears. A day after the incident of her being sexually assaulted at a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) jalsa by party workers in Wah Cantonement, she talked about how the bruises may heal but not her emotional scars. She was covering election rallies and got invited by a PTI candidate Mohammad Sarwar to his rally in Wah. It was a sudden plan so no one could have conspired to misbehave. This is important to note, as many PTI workers have subsequently tried to blame the incident on Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz)’s workers. However, when confronted with facts, PTI workers tried to hide behind the argument that women should not provoke people by coming out and mixing with them. Read more…
Sinful liberals and the war against jihadi terror: Manisha Sethi responds to Praveen Swami
Guest post by MANISHA SETHI: It has been seven months since the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association brought out its report, Framed, Damned, Acquitted, chronicling in detail how the Delhi Police’s Special Cell implicated innocents – former militants, police informers, businessmen, and just ordinary, unlucky men – as terrorists. It is one of the few documents that lends evidentiary credence to the widespread sense amongst Muslims that they are being targeted in the war against terror. Apologists for the police and investigative agencies however do not tire of contesting its conclusions, namely that there is a systemic and systematic bias against minorities when it comes to terror investigations. What bias, they ask. As does our chief National Security ‘analyst’ Praveen Swami, who has stressed that “liberals are compromising the war against jihadi terror“.
Could such ‘analysts’ be echoing the sentiments of a judge of the Allahabad High court, who less than two decades after India gained independence, noted, that “in the entire country there is not another criminal force whose misdeeds can come anywhere near the list of crimes of that organised body called the Indian Police force” (All India Reporter, 1964, Vol. 51, 702). Do they mean, that our extraordinarily brutal police force is even-handed in its application of cruelty across the spectrum of our citizenry, and is not especially biased against the Muslims, or Dalits, adivasis and so on?
Gandhi’s fourth monkey: Suvaid Yaseen
Guest post by SUVAID YASEEN: Incredible India is a land of promises. Amnesia and half narratives. Selective remembrance and deliberate forgetting. The national interest is incredibly important. And everything is allowed in this war.
Gandhi’s – the father of the nation – maxim of bura mat kaho, bura mat suno, bura mat dekho (don’t say evil, don’t hear evil, don’t see evil), interestingly forgets to say bura mat karo (don’t do evil). So, you can do it, and forget it. Gandhi should smile. And his monkeys can make merry.
Mohammad Yasin Malik, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front commander turned ‘Gandhian leader’ must know this irony very well.
When, in the early nineties, the guns started ringing, Kashmiris were told that they should leave the path of the armed struggle and have a peaceful agitation, and they would be listened to, by India and by the international community. Read more…
This is a guest post by SAATTVIC
Hi Thane,
I recently read your piece for Kafila, which was subsequently reproduced in part in the Hindu. I studied economics there as well, batch of 2006. I subsequently went on to read for an MPhil in Economics at Oxford.
Good on you for writing that piece. It raised lots of questions about our education system, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote (and share the same dismay at the dictation sessions from one particular professor you referred to).
There’s just a few things that I’d like to say, but before I say them let me say that none of this comes from being ‘nationalist’ or ‘patriotic’ in the slightest – just as you spent three years studying, working and paying taxes in India, I spent five studying, working and paying taxes in the UK, and I would like to believe that doing so has given me a bit of a world view of these things. Moreover, my area of interest is education economics, which is what my research focused on. Read more…
At the recent Historical Materialism conference held in Delhi from April 3-5, a panel was organized with great fanfare - an official panel by the HM editors – around Vivek Chibber’s new book Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital. This panel was billed to be a decisive refutation of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial theory, not only by the chief theorists and organizers of Historical Materialism but by many other Indians – most of whom in any case have little more than a religious faith in ‘Marxism’ and understand little of Marxism and its history. There was glee all around and one came across the hurried announcement of a Centre for Marxist Studies that was to host further events around this book against the demon that Chibber had apparently slain. After all, Chibber was backed by the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Robert Brenner and Noam Chomsky, all of whom had endorsed his book as the death knell to Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial theory. The glee was to be short-lived.
On April 28, at the New York conference of Historical Materialism, the organizers made the mistake of inviting Partha Chatterjee (a representative of a spent force, already buried at the Delhi HM Conference!) to debate the new star on their horizon. The meticulous demolition of Chibber that followed, embarrassed even his most ardent supporters, who had hoped to see the redoubtable Partha vanquished in person. And Chhibber, let our marxist brethren note, is reduced to finally accepting that he is more inclined towards contract theory than towards Marxism!
Partha, whose years of meticulous engagement with Marxism can hardly be taken on cavalierly by any upstart on the horizon, calmly tore Chibber’s claims to shreds. Many supporters of Chibber’s book have, in social media, glumly described the 28 April event as a great setback to their cause…
Here is Partha in debate…
