OBITUARY: HARI P. SHARMA

HARI SHARMA

1934-2010

It is with deepest sorrow that we announce the death of our friend and comrade, Hari Prakash Sharma, on March 16 following a prolonged battle with cancer. Hari took his last breath in his home of 42 years at Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver), British Columbia, surrounded by his comrades Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, and Chin Banerjee. All of them had come together in 1976 to form the Vancouver Chapter of the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA), which had been founded by Hari and many others at a meeting in Montreal in 1975.

Hari was born on November 9, 1934 at Dadri in Uttar Pradesh though his family came from Haryana. His father was a railway employee, so he moved from one place to another wherever his father was posted. Hari received his BA from Agra University and his Master’s in Social Work from Delhi University. The insight into the social life of India Hari got from his travels by train enabled by his father’s employment in the railways and his extensive travels by foot through the villages of India stimulated Hari to start writing short stories in Hindi. Hari is regarded as one of the finest writers of short stories in Hindi and many people had urged him to resume his writing in Hindi. One of his stories was adapted as a play and staged in New Delhi.

Hari moved to the US in 1963 for further education and did his Master in Social Work from the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964 and Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1968. He taught briefly at UCLA before accepting a position at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia in 1968, where he stayed till his retirement in 1999. He was honored by the University as Professor Emeritus.

Hari, like many enlightened academics of the 1960’s plunged in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US and Canada. This is also the period when he espoused Marxism, which ideology he held dearly and steadfastly until his death.

As a member of the Faculty of Simon Fraser University he became a champion of the academic rights of colleagues who were faced with the threat of dismissal for their support of the student-led movement for democratizing the university. He became an associate and friend of another Marxist Kathleen Gough, who was suspended for her political activities. Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma co-edited the 469-page book, Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, which was published in 1973 by the Monthly Review Press, New York. The book was sought by political activists of that time and many people know of Hari as an eminent leftist scholar because of that book.

The 1960s were a period of international revolutionary upheaval. The Naxalbari peasant uprising happened in the spring of 1967. Hari was greatly inspired by it. He went to India and visited Naxalbari area. It is then he got committed to the path opened by Naxalbari and retained his faith in its ultimate success until his last days, while many of his comrades had simply written off Naxalbari as a thing of the past. Hari developed contact with peasant revolutionaries and maintained a living contact till his last days.

While associating with the Naxalbari movement in India, Hari carried on anti-imperialist work in Vancouver through the weekly paper, Georgia Straight, published by the Georgia Straight Collective, of which he was a founding member. In 1973 Hari went to the Amnesty International in London and the Commission of Jurists in Geneva and sent a written representation to the UN Human Rights Commission to publicize the condition of more than thirty-thousand political prisoners in Indian jails.

In 1974 he and his comrade Gautam Appa of the London School of Economics organized a petition of international scholars to protest the treatment of political prisoners in India, which he handed to the Indian Consulate in Vancouver, BC on August 15 of the same year.

In 1975 Hari enthusiastically accepted an invitation from his friends in Montreal. He along with many others founded the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) on June 25, 1975, exactly on the same day on which Indira Gandhi declared the State of Emergency in India. Hari’s tireless work against dictatorship in India and in defense of political prisoners and oppressed peoples, and his energetic organization of progressive people across North America in the struggle against Imperialism and for social justice, led to the revocation of his passport by the Indira Gandhi government in 1976.

Having engaged in various anti-racist struggles in the 1970s, IPANA in Vancouver, under Hari’s leadership became a primary force in the formation of the British Columbia Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR: 1980), which proved to be an extremely effective instrument against the tide of racism in the province at the time. Hari and IPANA also played a leading role in the formation of the Canadian Farm workers’ Union (CFU: 1980), which for the first time took up the cause of farm workers who had been historically excluded from protection under the labour laws and any protective regulation.

From the 1980s Hari’s work also began to focus on the condition of minorities in India, which came to a crisis with the attack on the Golden Temple and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Hari stood firm in his defense of the human rights of Sikhs and, increasingly of Muslims who became the primary targets of the rising Hindutva forces gathered under the banner of the Bhartiya Janata Party. He organized a parallel conference on the centralization of state power and the threat to minorities in India to coincide with the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver in 1987.

In 1989 Hari brought large sections of the South Asian community together to form the Komagata Maru Historical Society to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident, in which Indian immigrants traveling to Canada on a chartered ship were turned away from the shores of Vancouver by the racist policies of the Canadian Government. As a result of the society’s work a commemorative plaque was installed in Vancouver. In 2004, during a screening of the documentary film on this incident by Ali Kazimi, Continuous Journey, the Mayor of Vancouver presented a scroll to Hari dedicating the week to the memory of Komagata Maru.

Following the attack on Babri Masjid in December 1992 Hari became the prime mover in the formation of a North American organization dedicated to the defense of minority rights in India called, Non-resident Indians for Secularism and Democracy (NRISAD). This organization brought together Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians of origin in South Asia through educational and cultural activities. It had its most significant moment in Vancouver in 1997, when it celebrated the 50th anniversary of the independence of India from colonial rule by bringing together people from the entire spectrum of the South Asian community to focus on how much remained to be done on the subcontinent and the urgent need for peace between Pakistan and India.

Recognizing the need to build a North American front against the growing menace of Hindutva fascism in India, Hari travelled to Montreal in September 1999 to join the founding of International South Asia Forum (INSAF). He became is first President and organized the Second Conference in Vancouver from Augst10-12, 2001.

Hari’s leadership again led to the development of NRISAD into South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) in Vancouver to embrace the necessity of going beyond a focus on India to the entire South Asian region in the quest of peace and democracy based on secularism, human rights and social justice. SANSAD has pursued these goals vigorously, condemning the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (for which he was denied a visa to go to India), championing the human rights of Kashmiris, promoting peace between Pakistan and India, supporting the rights of women in Pakistan, condemning violence against journalists and academics in Bangladesh, supporting the movement for democracy and social justice in Nepal, and defending the human rights of Tamils under the attack of the Sri Lankan state.

Besides being an able political organizer and a gifted writer of short stories, Hari was also a talented photographer. He photographed the common people of India, their lives and struggles. His photographs hang in many homes and have been displayed in many exhibitions. He proved himself to be an excellent director of political drama.

Political ideals remain steadfast. However, there has, naturally been, divergence of opinion on the strategy and tactics of achieving these ideals. During the course of long political activity of more than 50 years, Hari made many friends and comrades. It is natural that among these comrades there also arose disagreements on many issues. Nevertheless, Hari remained a comrade or a friend of all of them and they all are deeply saddened by his passing away.

Hari leaves behind him a legacy of activism in the service of the oppressed. He is an inspiration to engagement in the struggle for a better world, to a never-flagging effort to create a world without exploitation, without imperialist domination, without religious, caste, ethnic or gender oppression, a world that Marx envisioned as human destiny.

A Memorial Service for Hari will be held at Riverside Funeral Home and Crematorium, 7410- Hopcott Road, Delta, B.C. (Ph. 604-940-1313), at 3:00 pm on Sunday, March 21, 2010.


Chin Banerjee
Harinder Mahil
Raj Chouhan
Daya Varma
Vinod Mubayi
Charan Gill

Misplaced Anger: The Assault on Illhem

Tariq Ali on the NPA candidate who wears a hijab

Misplaced Anger: The Assault on Illhem

By TARIQ ALI

Forgive an outsider and staunch atheist like myself who, on reading the recent French press comments relating to Ilhem Moussaid the hijab-wearing NPA candidate in Avignon, gets the impression that something is rotten in French political culture.

Let’s take the debate at face-value. A young Muslim woman joins the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party]. She obviously agrees with its program that defends abortion, contraception, etc, i.e. a woman’s right to choose. She is then told that despite this she does not have the right to choose what she wears on her head. It’s astonishing. There is no Koranic injunction involved. The book

says: "Draw their (women's) veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty", which can be interpreted in several ways but is disregarded most blatantly by hijab-wearing Egyptian women I see in Cairo and Karachi wearing tight jeans and T-shirts that contradicted the spirit of the Koranic message.

Patriarchal traditions, cultural habits and identity are what is at stake here and they vary from generation to generation. Pushing people back into a ghetto never helps.

I grew up in a Communist family in Lahore. My mother never wore a veil. She set up a feminist group in the Fifties that worked with working class women in the poorest quarter of the city. Half of them covered their heads in public. It did not affect their activism in the slightest. Similar stories can be told of women in different parts of the world, Muslim and non-Muslim. The Algerian women who fought in the resistance against French republican colonialism did so as anti-imperialists. Some were partially veiled, others not. It did not affect the way they fought or the methods used by the French to torture them. Perhaps the torturers should have been more brutal to the hijabed freedom-fighters to help integrate their progeny better in the Republican tradition.

In 1968-9, the Pakistani students, workers, clerks and women (including prostitutes) fought for three months against a military dictatorship and won: the only victory of those years. The religious groups backed the military. They were isolated and defeated, but many of the women students who fought with us wore the hijab and chanted militant slogans against the Jamaat-i-Islami. Should we have told them they couldn’t participate unless they took off their head-cover? Personally, I would have preferred that for purely aesthetic reasons, but it made nil difference to our struggle.

The anger against Ilhem and the NPA is completely misplaced. The real state of the world leaves the defenders of the Republic completely unaffected: the million dead of Iraq, the continuing siege of Gaza by Israel and Egypt, the killing of innocents in Afghanistan, the US drone attacks in Pakistan, the brutal exploitation of Haiti, etc. Why is this the case?

Several years ago I noticed that French protests against the Iraq war were muted compared to the rest of Western Europe. I don’t accept that this was due to Chirac’s opposition to the war [after all de Gaulle had opposed the Vietnam war even more strongly], but to Islamophobia: an increasing intolerance of the Other in French society, reminiscent of the attitude towards Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The conformism of that period explains the popularity of Vichy during the early years of the war.

Islamophobes and anti-Semites share a great deal in common.

Cultural or ‘civilizational’ differences are highlighted to sanction immigrant communities in Europe. The narratives are multiple. No universalist response is possible. Immigrants and the countries to which they migrate are different to each other.

Take the United States for a start. This is a territory peopled by migrants, many of whom were Protestant fundamentalists, from the seventeenth century onwards and which has depended on migrations ever since.

In most of Western Europe the first large wave of migrants were from the former colonies of the European powers. In Britain, the migrants were from the Caribbean Islands and South Asia, in France from the Maghreb. Without abandoning their identities, they integrated in different ways and on different levels. The South Asians, principally peasants and a sprinkling of workers, were not treated well by the trades-unions. Despite this, South Asian migrant workers led some of the most memorable struggles for unionization.



The Indians in particular came from a highly politicized culture where Communism was strong and they brought this experience with them to Britain (like the New York taxi drivers today). The Pakistanis were less political and tended towards networking groups reflecting clan loyalties in their villages or cities of origin. The British governments encouraged religion by pleading for mullahs to arrive so that the migrants could be kept away from the racial currents in the working class during the 1960s and 1970s.



In France, there was forced integration. Each citizen was taught that s/he had the same rights, something that was patently not the case. It is material needs and a desire to live better that fuel the rage, not spiritual beliefs. During the eruption of the banlieus in 2005, Sarkozy, then Minister of Interior, like the ultras in Stendhal’s novels, talked of ‘savages.’ I have often pointed out to the discomfiture of even some leftists that the kids who rioted had integrated well by internalizing the best French traditions: 1789, 1793,1848, 1871, 1968. When oppression became unbearable the young built barricades and attacked property. Deprivation, not disbelief, was the root of their anger.



How many Western citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers undoubtedly took humanity forward by recognizing no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the Islamophobic ravings in sections of the global media.



Marx famously wrote of religion as the ‘opium of the people’, but the sentence that followed is forgotten. Religion was also ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’ and this partially explains the rise of religiosity in every community since the collapse of Communism. Compare the young Normaliens trooping in to say Mass today to the horror of their parents. My women friends in the Muslim world complain bitterly when their daughters wear the hijab as a protest against familial norms. It was always thus.



Published in Le Monde on February 20, 2010.

Hari: My Comrade

TRIBUTE

Hari: My Comrade

Hassan N. Gardezi

A tribute read at the 75th birthday party of Hari Sharma, 15 November 2009.

Hari and I were born in the British colony of India, he on the other side of eastern Punjab where the Hindi-Urdu linguistic community begins and I in the southern Siraiki-speaking belt of Punjab; the land now divided into India and Pakistan. We went to school when the raj was still intact and the Second World War, started by the imperialist powers, was still raging. The Punjabi youth were being enticed to join the British Indian Army with musical chants of “bharti ho ja rey recruit.” But we never knew each other until decades later when from different routes we ended up in North America in the 1960s at a time when the winds of change were blowing strong and turbulent.

As I recall those days from the vantage point of a visiting academic in a university town of the U.S. Midwest the majority of black, Afro-American, people trapped in the poverty-stricken ghettos of big cities were up in arms protesting

racial and economic discrimination. Riots, burning inner cities, and police shootings were the scenes brought daily on the TV screens in American homes when families assembled for evening meals. At the same time the young people in general were in revolt against the Vietnam War. The rampant destruction of a poor Asian country, its bombed-out villages, its terrified refugees, the wounded bodies of its people scorched with napalm were catalyzing another movement for change which was fast becoming global in scope.

In this political environment was born in the mid 1960s the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) from within the American Asian Studies Association. It was through this Committee and its publications that Hari and I later got acquainted. In Hari’s words, “CCAS members were organizing free universities, teach-ins, panels at academic conferences; holding classes on modern China, on Asian revolutions, on national liberation movements, on imperialism. They were building links with revolutionary forces in Asia.”1

Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars

Hari is well known in North America and Asia as an activist in many community-based organizations, but my focus in writing this note is on the contributions he has made to the understanding of Asia through the CCAS and its periodical, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, later renamed Critical Asian Studies. As one of the original members of CCAS Hari has remained consistently committed to its Statement of Purpose: “to develop a humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront such problems as poverty, oppression and imperialism.”

Hari has confronted the problems of poverty, oppression, and imperialism, particularly in South Asia, with his skillful and forthright manner, which at times has earned him the ire of Indian authorities and shallow patriots. A superb example of his talent is the famous photographic collection in which he has captured on camera a series of particular images of life in India. A sample of this collection was first published in America as a photographic essay in the BCAS issue of April-June 1977. A barefoot, coy girl of Orissa with deep and soft eyes clutching a corner of her tattered sari to her mouth, neatly dressed and sombre faced pedestrians of Calcutta passing by a beggar with her forehead on the pavement, three young women planting rice seedlings in the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu, a police officer on the railway tracks aiming his gun at the crowd of striking workers, and many more fragments of “the universe that is India” were incorporated in his essay in a bold and perceptive narrative, which is Hari’s unique style, “in the hope that one day the particulars will merge to change the nature and destiny of the universe.”

After the mid 1970s the grassroots movements for change and efforts to build a humane and knowledgeable world order began to dissipate. The antiwar movement in North America, based on insufficient understanding of the nature and mechanisms of capitalism and imperialism, began to fold. In academia new fads of postmodernism, post-Marxism, and so forth began to disorient the minds of those interested in the study of war and peace, poverty and exploitation in this world. Even within the community of scholars brought together in the CCAS network occasional debates began to erupt on the interpretation of post–Vietnam War events, the emergence of a market economy in China after Mao Zedong, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of neo-liberalism.

One such internal debate was touched off in the pages of BCAS concerning the fiscal and economic programs imposed by the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the poor countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A key participant in the debate argued that the lack of development in these countries and the growing gap between the rich and poor was a result of their internal “statist bureaucratic” structures and not the external factor of WB/IMF interventions. In his rejoinder Hari challenged the fallacy of drawing a line between the internal and external causes of economic backwardness. He pointed out that modern-day imperialism, with the WB and IMF as its global agencies, was internalized in the economic and political structures of semi-colonial neo-colonial societies. It was “tied to the industrial bourgeoisie, banking capital, landlord and kulak lobbies, contractors and builders, state bureaucracies, military command, cultural elites, intelligentsia.” The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were also aiding this internalization, as many of them were “created by imperialism.”2

The WB and IMF were there to “serve the capitalist-imperialist system: (1) by facilitating capital accumulation, and (2) by mediating at times of capitalist crises.” Their agenda should not be confused, said Hari, with any pretence of seeking the welfare of people. The insistence by the WB/IMF on balancing government budgets “has meant cutting funds for education, health, child care, family support, unemployment insurance, job security.” And Hari, the activist, was not going to leave the debate just at that. He went on to add that, “People are marching, shouting, fighting. Those of us who live in these more developed societies, including concerned Asian scholars, have to join in these struggles—provided we care for the people, provided we are opposed to the capitalist-imperialist agenda, provided we also care for the people of Asia.”3

In 1998 when India and Pakistan test-exploded their nuclear bombs, the half-a-century–old hostility that had characterized relations between the two sibling states acquired a new and alarming dimension. Hari and I were asked to guest edit a special issue of BCAS on the implications of these nuclear explosions, “The South Asian Bomb: Reality and Illusion.”4

Writing editorially, Hari commented that to begin with the nuclearization of the military arsenals of India and Pakistan “was bound to accelerate the unconscionably wasteful arms race the two countries had been engaged in, while doggedly hugging the bottom rung of the human development index.”5

The tests took place when both the countries were being governed by right-wing, ultranationalist political parties. A.B. Vajpayee was leading India at the head of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with the support of all the Hindutava forces, and Nawaz Sharif, a protégé of dictator Zia was wooing the Islamist parties and seeking to make himself Amirul Momineen, the chief of the righteous believers, through a constitutional amendment. Without mincing any words Hari eloquently expressed the extraordinary risk in this coincidence: “Nuclear bombs, as such, are bad because they are tools of ultimate terror, of ultimate destruction. They are worse—in fact unpardonable—if their acquisition involves deployment of scarce resources that could have been better used to provide the basic needs of the citizenry.… Nuclear bombs are absolute disaster if they are acquired by socio-political forces with a fascist agenda as is clearly the case with the saffron clad marching soldiers of Hindutava or the Islamic mujahhedeen of Pakistan.”6

There were of course spuriously soothing words coming from certain quarters that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the two mutually hostile South Asian states would act as a deterrence to engage in any future wars—the MAD theory etc. — and therefore contribute to a greater sense of security among their peoples. To this Hari responded that the “scientific-military establishments of two of the world’s poorest countries are operating with the same perverted logic, impervious to what this type of thinking did to the security and integrity of the Soviet Union, once a superpower of formidable economic and military stature.” In hindsight it is quite clear that since the nuclear tests, giving India and Pakistan the status of nuclear powers, the security situation in the two countries has continuously and dramatically deteriorated. They have fought one more major war in 1999 with heavy loss of life on both sides in Kargil on the Kashmir line of control and others on their international borders have been barely averted. Neither have they refrained from adding one wasteful set of destructive weapons after another to their arsenals at the expense of providing any kind of security, physical or economic, to their people.

The positions that Hari takes on various issues are based on his profound knowledge of social history combined with his conviction that a better more humane world order is possible. He has written much on the rise of social systems and movements that have brought us to where we are today and on how we can change the insecurity and oppression around us. I will try to present some of his thinking in this respect, again from his work with the community of scholars associated with BCAS, now renamed Critical Asian Studies (CAS).

Chinese Revolution

In a roundtable of articles published originally in CAS, entitled China’s Economic Transformation, Hari wrote an introduction in which some of his seminal ideas on imperialism, capitalism, Marxism, the historical socialist project, and the significance of the Chinese Revolution fall together in a remarkably cohesive formulation.7 The Chinese Revolution of 1949, which the imperialists of the world and some Western intellectuals now tend to dismiss as an “aberration,” something that “was doomed to failure,” in Hari’s view was the “outcome of a prolonged and sustained effort by a vast multitude of Chinese people under the leadership of a Communist Party, to do away with imperialism and its local props (feudalism and comprador capitalism) and to lay down the foundations of building a socialist society.”

As such the Chinese Revolution remains “an important landmark on the long worldwide emancipatory project, which began precisely a hundred years earlier with the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party.” The Manifesto itself was a milestone that signified the “beginning of the proletarian class consciousness.” It was commissioned by an international association of workers, the Communist League, to form “a detailed theoretical and practical programme for them,” and was first published as a 23-page pamphlet in February 1848 without the names of the authors, Marx and Engels.

When the Chinese Revolution happened it “elated and inspired working people and toiling masses all over the world. It did so especially in formerly (and in places still) colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America for whom the Chinese Revolution also provided a model, a distinctively ‘Chinese path’—with its focus on peasantry with a multi-class alliance, with protracted people’s war.…” In Nepal for example the end of the monarchy and inauguration of a democratic set-up would be hard to contemplate without the prolonged people’s war led by the Communist Party of Nepal, Maoist (CPNM), although much has yet to be accomplished.

In China itself discontent with the so-called capitalist reforms is mounting. The present regime is worried about the “resurgence of socialist thinkers critical of the lurch toward capitalism.”With the present deep crisis of global capitalism, the conditions of life and work for the Chinese masses have greatly deteriorated and protests by the working class are escalating. What might eventually come out of these protests and revived ideological debates is uncertain.

But in Hari’s view what “is certain is the fact that the Global Emancipatory Project is still on, in China as elsewhere, and will certainly remain so for a long time to come. There have been setbacks; these may happen in the future too. But a century and a half is not that long a period to undo a history of class domination, going back thousands of years .…”

This is a very important point that Hari makes. The history of the system we have inherited, in which class domination, gender inequality, organized violence or warfare, alienation from our species being and from our natural environment is deeply rooted, indeed goes back thousands of years. It is pre-biblical to say the least. Hari is very right in saying that a century and a half is not enough to undo this system.

This time perspective on societal change is also the secret of Hari’s abiding conviction that a better, more humane, world is possible. Every setback on the path of struggle to achieve that goal is a temporary setback. As he says in the context of China, “It is our task to learn the positive and negative lessons from the Chinese experience and carry on with the urgent task of fighting and defeating imperialism and its hold, wherever we live, and lend support to the struggles for national liberation and for socialism wherever they take place.”

The conviction that is present in Hari’s social scientific thought is also the intuitive faith of South Asia’s leading Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I would like to end this brief note on Hari’s valiant effort to keep the community of Concerned Asian Scholars on the right track by quoting a few lines from a poem by Faiz, which incidentally turned out to be the song of the day in the streets of Kathmandu when Nepal’s 240-year-old monarchy was abolished in 2007.

We shall see ham dekheen gay,

Certainly we, too, shall see lazim hai ke ham bhi dekheen gay

the day that has been promised to us woh din jis ka wada heiy

that what is written on the tablet of time jo loh-e azal pey likha hai

When high mountains of tyranny and oppression Jab zulm-o -sitam key koh-giraN

shall blow away like cotton flakes roi ki tarah ur jaiN gay

When crowns will be tossed jab taj uchaley jaiN gay aur takt

and thrones demolished giray jaiN gay

When God’s creation, the people, will rule jab raj karey gi khalk-e-khuda

who I am, too, and joe maiN bhi hooN

so you are our tum bhi ho

When a cheer will rise, I am the Truth Jab Nara uthey ga anal-haq ka

who I am, too, and joe maiN bhi hooN

so you are aur tum bhi ho

References

1. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27 (4), October–December 1995.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 31 (2), April– June 1999.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Critical Perspectives on China’s Economic Transformation. Introduction by Hari P. Sharma. Delhi: Daanish Books, 2007.

Celebrating Life in Struggle: A Tribute to Hari Sharma, edited by Chinmoy Banerjee and Harinder Mahil.

978-81-89654-82-5 (Hb) $19.75

November 2009. 231pp.

www.daanishbooks.com/products/

“Hari Sharma’s life is an appropriate focus for a celebration of life spent in struggle, bringing together people who have worked through their life for a world free of imperialist domination, militarism, state oppression, and class, caste and gender oppression. This book offers a tribute to Hari Sharma’s work among people in North America and India. Not merely a retrospective celebration, it indicates directions for struggle today. It also offers an album of photos and poems by Hari Sharma that unveil the life of India, routinely covered by daily indifference and latterly by the shine of globalization.”

Mainstream, Vol XLVIII, No 6, January 30, 2010

Gripping Narrative of a Meaningful Life

Monday 8 February 2010, by Amna Mirza
BOOK REVIEW

Life and Times of Shanta Toofani: Story of a Survivor—narrated by Shanta Toofani and synthesised by Dimple (Amreen) Oberoi Vahali, Diamond Oberoi Vahali; Daanish Books, New Delhi; price Rs 195; pages 285.
The book encapsulates the narratives of life of an unknown person yet someone whose experiences and activities we all would like to hear and learn from: Shanta Toofani. Written in the form of an open-eyed account by the authors, the direct voice of Shanta Toofani in various chapters adds a certain degree of vividness to the account. It is a simple life lived in a complex way—yet in its essence it is a life lived to the fullest. This is what this narration brings to us.

Shanta Toofani, as a child, learned the meaning of life with her mother passing away, later with the second mother killing herself, or separation with sister during migration from Burma to India with her father. In all these tales, there is a deep pathos which can be summed up as ‘exiled at multiple levels’, ‘repressed psyche’. (page 9)

The first part of the book has an interesting narration from the personalistic angle with Shanta Toofani talking about how she perceives inspiration as coming from spirituality, about gratitude for nature. A pertinent note in this connection is her thought: “compassion is value of dharma, and charity is friend of dharma”. (page 34) In this very segment, we can hear tones of marginalised existence in the hierarchical brahminical societal set-up, where she seems to be re-negotiating her identity at her own terms as she takes up cudgels over being dubbed as ‘achhut’—the child of a mother who was not a brahmin.

These writungs also bring to light the saga of this lady who never attended educational institutions in a formal way yet could read between the lines of the present-day hedonistic educational scenario making people more self-centred and weaning them away from contributing towards society. (page 68) She even had a Marxist bent of mind towards society where in absence of economic equality, accessiblity to resources for all come at an unequal plane. (page 69) The paternalistic emotions of care and nurture are heard as she opposes the way children suffer when parents split up due to the rising pressures of life. (page 72)

The part of the book pertaining to her experiences while travelling in buses brings out the kind of things which all of us hear—the public transport being devoid of emphathy for old people, people making noise in buses, eve-teasing. These are some issues which she points towards as she dared to raise her voice against them. Such instances occur in our everyday existence; so empathy is the state of mind while going through this segment.

Struggle, deprivation, yet determination to trust the inevitable destiny were yardsticks to shape Shanta’s childhood. With marriage happening at the age of 17, life did not change much. With the death of one son and the other son disapproving of his mother in later years she went through poignant times. But she bore all such adversities with commendable fortitude.

Moving away from personal insight and leaping towards her activism, part III captures her social and political interventions. We hear the voice of the subaltern who fights to get her due. She comes forward here as a Durga who is battling at various ends—educating slum children by her association with Ankur, selfless concern to get money for a lady’s burnt house, standing up for the rights of jhuggi jhopri dwellers at MCD meetings, AIDS bhadbhav andolan, nirman mazdoor panchayat sangam. These instances are like threads of an interwoven fabric of life. How being exiled at the level of a mother, sister, wife, daughter, she overcame the trauma to give back good to the life without sitting back and sulking over her destiny. In this struggle within, she was an epitome of compassion to others around her.

To sum up, a beautiful narrative to be read and pondered over. It may not have found space in mainstream discourse involved in covering flamboyant events; the publishers thus deserve credit for putting up an effort in producing the book. It has in store a lesson for all of us, who in some way or other are victimised. Where Shanta Toofani comes to our rescue is where she tells us that we need to battle our way out of this process of victimisation, we need to give our life a larger meaning beyond the self basing ourselves on honesty, courage and conviction.

INVITATION TO BOOK RELEASE: Irom Shramila Aur Manipuri Janta Ki Sahas Yatra

INVITATION TO BOOK RELEASE

Irom Shramila Aur Manipuri Janta Ki Sahas Yatra

Author: Deepti Priya Mehrotra,

(Daanish Books & The Other Media Publication)

AND

A panel discussion on

NON-VIOLENT STRUGGLES AGIANST MILITARISATION

SPEAKERS:

Rita Manchanda

Kalpana Mehta

Irom Singhjit

Babloo Loitongbam

Chair: Radha Bhatt

13 February 2010, Saturday, 3.00 pm

Deputy Speakers Hall, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg Raisina Marg,

Vallabhai Patel House, New Delhi

Organized by

Daanish Books & The Other Media

About the Book & Author

Irom Sharmila has been on a fast unto death for nine years, demanding a repeal of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

In response to the killing of ten innocent people at Malom village near Imphal in November 2000, one among many such atrocities – Irom Sharmila began an indefinite hunger strike demanding repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which empowers military and paramilitary personnel to arrest, shoot, even kill, anyone on the grounds of mere suspicion. The government arrested her and force-fed her through nasal tubes. She has been released and re-arrested innumerable times since, then, but has stood by her demand, steadfastly refusing to eat until the Act is repealed.

Irom Shramila Aur Manipuri Janta Ki Sahas Yatra is hard- hitting account of ordinary people caught between the crossfire of security forces and militants. This book depicts a lively and poignant tale of a beautiful but violence affected state –its history, people’s struggles and women’s movements in pursuance of peace, justice and dignified living.

Deepti Priya Mehrotra has a PhD in Political Science and post- doctoral thesis in philosophy. She is actively associated with various social organizations and has an enduring interest in people’s movements, feminist peace building and creative education. Presently, she teaches part time in Delhi University and Ambedkar University, and is associated with an organisation called Sampurna that works on children’s literature and curriculum books.

Shahzad’s Arrest And Goebbels’ Lies

Shahzad’s Arrest And Goebbels’ Lies

By Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association

08 February, 2010

Teacherssolidarity.org

Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, believed that a lie repeated several times over would soon acquire the legitimacy of truth. The Delhi Police has surpassed Goebbels’ strategy. By deluging the press and the public with one lie after another, it hopes that the truth will never be extricated.

Who killed Inspector Sharma?

Shahzad Ahmed (not ‘urf Pappu’ as he has never borne that name), the most recent prize catch of the Delhi Police is being charged with the murder of Inspector Sharma. Till now, we had been told that it were the two slain boys, Atif Ameen and Md. Sajid, whose fire had killed Inspector Sharma. Indeed, the NHRC report attempts to establish this at great length. According to “sources” quoted in the press, Shahzad fired from a .32 revolver (Zee news, Feb 07, TOI 07). Now according to the NHRC report, the cartridge cases recovered from the site of the ‘encounter’ matched the .30 pistols, W2 and W3, which the police claimed were found in flat 108, L-18, Batla House. Two mutilated bullets recovered from the bullet proof jacket of a police man, according to the NHRC were fired from W3. It may be repeated here again that no seizure list was prepared in the presence of any independent witness, as is procedurally required, so the claim that W2 and W3 and the corresponding bullets and cartridge belonged to Atif and Sajid is just that—a claim. No unaccounted for bullets and cartridge cases have been mentioned by either the police or the NHRC.

So what happened to the cartridge cases of the .32 pistol used by Shahzad? Did the bullets and cartridge cases disappear in thin air, just as Shahzad and Junaid supposedly did?

The Great Escape?

According to the police version, reproduced faithfully in the press, Shahzad and Junaid escaped from the building L-18 while the encounter was on. It has been repeatedly pointed out by civil rights activists that the building only has one exit point through the staircase which is covered by a heavy iron grill. In the stories that have appeared in the press and also repeated by the NHRC report, this is sought to be explained by the presence of two separate doors to the flat 108.

However, had the NHRC or reporters bothered to inspect the site, it would have been clear that these two gates are adjacent to each other. A police party standing at the landing of the 4th floor facing flat 108 would face both the doors simultaneously as both doors actually open in the same landing. In the bizarre reconstruction of events according to the police, first, Shahzad and Junaid supposedly opened the second door to the landing, where the police party was, and then ran down the stairs screaming that they were residents (TOI report, 05 Feb). Now, according to the statement of Karnail Singh, Joint Commissioner of Police, Special Cell, Delhi there was a “back-up team, headed by ACP Sanjeev Kumar Yadav …which immediately rushed to the flat in order to rescue the team members and apprehend the militants holed inside the flat.”(NHRC report).

Now suppose, there were two militants who had fired upon the police and were running down the stairs, surely, they must still have wielded the pistols (.32??), and regardless of their protestations that they were residents, ACP Yadav’s team, which by the police’s own admission rushed upstairs immediately, should have apprehended them, or at least attempted to overpower them. And surely, the crowd of people, which the police claimed had collected around the building, hearing the firing, would have sighted two young men, pistols in hand running down the stairs. But all we have is police claims and custodial confessions of Shahzad (which remember are not admissible in court) that he and Junaid fired and fled the spot miraculously.

But wait, it gets more twisted. According to a news report, Shahzad and Junaid, after making good their escape, walked to the bus stop and took a bus to Badarpur. In the evening, Shahzad and Junaid boarded a train to Mumbai without realizing where it was headed…” (Indian Express, Feb 04). Imagine, a fleeing terrorist waiting at the bus stop for the right route number bus to arrive! In other stories, the duo traveled to Aligarh (some say by train, others insist they took a bus) but there is no consensus on their travel itinerary. According to TOI on Feb 05) from Aligarh, the two went to Lucknow and thence to Azamgarh, where Junaid parted ways with Shahzad. In another report in the same paper, this was the route: Aligarh, Bulandshehar, Lucknow, Khalispur, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Mumbai (where the two separated). (TOI, Feb 07)

So did they take a train out to Mumbai or a bus (or again train) to Aligarh? At the very least, the Delhi Police must try and be consistent in its leaks to the press.

The Pilot Theory Crash lands

As early as January 6, there started to appear reports in the television media (Headlines Today/ Aajtak) that a 9/11 type of attack had been planned by the IM to be conducted by Shahzad Ahmad who had ostensibly received a flying license at an institute in Bangalore. This was attributed to information contained in a confidential communiqué of the Intelligence agencies.

Following Shahzad’s arrest, there was frenzied reporting about his commercial pilot license. But now it turns out that he had never enrolled in a flying institute. One may not choose to believe Shahzad’s mother when she denies he never received any flying training, but the Uttar Pradesh Addl DG (law and order), Brij Lal also refuted the allegation that Shahzad was a pilot (Mail Today, Feb 06). All reports of the aerial module of IM and Shahzad’s key position in this supposed module are based of course on unnamed sources in the police.

Why were the Intelligence agencies so keen to propagate the falsehood of his flying skills?

 
Manisha Sethi, Adil Mehdi, Ahmed Sohaib, Ghazi Shahnawaz, Tanweer Fazal, Arshad Alam, Sanghamitra Misra, Amabarien Al qadar, Haris ul Haq, Azra Razak, Farah Farooqi, Anwar Alam

France: New Anti-Capitalist Party defends democratic right to wear hijab

NPA candidate Ilham Moussaïd.

By Olivier Besancenot, translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (MRZine)

February 3, 2010 -- Le Figaro caricatured my words regarding the candidacy of Ilham Moussaïd, who is on our list in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur regional elections. After a serious and complex debate, the Vaucluse chapter of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) made a choice to include on its feminist, anti-capitalist and internationalist lists an NPA member who believes in wearing a headscarf on account of her religious convictions.

Our party welcomes youth, the unemployed, the precarious, workers of all backgrounds who find their values reflected in the party. Faith is a matter of personal choice that does not create any obstacle to participation in our struggle so long as members sincerely share the secular, feminist and anti-capitalist fundamental principles of our party.

I therefore simply said to Le Figaro: "Ilham is evidence that one can be a member of the NPA and wear a headscarf."

The NPA is a party that fights against any form of oppression and exclusion. A debate on liberation and the place of religion -- and all its forms of expression -- exists within the NPA, in view of its next congress.

[The original article "Déclaration d'Olivier Besancenot. Rectificatif à propos d'un article du Figaro" was published on the web site of the New Anti-Capitalist Party on February 3, 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi. See, also Françoise David and Amir Khadir, "Secularism: For a Broad, Open, and Democratic Debate" (MRZine, January 18, 2010); Danièle Obono, "The Left and Racial Domination in France: An Interview with Sadri Khiari (MIR)" (MRZine, January 6, 2010); and Saïd Mekki, "The Decolonizing Struggle in France: An Interview with Houria Bouteldja" (MRZine, October 28, 2009).]

* * *

Far-left party reveals ‘veiled’ female candidate

By Tony Todd
February 3, 2010 -- French 24 -- The veil issue has shown its face in French politics once again, after radical anti-capitalist fringe party the NPA revealed that one of its candidates in forthcoming regional elections wears an Islamic headscarf.

A candidate for a radical French anti-capitalist party in the forthcoming regional elections wears a headscarf as a token of her Islamic faith, something that has raised eyebrows in this rigidly secular society.

All the more so because the NPA (New Anti-capitalist Party), led by Trotskyist postman Olivier Besancenot, is a party that generates headlines for its extreme left-wing position on issues including militant secularism.

“A woman can be a feminist, can uphold secular values and wear a [Islamic] headscarf at the same time,” he told the newspaper.

The veiled meanings of a very French issue
Wearing a headscarf – as well as the wearing of other religious symbols such as crucifixes – is strictly prohibited in French public institutions such as schools.

And a cross-party parliamentary commission last month came up with a list of recommendations for a law to ban wearing the full face veil (niqab) in public places such as hospitals and on public transport.
It is a very French issue. Islamic headscarfs in France are all referred to as “voile” – meaning veil – whether or not they cover the face.

The French public dislikes veils because they are seen as the embodiment of male domination over women, as well as symbols of religious attachment in a country that clings fiercely to the principle of the separation of church and state.

But veils and headscarves are also an overt reminder that France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim population, something that makes the (often Christian) right wing uncomfortable.

Radical pragmatism of a fringe party
Making headway in the country’s deprived suburbs, notable for their large Muslim immigrant populations, could pay political dividends for the NPA, which is very much a fringe party.

The “banlieues”, Besancenot told Le Figaro, are “deserts where social associations, unions and political activity barely flourish”.

They are also places where women, some of whom wear Islamic veils, are starting to carry the torch for the NPA’s brand of militant anti-capitalist Trotskyism.

In a statement, the party said the choice to put Moussaid forward as a candidate had come after “a serious and complex debate”.

“[Moussaid] is a militant feminist, anti-capitalist and internationalist who happens to wear a headscarf for religious reasons”, the statement continues. “The NPA welcomes young people, the unemployed and wage-earners of all walks of life who hold our ideals dear. Religious faith is a private matter that should in no way be an obstacle to the NPA’s fight for its fundamental principles of secularism, feminism and anti-capitalism.”