On May 30, 2008, he was denied entry into India on the grounds of "insufficient documentation", as a red-faced Indian Ministry for Home Affairs sent a hurried apology to the chastened activist who was in India to participate in a counter-terrorism conference organized by a local human rights group.

On the other hand, Ansar Burney has expressed regrets over the "half-apology" tendered to him by the Government of India and has said that the apology has pained him more than the incident itself.

Why apologise to me at all if I was not carrying some required documents? In that case, I should apologise to India. Either they were wrong, or I was wrong. It cannot be both ways. This is a half-apology, and it has caused me more pain.

Burney was a minister in the care-taker government which oversaw the general elections earlier this year. The Burney family runs the Ansar Burney Trust that is engaged in prison welfare work. Their aim is to look after the needs and interests of the Indian prisoners in Pakistan and the Pakistani prisoners in India. The trust has weathered severe criticism in Pakistan for its campaign to secure release of Kashmir Singh and the suspension of the death sentence of another prisoner, Sarabjit Singh.

Sarabjit Singh's sister was dismayed by this action of the Immigration authorities. Our politicians are playing "dirty politics", she said.

Perhaps the dirty-politics playing politicians should be sensitive and empathetic to the fact that Ansar stands as a liberal face of Pakistan. India and Pakistan, the two estranged neighbours have been locked in a power struggle over the subcontinent for the past decades, running up to the independence of the countries. The dire need is for a few young liberal Pakistanis and Indians to take up the cause for peace and stability in the region and eradicating any scope for misunderstandings in the future.

The Afghan War in the north has, without any doubt, brought peace and stability to India, but has churned the Pakistani Republic into turmoil.

The newly elected democratic government in Pakistan is a beacon of hope for the millions of Pakistanis who wish for a brighter future for their children; and much of the ire and resentment is directed towards the West. The Indian government should not remain averse to the fact. The need of the hour is to strengthen ties by entering into bilateral trade agreements. Trade has a greater nuclear and war deterrent than our politicians would like to believe.

People like Ansar Burney should be honoured for their efforts.

The Jaipur blasts happened in areas where both Hindus and Muslims live. (AFP)

By Aijaz Zaka Syed

"I am puzzled at your silence and the silence of your newspaper on the Jaipur blasts," wrote in an intelligent reader based in the US. Venkat, an Indian techie, (not his full name) seems to follow what I write and often sends me his feedback. And I must confess I often enjoy his interesting take on the issues that usually exercise me, even if I don't always agree with him.

This one, coming as it did soon after the terror attack on Jaipur in India this month, was a little surprising. Because after my day-to-day responsibilities, I barely manage to do a weekly column and it comes on a fixed day of the week. The Jaipur incident took place on May 13 and my column, even if it were devoted to the issue, wasn't due until May 22.

I wrote back to Venkat explaining my inability to keep up with his expectations. I also pointed out in passé that we had run an editorial and several letters on Jaipur the very next day condemning the attack in strongest terms.

Back home in India, numerous Muslim organisations and public figures have vehemently protested the attack that killed 62 people. But their voices couldn't have reached Venkat or the larger Indian society. Because the marginalised, ghettoised and semi-literate community that I come from has lost its voice — literally.

Even when an anguished Indian Muslim speaks his mind on issues like terror and the larger concerns facing the community and the country, the media has little time or patience for these sound bites. The media is more interested in burning the 'usual suspects' at the stake of public opinion even before they are judged by a court. Evidence be damned. Justice can go take a walk! Who cares who really is responsible for the Jaipur attacks? Or the Hyderabad blasts? Or the Mumbai bombings?

I wish friends like Venkat could read Urdu dailies. For they'd see how Indian Muslim views these despicable acts targeting innocent people. The minority community is as outraged as fellow Indians over the spilling of innocent blood. In fact, it's all the more anguished because the responsibility for these heinous acts is being laid at its door.

Prominent Urdu dailies are full of commentaries by Muslim leaders and intellectuals condemning the Jaipur tragedy and growing incidents of this nature.

How much of this has found its way into the English dailies or perennially hysterical Hindi news channels? Little. No wonder Venkat is 'puzzled' over our silence.

This is precisely why one has been shouting out, for what it's worth, to tell the world that such outrageous actions have nothing to do with Islam. Terrorism is an extremist and nihilistic death cult. There cannot be a greater absurdity than linking it to a faith that celebrates life and hope and advocates peace, justice, reason, balance and moderation in everything we do.

This is what I tried to argue after the 7/7 London bombings. Even as one has repeatedly assailed the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and widespread human rights abuses as part of the terror war, one has never shied away from taking on the extremists who claim to speak on behalf of Islam and yet shed innocent blood.

In fact, I see these elements as greatest threat to Islam and Muslims because they kill in the name of our faith and distort its humane teachings. Which is why one has constantly pleaded with Muslim intellectuals and leaders to raise their voice against this lunatic fringe.

God knows we can't afford to lose this battle of hearts and minds. We really need to make some noise; making it clear to the world that this is not the Islam we know (no apologies to Bush).

That said, I find these expectations from Indian Muslims to prove they are not with the terrorists every time there's an attack of this sort rather disconcerting. Why do we have to prove our innocence and loyalty to the land that has been our home for more than a thousand years every time there's an incident like this?

Indian Muslims have paid and continue to pay an incalculable price for the Original Sin of the country's Partition. How long are we supposed to carry this cross on our shoulders? This is especially unfair to people born after the Partition. The people of my generation and even those from my parents' generation never had a role to play in the division of the country, whatever the geopolitical and historical factors contributing to it.

Why then is this burden of historical guilt thrust on us time and time again? It's the shadow of this guilt that has been the bane of Indian Muslim's existence. Weighed down by this shame, he has put up with every injustice and insult all these years.

This is why while his fellow Indians confidently demand their share of the pie, he is content in his ghettos and grateful for crumbs — or promises of crumbs — the politicians throw his way. He is elated when his identity as an Indian is recognised at the time of polls and is wooed by political parties. But times are a-changing. Today's Muslims aren't prepared to be treated like second-class citizens in their own land.

We love this great land as much as the next Indian. Nobody has any right to lecture us on patriotism. And we aren't ready to stand there, our heads bowed in shame, and take the blame every time some nut out there goes berserk.

Trust me it does hurt us too when innocent people suffer. I still can't get the image of that young woman in a new saree, henna still fresh on her hands, out of my mind. She lay there on the road, next to a young man, maybe her husband. She looked as if she was in a deep, peaceful sleep. My heart went out to her and her loved ones. She didn't deserve to die this way. And those who did this to her must be brought to justice and must be made to pay for their crimes.

But don't blame a whole community when it's not even established who is responsible for this outrage. And please don’t expect us to apologise. For we too are victims of terrorism.

After Jaipur, RSS and BJP men went on the rampage targeting Muslim homes and small businesses in the old city. But how many of us know that at least eight of those killed in Jaipur were Muslim? All of those killed in Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad and many of the victims of the Gokul chaat joint, again in Hyderabad, had been Muslims. Many of those killed in the Mumbai train bombings were from the minority community.

In fact, if there's one community that has suffered the most at the hands of terrorists, it is the Muslims. Just look around, from Pakistan to Afghanistan and from Iraq to Palestine, it is Islam and its followers who are at the receiving end, whatever the causes. Not to mention the disgrace it has brought to the fair name of a great faith, distorting its humane and liberating teachings, perhaps forever.

But this goes beyond religious identities and ideologies. Terror knows no faith. And we are all its victims, whether we are Muslims, Christians or Hindus.

-Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior journalist and commentator based in Dubai. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com.

Ten years ago, on the occasion of the birth celebrations of India’s own prophet of peace – Gautama Buddha – the Indian State exploded nuclear warheads under the sands of Rajasthan. Pakistan responded to it in a predictably unfortunate manner by exploding a set of nuclear warheads of its own. We complete a decade of living under the nuclear shadow in the sub-continent of South Asia and it’s a good time as any to remind ourselves of what this means.

Before we get into an analysis of these ten years and their consequences, it would be good to remind ourselves what exactly are nuclear weapons and what they do. Often called the ultimate weapon of a war, nuclear weapons kill and maim on a massive scale. A simulation done by some scientists and ex-military servicemen indicated that a “limited” nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would lead to the instantaneous death of about 12 million people in both countries and about three times the number would be seriously injured and diseased. That gives us a figure of close to 50 million people dead or irretrievably injured in both countries. To put this into perspective, we need to remember that “only” about a million people were killed during Partition in both countries and the total number who had to migrate ranged between 12 and 15 million. It is clear that even the most “limited” nuclear weapon war between India and Pakistan would likely lead to the end of history for both our countries.

But the consequences of nuclear war are not merely on those who are directly impacted. It will poison the soil of much of Pakistan’s agrarian belt along the Indus river and crops grown there for centuries will contain radioactive elements, and similar would be the impact on the agricultural lands in India. Water, both in the rivers and lakes and inside the ground, would be poisoned and made undrinkable or unusable in agriculture or industry. Winds will carry the radioactive dust on the permanent snows of the Himalayas poisoning our long term water supplies and impacting non-combatant countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Afghanistan and Burma.

If the immediate impact of nuclear weapons is massive, their long term consequences are even worse. The soil and water are contaminated, almost irretrievably, and genetic deformities and malignancies are passed on over generations. Even today in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fourth and fifth generation children who are being born often express genetic mutations and tumours which are caused by their great-grandparents exposure to radiation. Billions of dollars have been spent on sanitising the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US and Japanese governments in an attempt to make these cities habitable again, yet these problems arise. Neither India nor Pakistan would have a fraction of these resources to spend on cleaning and curing the physical and human remains of their nuclear battle. Given the utter poverty in which our people live, it would imply that the disease load and ecological cost of this nuclear exchange would be that much greater and longer lasting.

It is not merely the massive scale of death and destruction which makes nuclear weapons a moral hazard of the first order and a weapon which can have no justification whatsoever. Even from a military point of view, it is unusable. The only context in which this weapon can be used if one of gross military asymmetry. If one country is unequivocally stronger than the other in military terms, it could make some military sense to use nuclear weapons as the danger of a counter attack would be minimal. Therefore, the US could use this weapon on a militarily defeated and physically exhausted Japan in 1945. The certain destruction consequent to a nuclear retaliation by the adversary makes nuclear weapons impractical between two nuclear armed States. Moreover, even in most cases where the combatants may be asymmetrically matched in military and nuclear armed strengths, the use of nuclear weapons by the stronger country would render their victory that much more difficult given the present context of international relations and laws. It is for this reason even the rogue state of the United States has not been able to use nuclear weapons in the post-Soviet world against weak adversaries like Sudan, Iraq or Serbia. The use of nuclear weapons would have destroyed the American enemy but would have made the US lose the war’s strategic aims.

Lastly, the economic and social consequences of nuclear weapons on States which possess them is very negative. Apart from the fact that billions of dollar are diverted to building and sustaining nuclear arsenals, it also fosters a jingoistic national arrogance among the citizens of the State which possesses nuclear weapons which in turn provides strength to right wing politics and violence in society. Globally, just the USA has spent $ 5,500 billion in developing their nuclear arsenal whereas the maximum estimate for a global budget elimination of starvation, universal provision of health care, provision of shelter to all and clean water to all, universal global literarcy, clearing of all landmines and total debt relief to all developing countries would cost $ 2,500 billion over ten years. In simple words, less than half the money spent on the nuclear arsenal of one country, albeit the largest, is enough to solve all the pressing livelihood problems of the world today.

In the context of this unambiguous immorality and impracticality of nuclear weapons, it is quite an “achievement” that the States of India and Pakistan are today partners with the USA and Israel in destroying the global movement towards elimination of nuclear weapons. It is these four countries which bear clear responsibility for the re-nuclearisation of the world and we as citizens of India and Pakistan need to do more to accept our responsibility and resist this demon.

Unfortunately, the past decade has been one where the opponents of nuclear weapons have failed at every step. The official establishments in both countries should look back smugly over their ‘acomplishments’ over this decade, and these have been many. Both countries have managed to end the political and economic sanctions which were imposed on them by the international community and are today preferred allies of US imperialism. Pakistan used the strategic requirements of the USA in the post-9/11 world while India has leveraged its growing economic clout. Both countries have managed to build up a “respectable” arsenal of nuclear weapons and acquired competence in handling and working nuclear armies.

But, in India, the greatest achievement of the nuclear lobby has been the cooption of the anti-nuclear voices. Who would remember today that Dr. Manmohan Singh had opposed the nuclear weaponisation of India in 1998 May. Today he stands as a champion of the Indo-US nuclear deal which would provide the India’s nuclear arsenal with large supplies of uranium as well as remove the technology barriers for its nuclear industry. Even among those who oppose the nuclear deal, the focus has changed from an outright rejection of nuclear weapons to a ‘realist’ position of rejecting nuclear agreements with the USA but promoting nuclear cooperation with Russia, France and other countries. In fact, recently when India tested its nuclear capable Agni III missile, there was not one word of protest from any quarter in India. The situation in Pakistan seems similarly dismal. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are the four rogue nuclear States which do not even have a minimal anti-nuclear domestic voice to temper the phallic hallucinations of our warmongers.

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This article was published in my weekly column in The Post on 21 May, 2008.

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In the past two weeks, this column has tried to understand why is it that China and South Asia (historical India) account for a 92 million out of the 100 million “missing women” of the world. Patriarchy is common to all historical societies yet it is the civilisations of these two regions which have developed this ghastly tradition and not others. While the reasons may be numerous, it seems that there was something common in particular forms of feudal culture which developed in these two civilisations which have promoted this particularly vicious and murderous form of patriarchy.

This column had argued that both Confucianism in China and the various forms of social stratification influenced by the Caste system in South Asia were unique feudal social forms which had easily adapted themselves to capitalist economic relations. In fact, it was precisely among those social groups which were integrating most with the capitalist world, that ideologies of “tradition”, “indigenous culture” and “religious purity” (all code words for feudal mentalités and ideologies) were growing fastest. At least, this is the experience of South Asia. It is difficult to ascertain the situation in China but there is a clear revival of Confucian ideas in Chinese society which parallels the revival of capitalist relations.

Both Confucianism and the South Asian feudal form made sons the ideological centre of the family and social order. Without sons, families would not only dissolve in the material sense (in that there would be no one to pass on the property to) but would also lapse spiritually into a sort of limbo since the spirits of the dead needed to be constantly placated by sons in their prayers. While the material importance of male heirs to continue private property in both feudalism and early capitalism was a universal phenomenon which gave strength to patriarchy, in these two Asian civilisations, the moral – spiritual importance given to sons made them semi-divine and reduced women to sub-human levels.

As these two civilisations have encountered and adopted capitalism as a system to organise their economic world, they have continued to use their extant feudal social stratification with its ideologies of loyalty, obedience and lack of free-will to organise society. These feudal ideologies lead to the continuation and spread of a feudal mentalité. This mentalité has at its core the idea of inequity, dependence and filial piety, the exact opposites of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – the slogans of modern emancipation. These ideals are seen as a moral beacon for people to live a good life and compete for political loyalty and social acceptance with the morality of modern emancipation. Inequity, dependence and filial piety provide excellent tools to discipline working people to the needs of their employers and to the authority of their Governments. It also continuously divides working people into primordial identities and weakens their political unity. In these, and many other ways, this feudal mentalité provides a strong ideological foundation for capitalism in these countries.

But when this feudal mentalité is mixed with capitalist economic relations, it leads to an erosion of the supportive and protective features of feudal social relations. While feudal mentalité has inequity, dependence and filial piety at its core, it also provides sustenance and support to those who live in its fold. But capitalist economic relations dissolve the supportive and protective aspects of feudal relations, whether it is between humans or between humans and nature. Only the repressive and regressive aspects of inequity, dependence and filial piety remain.

For example, the feudal form of marriage remains intact in both South Asia and China as it provides both a source of capital accumulation for the groom's family as well as provides it with a life-long supply of unpaid domestic labour and the tools of biological reproduction. Dowry (a feudal form of property transfer) gets transformed into a capital accumulation strategy by the groom’s family. This form of capital accumulation would be called “primitive accumulation” by Marxists and is similar to what the pirates and colonial plunderers used to do in the 17^th century. Those forms and practices of feudal marriage are valorised and strengthened which provide economic gain to the grooms family and thus give feudal patriarchy a particularly sharp and inhuman edge in its contemporary, capitalistic avatar. It is instructive that in both India and China (as well as much of Asia and the Arab world) the feudal form of family continues and thrives under colonial, semi-colonial and capitalist contexts.

The feudal mentalité already predisposes people to view all those who are non-elite, non-male in sub-human categories since this mentalité is based on inequity, dependence and filial piety. When the market economies’ need to accumulate capital is interwoven with this mentalité, it turns all those who are categorised non-elite, non-male as mere instruments of capital accumulation. It converts them into veritable “animals with tongue” (the famous Aristotelian categorisation of farm animals as “animals without tongue” for cattle and horses and “animals with tongue” for human slaves) for the feudal-in-mentalité-but-capitalist-in-currency man.

It is for this reason that millions of parents view their girl child as a pure (mere?) economic liability and not as a human being. It is also for this reason that many of the successful schemes to counter femicide are based on such pure economic reasoning. In India the Central and State Governments have come up with myriad schemes which give economic incentives to parents for keeping their girl child alive. Often the amount promised in such schemes is also calculated, quite unabashedly, to equalise the purported monetary loss that the family would suffer due to the presence of the girl child. Alternatively, many schemes threaten disincentives which would negate the economic gain the family would make by doing away with the loss-making girl child. Even the awareness generating publicity campaigns stress on the economic benefits of keeping the girl alive in the modern economy. In all these cases, the government and policy makers are acknowledging, albeit indirectly, that girls and women are nothing more than economic units for their families.

The interesting, and tragic, aspect of mentalities is that it provides such a complete and closed world-view (what philosophers term Weltanschauung) that even its actual victims are psychologically comfortable viewing the world in its terms and acting on the basis of its moral codes. Therefore the inexplicable acts of mothers killing their daughter’s and aborting female foetuses; and mother-in-laws inflicting the very same injuries they suffered on their daughter-in-laws.

It appears that unless this specific feudal mentalité and its culture is attacked and destroyed it would be difficult to end this continuing genocide of women. An interesting vindication of this position comes from China, where in the period of the unfortunately organised “Cultural Revolution” the sex ratio jumped in favour of women, only to fall again, equally drastically, with the beginning of the capitalist restoration in the 1990s. It is impermissible to return to the barbarity of China’s “Cultural Revolution” but its basic premise – of an all out attack on feudal mentalité and its cultures – is correct and we today need democratic methods of organising a similar “Cultural Revolution”.

Before I close this article, I would like to point out that in this fight against feudal mentalité and its cultural expressions, women will find lower caste men, ethnic minorities and tribals to be their natural allies. A political praxis which does not naturally lead to an alliance of women, lower castes, minorities and tribals, is prima facie, a wrong political praxis since their enemy is the same. It is also important to remember that victory in this battle is equally crucial for elite men who are otherwise incapable of breaking out of their golden cages merely through their armchair pursuits of drawing room chatter and high theory.

(concluded)

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This article was published in my weekly column in The Post dated 7th May, 2008.

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Post script:

A google search would show hundreds of thousands of internet resources and news reports on the killing of women. I am here linking a newsreport from today's Times of India which illustrates the argument I have given above.

"Things have changed and improved a bit. We do have girls around now," Inder Singh says, while admitting that baby girls are killed even today in the village. " Kya karein? [what to do?] A good match for a girl means lots of money for her dowry."

Read the entire report here

A good blog with lots of news reports and documents relating to femicide in India.

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Last week this column had spoken about the fact that there are about 100 million women less on this earth than there should be. Women who are “missing” since they are aborted, burnt, starved and neglected to death by families who prefer sons to daughters. This column had also identified the countries of South Asia, East Asia, West Asia and Saharan Africa as the main regions which were missing most of these women. The estimated number of women who are missing are 44 million in China, 39 million in India, 6 million in Pakistan and 3 billion in Bangladesh. This is the single largest genocide in human history. Ever. Some researchers have coined a word for this phenomenon: Femicide, or the killing of the human female because she is female.

What is significant is that globally this genocide seems to be confined largely to Asia. Even within Asia, it is largely confined to the two historically coherent zones of China and South Asia (what was historically called India). These two areas together contribute 92 % of the total missing women of the world. While Census figures are available only from the mid 19th Century for South Asia and from the 20th Century for China, it is quite apparent that the killing of women and the aborting of female foetuses is not a modern phenomenon. The invention of ultra-sonography and other pre-natal diagnostic techniques may have contributed to an increase in the number and ‘efficiency’ of femicide through abortions, but the practice of killing women has a much longer history, stretching at least into the middle ages.

It is but obvious that femicide is based on a form of extreme patriarchal social system which gives primacy to sons and devalues daughters enough to make it possible for parents to kill their own off-spring without any moral dilemma. But patriarchy is hardly the preserve of South Asian societies or of China. It is a global phenomenon which is to be found in all historical societies. In all historical societies, whether in Europe, Africa, Americas or Asia, property has been controlled by men and lineage generally passes through the male heirs. Political power too is controlled by men and so is social status. In fact, some of the specific forms of patriarchy which existed in medieval Europe was much worse than what is practiced in the cities of India, China and Pakistan of 2008.

Even a comparison of modern societies which are similar in various ways shows that there is something specific about the societies of South Asia and China which make it possible for millions of people to ‘do away’ with their daughters for economic or social reasons. While India and Pakistan show such low sex ratio. Sex ratio is defined as the ratio of men to women in society. One form of the sex ratio is to calculate the number of women for every 1000 men. The other method is to calculate the number of men for every 100 women. We shall use the latter method in here as it is now more universally used and the United Nations provides data in this format.

According to the United Nations population data, globally there were 101.7 men to 100 women (which means that the sex ratio is 101.7) in 2000. But in China, the same sex ratio was 106.8; in India it was 107.9; in Pakistan it was 106 and in Bangladesh it was 105.3.

What is surprising is that in many neighbouring countries, which share much with these countries historically, sociologically and culturally, the sex ratio is not so skewed. Japan, which was historically influenced by China (not to mention India) has always had a good sex ratio and even today (2000) its sex ratio is about 95 men to a 100 women. Korea too, which was influenced by China has a sex ratio of about 100 which means an equal number of men and women; while Vietnam, another country with long Chinese influence has a sex ratio of about 99 men to a 100 women.

If we look in the South Asian neighbourhood, while India and Bangladesh have a low sex ratio, Burma, their neighbour in the east and till 1937 a part of the same British Indian Raj, has more women than men as does Nepal. Countries like Thailand and Indonesia which have had long historical ties with peninsular India too have more women than men. Other countries with a similar developmental or religio-cultural profile do not show such a tendency of killing their females.

So what is that feature common to both China and South Asia which could explain the unique predilection of these two historical civilisations to so nonchalantly murder their women? I must admit that it is not easy to answer this question with any amount of certainity. But there is one historical commonality between the civilisations of China and India which seems to hold at least some clues towards answering this question.
This commonality could be the ideologies of feudalism which both these civilisations developed and which remain firmly entrenched in their social relations even today, many decades after the process of modernisation began.

The Chinese ideology of feudalism is known as Confucianism while in India there was no particular name given to it; though much of it derived from the legal texts which are commonly referred to as the Manusmriti. As an earlier column of mine had argued (Caste and Capitalism, dated 27 June 2007), the forms of feudal ideology which developed in India (and China) were flexible enough to enable them to continue providing ideological justification for capitalism. In all other societies, specially Europe, feudal ideologies were found incapable of providing legitimacy to capitalist social relations and therefore the transition from feudalism to capitalism was possible only with the total destruction of feudal ideas. In Europe this meant the challenge to the Catholic Church – the renaissance and reformation, the process of secularisation of social relations, the delegitimisation of social hierarchy and its replacement by ideologies of equality and personal freedom.

No such social reform has accompanied the rise of capitalism in either China or India. In fact, the contrary trend seems to be the norm. Those parts of society which seem most rapidly to be integrating with capitalism and the global economy are precisely the social groups which are displaying an increased predilection for “tradition” and “religion”. As this column had argued in last year, the caste form of social stratification has proven itself to be highly capable of providing a social scaffolding to the requirements of modern capital in India. Similarly, Confucian ideas of discipline, obedience and social rank seem to play a analogous role in present day China.

If this hypothesis is correct, then it is the continuation of the feudal mentalité in China and South Asia combined with the precipitous spread of capitalist economic and social relations which makes it possible for families to view their daughters and wives in such crude material terms of profit and loss and dispose of loss making liabilities without considering them human. It is the feudal mentalité which makes everyone (men as well as women) view males as qualitatively better than women and it is the practical, monetary push of capitalist social relations which monetises human relations and shows up women as loss making liabilities which need to be reduced.

(to be continued)

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This article was published in my weekly column in The Post on 30 April, 2008.

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Napoleon is said to have observed that geography is destiny. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be emphasizing the truth of the emperor of France’s words in the next two days as he makes surprise appearances in Pakistan and India.

The president’s visits will last just a few hours and are likely to set in train big changes for the region. Sensing that the clock is ticking for the Bush administration, Iran wants to press ahead with a long-proposed 1,700-mile pipeline to deliver gas to Pakistan and India, at a cost $7.5bn.

Understanding that such a project would see a shared strategic interest develop between three nations straddling the world’s main oil and gas artery, the US peddles a rival scheme: The $7.6bn gas pipeline from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad field through Herat and Kandahar in Afghanistan to Multan in Pakistan, and finally into India.

Both may go ahead but it is Iran’s proposal that has momentum. Oil ministers met in Islamabad last week and agreed to sign a bilateral agreement and to start construction of the pipeline by 2010. India also wants to put back on track a floundering $25bn deal for getting 5 million tons of liquefied gas from Iran every year for the next 25 years.

In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that the US has been unable to crack the Persian puzzle. The US’s attempts to ostracize Iran over its nuclear program have so far yielded little. Washington’s sanctions strategy has also been undone, principally by China’s announcement that it would develop oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran for $2bn late last year.

None of this has gone unnoticed in New Delhi and Islamabad. Pakistan has had a fractious relationship with Iran in recent years. India’s dealings with Iran have been bedeviled by baubles dangled by the US: Principally a deal that would legitimate Delhi as a nuclear-weapons power in return for the inspection of civilian atomic energy plants. To Tehran’s annoyance, India also voted with the US and against Iran’s nuclear program twice — in October 2005 and February 2006 — at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Indians are likely to be seeking to make amends with President Ahmadinejad in a big way.

Nukes have long been at the center of Iranian dealings with South Asia.

India has never shared Washington’s assessments of Iran as an aggressive regional power. India’s reason is simple: My neighbor’s neighbor is my friend. Hence it sees Iran as offering a road to Central Asia — a key Indian concern — that bypasses Pakistan. To this end New Delhi has been building up Iran’s Chahbahar port and constructing roads that skirt Pakistan’s border.

India and Iran’s energy, strategic and diplomatic ties, likely to be revived this week, may also see more private sector dealings between the two nations. In the past this has led to revelations of Indian transfers to Iran of high-technology goods that could be useful for Iran’s atomic program.

The truth is that in the past few months, Tehran has emerged as the Gulf’s main power center. In Iraq, Tehran has outfoxed competitors, gaining influence at their expense. Iran’s intervention a few weeks ago to end a bloody Shiite conflict on the banks of Iraq’s Tigris did not go unnoticed in Washington.

In Afghanistan both Indian and Pakistani diplomats have noted that the West’s position is becoming seriously eroded, leaving Iran to shape the debate.

This means they have to take seriously President Ahmadinejad’s recent questioning of NATO’s legitimacy in Afghanistan. There is also a feeling that the Western alliance has become lopsided: The US has accepted it will need to airlift more troops because the Europeans will not. If America ends up as the sole defender of the Kabul regime then the attacks on the “coalition” can be construed as a resistance army fighting an occupier.

All this comes at a time when the Northern Alliance, the former rebels in Kabul over which Iran has considerable influence, have been talking to their archrivals the Taleban, something that is anathema to Washington.

However much the Americans might wish otherwise, the reality is that no one can ignore Iran. Involved in bloody imbroglios in Afghan and Iraq, Tehran calculates the US would not use force against Iran, even if it pursues its nuclear ambitions.

To reinforce this point Iran recently announced that 6,000 new advanced centrifuges were up and running at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

Ahmadinejad plainly enjoys the taunting the US. This is an Iranian luxury, afforded by geography and geology, that neither India and Pakistan have.

It is estimated by historians that about 72 million people were killed during the second World War. Of this number 25 million died in combat, as much as 11 million were killed in the Nazi Holocaust and another 20 million perished in war induced famine. But this is not the single event with the largest killing of human beings in history.

Demographers and economists estimate that today over a 100 million women have been killed globally by societies which prefer sons over daughters. While guns, bombs and Zyklon B (the gas agent in the Nazi gas chambers) were used to kill during World War II, the present genocide against women is carried out by abortions, drowning, strangulation and nutritional and medical neglect. Unlike during a war where the combatants are known and kill only the enemy, in this genocide of women, it is the girl child’s most trusted and loved ones who kill her. It is important to understand that these 100 million women should have been alive and living today if not for the fact that they were killed, often directly in the form of abortion, killing after birth and death due to medical negligence and discrimination over food. It is important to understand that unlike in war where State institutions and politics is responsible for the deaths, here parents and close relatives of the unborn girl and the girl child are responsible for the deaths.

The blood of these 100 million dead women and girls is on all our hands as our hallowed families, which are meant to nurture and protect, have turned into killers of their own girls. Unfortunately, this problem seems to be concentrated in the countries of South Asia, East Asia and China.

The economist Amartya Sen gave the term “missing women” to this phenomenon of fewer women in populations than there should be and estimated that there are at present 44 million women missing in China and 39 million in India. Others have estimated that there are close to 6 million missing women in Pakistan, 3 million in Bangladesh and one million in Afghanistan. This implies that there are actually more women who are killed and missing in South Asia than anywhere else in the world. In India and China there are 107 men to 100 women, in Pakistan there are 108 men to 100 women. Truly a dubious distinction for a region which prides itself on its culture, history and civilisation!

To say that South Asian cultures are biased against women would be an understatement. Historically, some of the most devious, cruel and humiliating forms of female oppression have emerged in South Asia, China and the Arab world. From discriminating the girl child with food, medicine and education, from forcing subservience to male commands, from burning widows and enforcing purdah, from honour killings to female feticide, Asia and the Arab world have led the world in sexual apartheid.

Therefore it is not surprising that an overwhelming number of women reported missing – killed in action on the frontlines of patriarchy’s war on women – are from South Asia, China and its neighbouring countries. What is interesting to note that differences of religion, culture, climate, ideology, social system or economic growth have no influence on this killing of women. Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist, Democracy or dictatorship, feudal, capitalist or socialist, poor or rich, cold or tropical, all over the swathe of Asia, millions of parents are wilfully killing their children who are girls.

While it is important to recognise its wide-spread prevalence, it is also important to identify the causes for its existence, the variations of its practice and the implications of its prevalence if we are to try and end this unprecedented genocide.

Historically, girl children were often killed at birth by the mid-wife by feeding her poison, drowning her, strangulating her with her own umbilical cord or stuffing her mouth with salt. All these practices are reported from different parts of the British Indian Empire by the Firangi civil servants. Even those girls who escaped this death at birth, faced a childhood of neglect in the family with regard to food, medical care and education. Women were married off very early in life, often before they even attained puberty and became mothers in early teenage. Millions more were martyred on the altar of motherhood as the demands of repeated childbirth led to high mortality too. Many were killed when their husbands died, either by the religious practice of Sati or by the more prevalent custom of branding widows as “witches” and “dayens” and then lynching them.

Today, some of these more explicitly cruel forms of killing women may have become rare (though not entirely ended) but these have been replaced by the cold medical technology of the ultra-sound scan of the mother’s womb and the abortion of the female foetus. This brings us to the first of the main variations in the spread of missing women. It is the urban, educated, high income groups which display the maximum number of missing women! This means that the more educated, well-off and urban based a family, the more the chances of girl children being killed.

Men carry the family line and name, property is in the name of men who also wield political and military power (often the same thing), while it is men who are able to attain social status. Therefore if families have had to protect their property, pass it on to their progeny and acquire power in society, they have had to have sons. This feature has been called “son-preference” and is seen as the main cause for the killing of women But this is a necessity common to all forms of patriarchy, and as any Marxist would tell you, the history of all societies is the history of class struggle and the history of all class divided societies is also the history of patriarchy. So the importance of men to own private property, carry on the family line, hold power and control in society has been universal to all human history. But the killing of women, and that too on a scale where a 100 million of them are missing today, is a specific feature of Asian societies (and some North African ones which are influenced by Arab culture).

Some women activists and experts identify a social-psychological pathology which they term “son preference” which fuels this murderous desire for sons at the cost of killing their daughters. They argue that the existence of daughters implies a major loss of property and wealth in the form of dowry which has to be given at her marriage and also entails investments in her education and upbringing which develops her “human capital” which is “lost” to the family which invests but is a net gain for the family which “gains” her in marriage. This has been identified as the main cause of continuation of female foeticide and infanticide, specially in South Asia. Daughters are also a drag on the family’s ability to project themselves socially as economic and human resources have to be invested in protecting their honour and bodies.

While these are surely important causes for the continuation and increase in the killing of women, these do not fully explain this genocide. Next week, this column will explore some other possible reasons as well as look at the consequences of this genocide.

(to be continued)

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This article was published in my weekly column in The Post on Wednesday, 23 April, 2008.

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“If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style”

Quentin Crisp

The last Nizam of Hyderabad was known as the world’s richest man, and he ruled India’s largest princely state.

Osman Ali Khan owned the most extraordinary collection of fabulous jewels- including the world famous Jacob’s diamond-the size of an egg.

The Nizam deposited a staggering £1 million in a UK bank- now estimated to be at least £30 million. The money remained untouched for 60 years- but now 470 descendants as well as India and Pakistan want their slice of the wealth.

In 1947, when India and Pakistan were created, the Nizam-a Muslim- was unsure as to which country he should join. During the decline of his power, India seized the Nizam’s state. However, just before his assets were seized, the Nizam deposited £1 million in an account controlled by Pakistan’s High Commissioner to London in the National Westminster Bank.

Kapil Sibal, Indian minister for science and technology, said: “We are re-starting the negotiation process. How much the private beneficiary get and then what should be the distribution between the government of India and Pakistan will be negotiated.”

Negotiations will be no easy task- the Nizam had 86 mistresses and fathered more than 100 illegitimate children, and all their claims will have to be taken into account. The negotiations are to be conducted over 18 months and to involve the Nizam's grandson, now living in a small apartment in Istanbul after losing much of the family fortune.

In 1957, the British House of Lords ruled that the money might only be unfrozen with the agreement of all parties involved.   

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7348384.stm

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Last week India announced a line of credit of US $ 5.4 billion to African countries for developing their infrastructure and meeting other development goals as well as duty free import scheme for 50 Least Developed Countries, of which 34 are in Africa. Apart from this the Government also announced a grant of US $ 500 million to African countries and doubled the number of fellowships given to students from African and Asian countries.

This was startling news for a country which has for long being among the largest recipients of foreign aid in the world. From the time of its independence till the early years of this century, billions of dollars have been sent to India by global development agencies and NGOs to finance a range of development work. From the large donors like USAID to small donors like the Swiss and Swedish agencies, India has for long remained the largest aid recipient in their annual budgets. Even in 2006-07, the Government of India received US $ 1.83 billion in net external aid, not counting the amount received by non-governmental bodies in assistance. But according to some estimates, India’s annual aid to other countries equals US $ 1 billion. These figures include loans and other credit instruments. Even if one considers only grants (which have no repayment), the Government of India receives about US $ 654 million from the world and gives out something in the range of US $ 150-200 million to other developing countries.

It is not that India has solved its problems with regard to poverty, malnutrition, health, shelter, education and public infrastructure. In fact, with a third of the world’s extreme poor and 40 per cent of the world’s malnourished children India ranks a lowly 128 in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Looked at in absolute numbers, the figures are even more startling. India has about 700 million people who earn less than US $ 2 a day and close to 300 million earn less than one dollar! Eighty five million children in India are chronically malnourished and about 400 million of its citizens cannot read or write. Four out of five Indians do not have access to safe drinking water and sanitation too is beyond the reach of a vast majority.

Given India’s large population size, it has been referred to as a “swing State” by an international aid worker who said that the ability of India to achieve the Millennium Development Goals would decide whether the entire world achieves them. It is the massive size of absolute and relative under-development which marks out India from all the 188 countries of this world. It is this large development challenge which gets most donor agencies, developed country governments and international NGOs to invest money and energy in India to help it overcome its under-development. Whether this foreign aid really helps in ending poverty and underdevelopment is another story and we need not concern ourselves here with that.

So what is going on here? Why is the Government of India investing serious money in providing aid to other countries while itself being an aid receipient and with so many of its own citizens deprived of the basic rights of life?

To understand this seeming contradiction, it is necessary to move away from an understanding of the State and the Government as a representative of all its citizens working for the benefit of all. The State, any State, represents the concentration of political and armed power in the territory it controls. This power of the State is not derived from the institutions of the State (like police, army, bureaucracy, judiciary, etc) but from the social and economic power of the dominant classes in that society. In India, the dominant classes have been the industrial capitalists and the landed interests, in an alliance with the professional middle classes. The policies of the State represent the interests of this class alliance and to understand the growing appetite of the Indian State for effecting charity in Africa and Central Asia, it is necessary to understand the interests of these ruling classes.

The economic liberalisation which started in 1991 was an attempt by the State to free the industrial capitalists, sections of the landed interests which wanted to enter commercial agriculture and the urban professionals who wanted to get more for their management skills, from the limitations which had been imposed on them in an attempt to redistribute income. This is not to say that the earlier attempts at redistribution of income from the rich towards the poor (what was termed “socialistic pattern of development” by the Congress Governments and what is today called the “licence-quota raj”) was either effective or efficient. It constrained the productive forces hidden in capital and did not live up to its welfare promises due to the massive corruption in the entire State structures.

With the collapse of the Socialist State systems and the growing political power of the Indian elites, it was possible to do away with the fetters on capital that had hitherto existed. While this took away the already insufficient safety net of minor income redistribution for the poor, it unshackled capital to maximise its profits. Indian manufacturing and service sectors have grown phenomenally and Indian capitalists today are within touching distance of their global counterparts. The success of the economic liberalisation policy (for the capitalists) is evident in the massive concentration of capital that has taken place in their hands. Today, four of the ten richest men in the world are Indians, three of them based in India.

This growth of Indian capital and capitalist cannot be confined to within the country. To grow in the manner they have been and to sustain this growth, Indian capital needs to reach out to global resources and sell in global markets. It needs to invest its capital wherever the highest rates of return are promised. It has also to compete with European, American and Japanese capital(ists) who have been entrenched for much longer in all the nooks and crannies of the world, exploiting its resources and selling its wares. It is in this context that foreign aid comes handy. Foreign aid has for long been a preferred tool of expanding capital(ists) and their State(s) to enter new markets and protect old markets from competition. In this sense, foreign aid has the same function as discount sales and free gifts for retail customers. It has less to do with actual efforts to end poverty and more to do with capturing markets and resources.

India (and China) are slowly transforming from the old condition of aid receivers to aid givers. While China is already a net aid giver, India is still a net aid receiver. But the trend is clear. Almost all major donor governments and agencies have announced a reduction in the aid package to India while India is continually ramping up its annual aid programme.

This is but one indicator of the changing structure of the Indian economy, its State and the nature of its ruling classes. It is not for nothing that India is among the very few countries being seriously considered for full membership of the G-8 – the premier club of the world’s dominant economies.

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This article was published in my weekly column in The Post on 16th April, 2008.

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49.6 Vaas to Chanderpaul, SIX, This is the stuff of dreams! Off all times Vaas has to bowl a full toss! Chanderpaul waits for the gift, clubs that across the line and the ball just goes sailing over Jayawardene at deep midwicket. He waits and waits for the ball to clear the rope, a rather long and agonising one, he breaks out in celebration and the entire troupe from the dressing room rush onto the field and crowd around him

[From cricinfo.com]

He has a good company, in the name of Mr. Chaminda Vaas :). There is of course, one Mr. Mashrafe Mortaza, but that hardly is a company you count in international cricket. And then, in principle, you could count Steve Waugh, who conceded a six on last ball for a Tie].

What's more this lad (you can't really call Vaas a lad, but still!) gave 10 in last 2 deliveries.

Of course, this wasn't a final, and it wasn't a rivalry people kill for. Still, it's a reminder, if ever needed, that cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties, to repeat a cliche.

Even today, after all these years, when I watch that Javed Miandad six, I feel the pain ;). Poor Chetan Sharma -- his whole career achievements were wiped out in that one delivery. Even the joy of being the first Indian to take a hat-trick wouldn't have helped. Curiously, I found the reference of this "six" when I was reading Kamila Shamsie's Kartography. The narrator of the novel (my review is due, for a while) talks about it fondly, being from the other side of the border. It took me a moment to digest that someone could be happy about that! Lol! Those unlucky few who were born after the rivalry fizzled out, wouldn't get the pain or euphoria, sigh!

At the beginning of the new year, just a few days after the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto, this column had written about why democracy has been structurally weak in Pakistan and the threat of religious fundamentalism gaining power in Pakistan. This column had argued that the dominance of landed property, the weakness of an independent industrial capitalist class and the merging of the armed forces with the landed ruling class had created conditions where it would be near difficult for democracy to strike roots. It had further argued that this array of conditions made the likelihood of a fascist takeover of power a credible threat in the near future.

It was a gloomy prognosis to say the least and it is with undiluted glee that I have welcomed the resounding defeat of the religious fundamentalists and those political parties which were aligned to military rule. These electoral results have reverberated all over the world and have been seen as the beginning of a new chapter in the political history of Pakistan. It truly is a moment for democrats and progressive forces all over the world to savour when the people of Pakistan, braving the bombs, bullets, sundry threats and inducements of the establishment and of the fundamentalists, comprehensively voted both out.

While it is important to celebrate this victory of democracy, it is equally important to make a sober assessment of the achievements as well as the challenges on the road ahead. Important as it is, this electoral defeat of the fundamentalists and of the ruling parties has not weakened the social bases of their power. It has also not, in any way, disturbed the property relations which sustain the Pakistani State.

Before we analyse the significance of these elections, it may be useful to recapitulate the earlier argument. This column had argued that the landed interests formed the dominant part of the ruling class alliance which controlled the Pakistani State from its inception. Over time, the control of these landed interests over the Pakistani State has only strengthened, even while their economic position has objectively weakened given the global trend of falling prices of agricultural goods and rising prices of manufactured goods and services. To compensate this objective weakness, the landed ruling class has been forced to (i) depend on the stick of the military to keep the other social classes in their (subservient) place, (ii) align with Imperialism, and (iii) use the ideology of political Islam to provide it popular legitimacy.

This led to a situation where the military and the landed class fused into one, with the military and military personnel holding 58% of Pakistan’s agricultural land, and the distinction between the State and its dominant social class being erased. It also led to the penetration of the military into all institutions of the State to such an extent that instead of the military being an arm of the State, the Pakistani State often became an arm of the Pakistani military. Moreover, it led to the destruction of left and progressive political movements and the mass legitimisation of theocratic politics.

It will not be too much of an exaggeration to state that after the elimination of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan has continually been ruled by the military. Even during the period of democracy when Benazir and Sharif ruled by turn for more than a decade, the “civilian” government was clearly subservient to and dependant on the military and its leaders. Whether it was foreign policy, economic policy and even local political alignments, the military never let go of its veto in Pakistan.

For about three decades this alliance of landed interests, military, fundamentalism and US imperialism had a happy coexistence.

Today this alliance has fractured. The most obvious is the break between US imperialism and political Islam. It is but an well know fact that the US financed, organised and supplied with arms the religious fundamentalists who were ranged against the left-wing Government of Afghanistan. Even the strategy to finance the Taleban takeover of Afghanistan had the full backing of the Americans. The break between US imperialism and religious fundamentalism is of recent origin. This has put unbearable pressure on the Pakistani ruling class(es) and its military who are now forced to make the impossible choice between their international allies and their local ideological legitimisers. This fracture is well known and has been extensively commented upon.

But there is another break, perhaps incipient, in the ruling class alliance of land-military-mullah-Yankee which has not been noticed much. That is the break between the military and the landed elements. Today, the Pakistan armed forces do not only own huge chunks of land, but also banks, factories, travel agencies and other sectors of the modern economy. Also the growth of an industrial capitalist class which generates its wealth from non-land based economic activities, promises to grow the economy at a faster rate and provide the Pakistani State with greater resources, both economic and political, to draw on. Over-dependence on landed interests are proving to be a strategic drag for the Pakistani armed forces and its State, both in terms of military capability as well as economic/political strength.

Musharraf’s “enlightened moderation” was an attempt, albeit half-hearted, by the Pakistani military to break out of this over-dependence on landed interests and build up a wider class alliance which would include industrialists and professionals. If one looks at his policies, it is clear that he was trying to strengthen “civil society”, encourage the urban middle classes, promote press freedom, rein in fundamentalist ideologies and provide the political space for liberal politics. That all these measures were half-hearted and ultimately failed does not take away from their significance. It only indicates that it is not possible to usher in a “bourgeois” democratic revolution in a country like Pakistan without attacking, head-on, the property relations which underwrite its State and without making a clean break with Imperialism.

This Musharraf and the Pakistani military are incapable of doing. What is of more importance for leftists is that neither are the Asif Zardari’s and Nawaz Sharif’s capable of doing that. Moreover, there is no indication that the Pakistani military is going to vacate the commanding heights of the State. Musharraf remains the President and the army all-powerful. It is surely a sobering thought that most commentators have noted that the Pakistani military “chose” not to interfere in the electoral process which allowed this particular outcome. It may well chose otherwise in the coming weeks, months or years. Are the democratic forces in a position to stop the Pakistani army from making that other "choice"? While I surely hope they succeed, I am yet to see the evidence on the ground.

The social and economic contradictions which mark the Pakistani State and its polity remain what they were ten weeks ago. Moreover, the victors of these elections do not yet have a political agenda or manifesto which can lead to a major shift or closure of these contradictions. It also should be remembered that this electoral mandate is based only on two out of five Pakistani voters. The current run of deadly bombings also show that the religious fascists have not been weakened organisationally. It is important to celebrate our victories, as these elections surely were. But it should be well remembered that to over-estimate the import of our victories or our strength is a sure-shot way of conceding a future defeat.

As a well-wisher of the Pakistani people and their comrade, this columnist hopes this election victory is the first step towards the building of a democratic, progressive Pakistan and that his gloomy prognoses will be thrown into the dustbin of history.

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This article was published in The Post, on 12 March, 2008 in an altered version to protect my publishers from the wrath of the military. It was also published in the Human Rights Journal of Jammu and Kashmir.

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Hats off to Ansar Burney! This would not be possible if it wasn't for his efforts, persuasion, and hard-work. "Mr. Burney is currently the government's caretaker for human rights. He first heard of Mr. Singh during a radio call-in show some years ago."

Mr. Singh definitely has an angel looking after him as his death sentence was revoked my Musharraf. Maybe this is Musharraf's way of trying to bridge gaps between India and Pakistan. After all, 1973 was four decades ago, and a lot has changed since then, especially persistent negotiations.

I'm sure his wife must be the most excited as she has anxiously awaited his return. I admire her belief and conviction. I am not sure I would have stayed that long had I been in her place.

"Mr. SIngh told Mr. Burney that he had a love marriage rather than an arranged marriage. His wife confirmed this to the minister when he called her. Why else would I have waited 35 years for him, she asked? She has been waiting at the border since she first heard the news that her husband had been pardoned." It seems like the perfect end to a love story.

However, I have to say that the sentence "India and Pakistan frequently arrest each other's citizens often accusing them of straying across the border" sounds rather whimsical. As if both the governments have nothing better to do than to fill their jails with each others' citizens without good reason. I agree that some years back this was true, but it is definitely not so prominent anymore, especially with the recent attemts at peace talks.

Pakistan reiterated its sincerity in building bridges with neighbouring India by securing the release of Kashmir Singh. The 61 year old was sentenced to death in 1973 by Pakistani authorities on espionage charges. Mr. Singh spent 35 years in prison until he was spotted by Ansar Burney, Pakistan’s Caretaker Minister for Human Rights who successfully persuaded President Musharraf to revoke his death sentence and order his release. Mr. Singh was escorted to India where an emotional welcome was made.

Pakistani and Indian servicemen and civilians were imprisoned by the two sides during hostilities in 1965 and 1971. Now, Pakistan is requesting the release of more than 508 Pakistani prisoners detained in Indian prisons regardless that they have completed their sentence. Care-taker Law Minister of NWFP Mian Mohammad Ajmal said that most of the 508 prisoners have not been released despite completing their sentence in the Indian jails. He said that there are 445 Indians including 392 fishers  in the Pakistani prisons.

The release of Mr. Singh has overwhelmed the public with Pakistanis and Indians mutually celebrating his release. Caught in the middle are the families who agonize over the separation of their loved ones at the hands of the enemy. Mr. Singh last saw his wife as a young mother and his children as toddlers, now his wife is old; his children are strangers and he a frail man.

As she waited at Wagah border to see her husband, Singh's emotional wife Paramjit Kaur told reporters: "I am very, very happy to see this day.

Prisoners of war on both sides of the border are no doubt subjected to this form of torture, both are perpetrators and both have victims. Organizations such as the Ansar Burney Trust work with a humanitarian agenda by demanding the rights of prisoners. How long will it be before we see the Indian equivalent of this organization?    

The Care-taker Law Minister of NWFP Mian Mohammad Ajmal told that the lists of the prisoners would be exchanged from both sides by March 31. The procedure of the release of the prisoners has been discussed in the recent meeting of the Pakistan-India Judicial Committee and in this connection the members of the Indian Judicial Committee will come to Pakistan next month.

Finally India said whoever kisses more women in other country wins the race.

Pakistan agreed.

Indians went to Pakistan and kissed 100000 womens and came back.

Pakistan were exicted.

They said its out turn.

Indians said keep the egg with you.

What is it about Valentine’s Day that gets so many people so riled?

The past decade and more has seen the growing popularity of Valentine’s Day in South Asian countries as a festival of romance, specially for the urban youth. And it has also attracted significant opposition, often violent, from religious groups and conservative opinion which have attacked it for destroying our religion(s) and culture with its Christian, Western and commercial character.

Valentine’s Day emerged in late medieval Europe as a day to express romantic love and interest in the opposite sex. Historians trace its origins to erotic Roman festivals which were adopted and adapted by the early Church to suit its own interests by pairing men and women in the congregation into couples in the name of St. Valentine. What is really ironical about this naming is that St. Valentine is supposed to have been a chaste man, innocent of the art of love! By the early modern period, Valentine’s Day practice had changed from the medieval custom of drawing lots to choose one’s partner to being the day when men proposed to women they were attracted to. By the nineteenth century, this festival had lost all its religious significance and had been embellished with all the commercial razzmatazz that marks it even today.

In our South Asian contexts, Valentine’s Day is primarily an urban phenomenon centred around English speaking youth where men buy gifts, flowers and cards for women they fancy and, if already in an love relation, they go out on a date. At best it’s a harmless exuberance of youth and at worst a silly ritual fuelled by the profits of the entertainment and hospitality industry.

So what gets so many people so riled about Valentine’s Day? Every year in India, groups opposing Valentine’s Day break shops with romantic displays, assault lovers in public parks and organise other violent and dramatic protests against its celebration. This year one group forcibly married all couples they found in a public park in a metropolitan city of India and another group blackened the faces of couples it “caught” sitting together in public on Valentine’s Day. I am sure the situation will be similar in Pakistan, if not in specifics but in trend.

Despite this strident and violent opposition to Valentine’s Day, it is interesting that its popularity keeps growing, specially among the urban youth. I would argue that the increasing hostility and growing popularity of Valentine’s Day originate from the same source. This source is the threat that freedom of sexual choice poses to the patriarchal family – a family form which is at foundation of our social relations and power structures.

While different South Asian social structures have had different levels and forms of integrating with the modern economy, there have been two processes strikingly similar in all of them.

First, integration with the modern economy has not been paralleled by the destruction of the traditional social structure based on the community and its replacement by a social structure based on the individual, as happened in Europe. In some areas these traditional communities have remained largely untouched by change while in others they have changed a fair bit, but fundamentally, these traditional communities have remained the foundation of our social structures. Even today our identities are drawn from the religion, region, caste/clan, village and family we belong to. People who do not have even one of these identity markers, or have low level markers, remain on the margins of social power networks. The founding unit of this social structure is the patriarchal family where marriage relations are a matter of complex negotiations and alliance building. Such marriages, necessarily within the limits of religion, region and caste/clan, sustain the given community and strengthen its political power. These marriages reproduce the specific South Asian feudal form of the patriarchal family. The breakdown of this patriarchal family would sound the death-knell for the social structure which sustains our under-developed capitalisms.

The ideological device by which the extant social structure and its family form compel their continuation is by elevating their practice to a moral high level. Arranged marriages and public denial of affection by couples is propagated as the moral approach while “love” marriages and public display of affection by couples is termed immoral. This definition of morality and the shrill pitch at which it is constantly broadcast over society from a hundred thousand sources puts immense psychological pressure on individuals to conform to this moral code. Valentine’s Day, by publically fostering freedom to choose one’s sexual and marriage partner, is a direct assault on this moral code. By pointing to an alternative morality, where romance between couples is celebrated and public displays of affection is encouraged between individuals, irrespective of identity markers, Valentine’s Day is seen as a direct assault on the ideological scaffolding of the extant South Asian patriarchal family. By foregrounding the individual’s right to chose, in this case their marriage and sexual partner, and by giving women a say in determining their life-choices, it threatens the entire social structure.

This brings us to the second point. Despite the continuation of these traditional communities, the working of the modern economy and the market is building up the process of individuation. In spite of the continuation of traditional community identities, it is still the individual who enters the market whether for jobs, goods or services. The nature of the modern economy is also such that individual units (nuclear family) has to live where its bread-earner is based and this leads to a further, de facto, splintering of the patriarchal joint family. Modern education and social associations in the modern economy also engender ideologies which celebrate and privilege the individual.

This process of individuation creates the material conditions for the destruction of the patriarchal family as it exists in South Asia today and therefore of the social structure which this family form sustains. Regardless of the existence of this material condition, the patriarchal family has continued to exist. But it is under unprecedented strain. Nowhere is this more evident than in the burgeoning metropolises and booming small towns of India where people migrate from distant provinces and are rent apart from their community anchors.

Religious and social conservatives rightly see this challenge to the morality of arranged marriage and public denial of affection as the thin edge of the wedge which can unravel the entire edifice of the traditional social structure. Youngsters who celebrate Valentine’s Day despite all the opposition and physical threats also correctly perceive it as a passport to the liberation of their individual souls from the prison of their community. Unfortunately, while the religious and social conservatives are well organised and focussed, the progressives do not realise the historic import of the battle for Valentine’s Day. It is almost as if they are embarrassed to admit their support for the morality which celebrates individual romantic love and encourages public display of affection.

This article was published in ThePost on 27 February, 2008.

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Last week this column had posited that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was the culmination of a long series of failures by the Pakistani ruling class to manage the contradictions inherent in a State based on strong landed property with a weak industrial base. The column argued that such conditions created a predilection for the use of brute repression (the strategy of the stick) to deal with popular demands and undermined the possibility of democratic institutions gaining ground. The column further argued that this predilection was conditioned by the structural limitations that landholding imposes on the political strategy that a ruling class can adopt vis-à-vis the demands of the masses.

These structural limitations are the falling rate of return on primary products in global trade and the physical difficulty of dividing landed wealth among new aspirants to the ruling class.

As the price of agricultural goods falls continuously in relation to industrial goods or modern services it weakens the political position of the landed ruling classes vis-à-vis that class which produces industrial goods (capitalists) or provides services (professionals). Parallel to this objective weakening of their power is the need to continuously increase repression and control over the competing social classes in the domestic sphere. On the global stage, such regimes show a strong tendency to align with Imperialism to strengthen their domestic repressive regime. States ruled by landholders generally end up as client states of Imperialism.

Unlike industrial wealth, which has a natural tendency to grow, land is geographically fixed and agricultural incomes tend to fall over time. Landed wealth can be acquired or shared only by division or conquest. These economic and physical constraints on sharing landed wealth makes it doubly difficult for the landed ruling class to allow democracy, as democracy requires at least some sharing of resources with leaders of popular struggles who need to be co-opted into the power structure. This explains the difficulty democracy has faced in establishing roots in Pakistan.

Each time there has been a real possibility of democratic progress, the landholding ruling class has hit back at the democratic forces with the favourite political weapon of the feudals – assassinations. Liaqat Ali Khan’s assassination, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s legalised murder and now Benazir Bhutto’s killing are all examples of this thunderbolt of reaction.

The first phase of military dictatorships, those of Yahya Khan and Ayub Khan, were largely bereft of ideological baggage (read religious fundamentalism) as the landed ruling class was confident of using secular tools of repression to beat back the popular demands of livelihood, democracy and equality. This period was also marked by the annihilation of the communist left as a significant political force in Pakistan.

But the biggest weakness of repressive regimes is that this very repression, which supports their power, undermines their popular legitimacy. Class rule, to be stable, needs legitimising ideologies which justify the status quo and promise space for redressal of grievances. Democracy, disciplined within the confines of private property, provides the best such ideology.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan Peoples’ Party was the democratic answer to the crisis of class rule which the eroding legitimacy of Yahya and Ayub Khan had exposed the Pakistan State to. In a brilliant use of the strategy of the carrot, Bhutto successfully combined popular anger at military dictatorship with leftish economic populism and coated this mixture with an ideological layer of millenarian Islamic ideals and national pride. This was not an easy combination to build and sustain and it is to his credit that he managed to weld a political constituency out of this politics which survives to this day. From a Marxian perspective, it is important to remember that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his PPP were not a challenge to the class rule of the feudal landholders (in contrast to the earlier communists) but rather a strategy to better administer the State for this particular class rule.

But the economic and physical constraints on landed class rule soon kicked in, which found even this limited democratic experiment too dangerous for its security. Even minimal democratic space exposed the class rule of the landholders to unmanageable pressures which threatened to uproot feudal land relations itself. Reaction was swift and brutal – Bhutto was hanged and his democratic populism dumped. In Islam – with its strict moral codes, clear ideals of justice and rights and an alternative value system to modern political theories – Zia found the key to legitimisation of military dictatorship. The political use of Islam for shoring-up State power is the joint legacy of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his nemesis, Zia-ul Haq.

And lest we forget, military dictatorship has always been merely a form of class rule of the big landholders. It was under Zia that the complete intermeshing of the military and the landholding class was achieved, which today results in 58% of Pakistan’s agricultural land being under the control of the military or military personnel, and makes the Pakistan military the single biggest contributor to the nation’s GDP. Today it is perhaps possible to postulate that the ruling class has merged into the State and the formal distinction between the State (military) and a dominant social class (big landholders) has been erased.

After Zia, all governments have been under the control of the military. To demand an end to military rule today implies a direct assault on those property and social relations which define the Pakistan State. Therefore, it is not possible to oppose only military rule while continuing to support landed class interests. The secret of Benazir’s “opportunism”, much commented upon by analysts, lies in her inability to oppose landed interests. Therefore she had, willy-nilly, to come to terms with the military each time she made a bid for power.

Today it appears that the conditions of class rule have become more fragile in Pakistan than ever before. The Pakistan ruling class is still crucially dependant on landed wealth for its economic sustenance and politically on the twin, presently incompatible, props of political Islam and US imperialism. Two decades ago political Islam and US imperialism were in alliance which strengthened the Pakistan State, today their conflictual relation is a source of great weakness. The very ideology (political Islam) which provided legitimacy to military rule is cutting the other way today. Political Islam, drawing on Islam’s clearly defined concepts of justice, equality of the Ummah and promises of betterment, has become a rallying call for opposing both the injustices of class rule which is experienced as a military dictatorship by the people of Pakistan as well as for opposing US imperialism. The fragility of the class rule of the military-landlord complex is evident from its acute difficulty in even accommodating a largely controlled and stage managed manifestation of democratic urge, as was expressed by Benazir Bhutto in the past three months.

On the other hand, the denial of democratic space for expressing dissent and redressing grievances has meant that the mountain of injustice has only become higher. A fragile ruling class coalition will find it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to hold up this mountain much longer. Chances are high that this entire edifice will collapse under a social revolution as the masses rise to avenge their centuries of oppression and no State structure has enough strength to beat them back. Where the left has been decimated for decades and fundamentalist Islamic ideologies and their political formations are strong, this recipe only portends that the coming revolution in Pakistan will be steered by the forces of fascism, like in its neighbouring Iran. A fascist social revolution will also offer the landed interests a further lease of their property rights and will, therefore, be welcomed by them at the moment of greatest crisis for providing stability. As Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright said, “Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes, there will be singing of the dark times…”

Barkha Dutt says that in their curiousity about the 'idea of India' , Pakistanis seem to be lamenting the death of democracy

THE BATTERED Toyota spluttered through the sand, its frayed edges and peeling skin the perfect, but poignant, metaphor for the times. We were navigating our way through the rocky and barren desert of Sindh, today a glamorous byline for the globetrotting journalist, but for its own people, really just the poor country cousin of the greedy and mighty Punjab - a sort of step-child left behind at home to sweep the chimneys, while the rest of the family goes out to dance at the ball.

Benazir Bhutto, elevated to iconic martyrdom in her death, stared down at us from every wall, her Chanel glasses and Hermes headscarf tellingly out of place in the grime and muck of her ancestral village. But Larkana, home to two prime ministers, including Pakistan's first popularly-elected leader (Zulfikar Bhutto), may as well have been Meerut or Moradabad, with its potholed roads, haphazard traffic and nondescript constructions. It was difficult to believe or understand how this underdeveloped and decrepit mofussil town was part of the grand Bhutto legacy.

But any sceptical questions implying that Pakistan's first family may not have done enough for its people were met with combative and unswerving loyalty and the suggestion that as outsiders, we did not understand that competitive politics had left Sindh forever on the leeward side of the development mountain. And then, Sarfaraz, our determined and adventurous driver, asked us a tentative, searching question. What was the Indian rupee now worth, he wanted to know. As we answered, almost sheepish about sounding too boastful, he said ruefully, "Now my country has become worse-off than Bangladesh."

In the back of the car, we shifted uncomfortably at this new, politically-incorrect construct of subcontinental hierarchy No, no, we protested falsely, keen to provide reassurances and succour that wasn't ours to offer But in that instant, we understood that the India-Pakistan relationship had shifted seismically Up until now, India has responded to Pakistan only along two extremes, often schizophrenically contained within the same person. Either we belong to Club Nostalgia (the sort who wave candles at Wagah and go on about how we are the 'same people') or we wear our loathing for the 'enemy' as a badge of national pride. But today, as we watch Pervez Musharraf's confidence recede as sharply as his hairline and see ordinary Pakistanis collapse into guileless grief and naked fear, we know that the India-Pakistan paradigm has finally shifted beyond Partition, Punjabis and Kashmir After a week of travelling through Pakistan, I got the sense that four bitter wars with us later, its people have finally conceded the battle to the 'idea of India'. Admittedly, our conversations are not with the mad mullah fringe. But within the mainstream of Pakistani opinion, there is an unmistakable lament for the death of democracy and pluralism. Benazir's assassination has marked the end of the last liberal hope for the country's moderates. Many friends talk about migrating to another land. And several party workers, clearly angered by the political hijacking of the country's Election Commission, ask in almost naIve awe how often elections are rigged in India. I think to myself and remember - Kashmir in 1987, Haryana in 1989 and Bihar and Jharkhand more times than have been recorded - but then pause and say nothing. Because, being in Pakistan underscores what we don't realise often enough with all its warts, our democracy and secularism are what has kept us sane. And despite the eerie parallels between the Gandhis and the Bhuttos (the curse of violence, the aura of beauty and glamour, the family intrigues and estrangements, the streak of autocracy, the sense of political entitlement, the mass adulation and the undeniable courage), in this country we would stn never accept the leadership of the Congress party being bequeathed in a private will. Sunil Khilnani first wrote about how an abstract progressive ideal welded the many contradictions of India together into workable nationhood. Pakistan today is in desperate search for a similar such idea - one that wn enable it to survive, because the history that first gave it birth is today tortured and mangled beyond recognition. And the worst is not yet over The next few months will throw up all sorts of ominous questions that could pull at an already damaged edifice. Asif Zardari, famously called Mr Ten Percent after being slapped with corruption charges, has been re-invented as the grand new hope by an emotive media. But will Benazir's diabolically charming husband self-destruct and take down the party with him? So far, Nawaz Sharif has played the role of the gracious compatriot. But will his Punjabi generosity be swiftly abandoned if the PPP sweeps the elections? Fundamentalist clerics have already issued fresh threats to the 19-year-old boy who has been forced into his mother's shoes. Separatist sentiments have been strengthened in Sindh, Balochistan and Waziristan. And though the General who once dazzled the international media grows paler by the day (save the streak of mehndi that runs through his sparse hair), he still seems entirely missing in self-doubt. There is no doubt that there will be more blood on the streets before Pakistan's wounds heal - if they heal at all. We could gloat and say, we told you so. We could feel vindicated that a country whose various governments were historically defined by how they used violence against India may now be devoured by the monsters they created. We could condemn the many paradoxes of Benazir's legacy and critically judge the hypocrisy of a politician who was part-Radeliffe liberal and part-Larkana feudal. We could choose to be unsentimental about someone who was simultaneously her country's most moderate leader, but also a self-serving tactician who once provided a lifeline to the very Taliban that later threatened to kill her All of it would be true. But all of it would also be terribly short-sighted and pointless. Because India cannot afford for Pakistan to tumble into greater darkness. And India can afford to be more generous about the past. My abiding memory of Sindh is of huddling together under blankets in a generous stranger's home over bootlegged whisky and heaps of kebabs. This time, the quintessential warmth that has for long been the trademark of people on either side was underlined by a marked curiosity for just how India managed to hold it all together These were a people who were fearful about their own future, but still equanimous even about a country that must seem to them more formidable and possibly more hostile than ever before. We don't have to romanticise either Benazir or her country But just this once, can we hold back on the sneering condescension and superior grandstanding? After all, as soldiers on either side will tell you, even 'enemies' fight by a code of honour

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is perhaps as significant a turning point in the history of Pakistan as was the assassination of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali. In a sense these three killings form three significant watersheds in the political history of Pakistan and each represent the culmination of the failure of the country’s ruling class to successfully manage the contradictions of their time. What is particularly significant is that each assassination, built as it was on the failure of the previous attempt to overcome contradictions, has been more calamitous for the country than the previous one. Today, in the opinion of this columnist, it’s a situation of do or die for Pakistan as a nation and its citizens as a people.

Before I venture to explain my analysis and gloomy prognosis, a few caveats would be in order. I am an Indian who was born a few days after Bangladesh was formed and have grown up, as many others of my generation, with very little knowledge and perhaps lesser understanding of what Pakistan is as a living reality. Even today, despite my efforts to know and understand my neighbouring country better, my knowledge is perforce bookish and lacking the depth of personal contact. But as a Marxist I seem to identify certain trends and features which have not been commented upon and would want to proffer them for consideration.

In 1947 when the British left South Asia, the two successor States which were formed – India and Pakistan – did not see any transformation in the property relations or in the composition of the ruling classes. Political power remained in the hands of those who wielded economic and social power. From a Marxian perspective, the religious reasons given for Partition are not very convincing. What is important is that in India, it was the budding industrialists who had come to control the Indian National Congress in an uneasy alliance with the large feudal landholders. In Pakistan, this relation was mirrored with the feudal landlords being the dominant partner in the ruling class alliance which had a weak component of industrialists but many important professionals, specially lawyers.

The Muslim League represented this feudal landed class of North Indian Muslims and, as noted Pakistan scholar Hamza Alawi states, their success in Punjab came when they managed to convince the large landholders in the Unionist Party that their property would be safer in Pakistan and not India. The fact that the Muslim League represented only Muslims, particularly those who spoke Urdu or its related languages, only meant that it could not represent the interests of the entire class of feudal landlords spawned by moribund colonialism in South Asia, but only a fraction of it, and thus weakened the political position of its own class by fracturing it. The Hindu feudals were further divided between Hindu nationalist parties where they were dominant and the Indian National Congress where they were dominated by the rising class of industrialists. The only province where the class of large landholders managed to form a political front outside religious affiliation was in the Punjab with its Unionist Party, but that fractured when the cast of colonialism was being broken.

Both these ruling classes had successfully managed to hitch large numbers of the poor and dispossessed to their political platforms. The Congress had history of involving the poor, specially the peasants, with its political platform which stretched back four decades and more, while the Muslim League was new to the game. This had enabled the Congress to well calibrate its mass populism where it managed to get the poor to come out in support of its political agenda while controlling their revolutionary urges. Further, the Congress used the promise of social justice and economic succour to feather their populism while the Muslim League relied solely, newcomers as they were to this game of populism and as the history of Pakistan would fatally prove, on religious affiliation and sentiments.

After independence the ruling dispositions in both India and Pakistan had two strategies to manage the demands for social justice and economic equity that were unleashed among the working people by the demise of colonialism. One was the strategy of carrot and the other was the strategy of the stick. The strategy of the carrot required deft political handling of popular demands, acceding to some of them and the cooption of the leading elements of popular movements into power-sharing arrangements with the ruling class. Experience shows us that this strategy is successful only when there are institutions of democracy, specially elections and change of governments, to mediate this power sharing. The strategy of the stick was largely predicated on the ability of the ruling establishment – the State, government and dominant classes – to beat back the demands for social justice and economic equity by using a combination of brute repression and a deft handling of the social prejudices already present among our people. This meant recourse to religious and other primordial identities and an encouragement of illiberal ideologies.

The ruling establishments of both India and Pakistan have used elements of both these strategies in the last six decades. But as would be evident to most observers of our countries, the ruling classes of India have predominantly used the carrot while the Pakistani ruling classes have used the stick. While the difference in the composition of the respective ruling classes (landed in one and industrial in the other), as well as the role of ideology (religion based in one and secular in the other) have been important factors which determined the preference for one strategy over the other, an important factor has been the economic foundation of ruling class alliance. India’s independent industrial base and the existence of a monopoly bourgeoisie provided the economic resources to share for the success of the strategy of the carrot. The dependence of Pakistan’s ruling class on landed wealth meant that the only way to share resources was to divide the land, or provide new land to those aspiring to join the ranks of the ruling class. There is a geographical limit for land allotment and division which, apart from the fact that landed income has a tendency to fall in the era of global capitalism, pushed the Pakistani ruling class towards the strategy of the stick.

The assassination of Liaqat Ali Khan in 1951 and the failure of the ruling establishment to agree on a Constitution was a clear indication that the strategy of the carrot (democracy) was considered too dangerous a course by the ruling class of Pakistan. It is indicative that this was followed by more than a decade of open military rule, or the strategy of the stick. The rise of the Pakistan People’s Party and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a brave attempt to resurrect the strategy of the carrot with elections, a Constitution with clearly defined rights and a populist economic policy which at least recognised the poverty and inequity under which lived the millions of working people in P