Overall the UN is a mixed bag and it is for the members to make it effective. At this juncture, it is crucial to improve the UN rather than destroy it
The United Nations (UN) will be 75 next month. It is a relatively young organisation but a significant birthday like this one means it is time for stock-taking. It came into being after its structure was finalised at an international conference in San Francisco in October 1945, in which 50 countries, including India participated. Since then it has grown and today the UN has 193 members. Moreover, the UN of today is hugely different from the UN of 75 years ago. The big question is whether the world body has played its role properly or has it become irrelevant? It was the late UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld who said famously that the UN was created “not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.”
Interestingly, those who support the UN believe that the world body has served its purpose by and large. The very fact that it has survived, despite the ups and downs, shows success. They point out that most of all, there has been no nuclear war in the last 75 years. Others praise the peace-keeping missions of the UN. They also praise its sustainable development programmes. But the UN is also criticised for not being effective for various reasons. On the UN’s watch, several authoritarian rulers have used conventional weapons against innocent citizens. The UN resolutions are non-binding. The world body was supposed to prevent conflicts and war and yet over 80 conflicts took place since its inception. In the last three decades, US Presidents, right from Bush to Trump, have all criticised the UN for its functioning. The UN is also facing a resource crunch because members, including the US, do not pay their contribution in time.
India’s involvement with the UN is remarkable. As a founding member, New Delhi’s contribution in implementing the goals of the UN Charter and programmes has been substantial. It has been involved in many UN bodies and India is the current chair of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) executive committee. India is right now a member of the UN’s Commission on Status of Women (UNCSW), for four years (from 2021 to 2025). India was elected as a non-permanent member of the powerful UN Security Council (UNSC) for two years in June and the country served eight two-year terms earlier. New Delhi has been lobbying for the expansion of the UNSC and also staked a claim for a place in it. For some years now, whenever any of our Prime Ministers went abroad or any heads of State visited India, one issue that was always raised was getting support for India’s candidature to the expanded UNSC. However, the reforms are not taking off for various reasons. For instance, the five permanent members are not keen on losing their veto powers. The UN chief has praised India’s contribution to the peace-keeping forces as it has been the driving force behind many issues like the end of colonialism and apartheid and of global disarmament and terrorism. India is an ardent advocate of UN reforms. New Delhi initially had no ambition of becoming a permanent member of the Council. However, when the General Assembly took up the UN reforms in 1992, Japan, Germany and Brazil sought membership in an expanded Security Council. India too joined them in the chorus. However, many European countries object to Germany’s claim, Argentina opposes Brazil and Pakistan opposes India, and so on. Thereafter, the four countries formed the BRICS group to work together.
The one question that is being repeatedly asked in today’s circumstances is what is the future of the UN? Some want the UN to play a greater role in world affairs, while others want its role to specifically focus on humanitarian work. Reforming the system and getting wide international support and funds are the most important things needed for the UN. Almost from the early nineties, the reforms are being talked about but there is no progress in this regard, which is indeed unfortunate. Second, the UN needs to be modernised. Many feel that the present structure is flawed and many programmes are often duplicated. Third, there is an increasing feeling that the UN should be strengthened. The world body should be vested with more powers to deal with errant members.
Fourth, UN funding should not be stopped for any reason as the world body must remain independent. The UN is dependent on the contribution of cash, goods and services from its member states to finance and help its activities. Fifth, there is a need to cut down the strength of the staff. As The Guardian newspaper pointed out some time ago, “85,000 bureaucrats, an annual spend of about $40 billion (£26 billion) — 2,000 times that of the organisation’s budget during its first year in 1946. Spending has quadrupled in the past 20 years — and still, several agencies struggle to balance their books.”
However, despite all complaints and criticism, the UN is currently the only international body where heads of states can gather to discuss important issues and countries come together to try to work out some of the world’s problems. Overall the UN is a mixed bag and it is for the members to make it effective. At this juncture it is crucial to improve the UN rather than destroy it.
(The writer is a senior journalist)
A repressed history that is not fully understood eventually re-emerges as an unresolved entity
In his book Blood and Rage, British historian Michael Burleigh writes that as soon as Nazi Germany lost World War-II in 1945, there was a concentrated effort by the new German Government and polity to completely erase the country’s Nazi past. On May 9, 1945, at 11.01 pm, the Allied Forces ceased their attacks on the already destroyed Berlin and this, to Germans, came to be known as “Stunde Null” or Hour Zero.
From this point in time, Germany was to begin anew. Burleigh writes that this also meant a collective effort by “new Germany” to repress all memory of anything that had to do with the dramatic rise of Nazism in Germany, the collective euphoria that had accompanied its consolidation and the many atrocities that Nazism had encouraged and justified as an ideology. Indeed, there were thousands of Germans who had directly participated in the many physical and psychological acts of violence in the name of racial superiority. But millions of Germans who were not necessarily members of the Nazi party and its affiliates, had stood aside, choosing to ignore increasing evidence of their State’s violent conduct against those it believed were racially inferior or enemies of the “national body.”
The German State and governments that replaced the fallen Nazis, and German society as a whole, began to vigorously exorcise memories related to Germany’s Nazi past. The British documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis, in his 1995 documentary The Living Dead, demonstrates that this exorcism was encouraged by the US and Britain once Germany became an ally and rebounded as an economic powerhouse within a decade after the war. Because, even though a number of former Nazis who had survived the defeat were tried and executed or given long jail sentences, many, who were bureaucrats and scientists, were eventually allowed to integrate into the new German State and society to aid the country’s revival.
In the first few years after Germany’s defeat, Nazism was rightly demonised but, according to Curtis, the cause of its rise was never fully investigated. The memory of it was then completely repressed. German professors, teachers, politicians and parents simply stopped talking about it, as if there was never a Nazi Germany.
According to both Burleigh and Curtis, an inconvenient past, when repressed without being fully understood, eventually re-emerges as an unresolved entity. In the late 1960s, German youth, who were born just before the war or immediately afterwards, began to question their leaders, teachers and parents, not only about their country’s unspoken Nazi past but also about their role in it. Violence soon followed as German youth outfits accused their elders and State of being former Nazis. This commotion did produce some studies investigating the reasons behind the rise of a hateful ideology, and the support it had received from millions of Germans. But according to Curtis, such efforts were hampered by the ideological tendencies and violence of the youth, many of who became as myopic and totalitarian in their acts and beliefs as the past that they were now raging against. By 1977, the lid was once again placed on it.
It blew off again after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War in 1991. The unresolved, repressed fascist past, not only in Germany but in the rest of Europe too, returned. A brutal civil war between ethnic groups in what was once Yugoslavia, and the rise of violent expressions of ethno-nationalism in Europe and the former Soviet states proved that the “victory of democratic nations” during World War II did not treat the conditions that trigger fascist/nationalist hatred and chauvinism. Instead, this victory had simply placed a lid on these conditions. It keeps blowing off. Dread and violence has been spewing out from this hole ever since.
As a student of history, I spent almost a decade studying the silence that one comes across Pakistan’s various segments of the intelligentsia, educational and cultural products between 1971 and the early 1990s, on what is often referred to as the 1971 “East Pakistan debacle.” In 2018, I was able to further this study by accessing Washington DC’s Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. I went through 177 newspapers, magazines, journals (both English and Urdu) published in Pakistan between 1972 and 1992, plus 27 Urdu films released during this period. After 1974, there was almost no mention of the 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan which had dismembered the country. Articles and editorials did emerge across 1972, but only a handful tried to explore the reasons behind the “debacle.”
An investigation was launched (The Humoodur Rahman Inquiry Commission) by the Government, but its findings were never made public until 29 years later. Instead, and especially from 1973 onwards, the emphasis was put on demonising ethno-nationalist politics and then on explaining what remained of the country as its “natural” state (along the River Indus). There was then a systematic effort to forgo a past before 1971, by first admonishing it for failing to make Islam central to Pakistan’s national body and then treating this past as an almost alien occurrence, whose memory had no place in the “new Pakistan.”
There is hardly any mention of a region that was once called East Pakistan in Pakistani films and TV plays made after 1972. By the mid-1980s, its memory and the memory of a Pakistan before the “debacle” had been successfully repressed. Even parents wouldn’t talk about it as such. But it was an unresolved memory that kept re-emerging, sometimes violently, in the shape of ethnic riots.
In the mid-1990s, some journalists began to once again speak of the Humoodur Rahman Report. I was a senior reporter and saw rookie journalists having no idea what that was. Finally, parts of the report began to emerge from 2000 onwards. In 2003, while watching a TV talk show on the report, an elderly relative of mine exhibited a most painful expression and sighed, “what’s the use of talking about this?” A painful memory that had been repressed (but never resolved) had returned to haunt him. He was in East Pakistan during the civil war as a Government employee.
Conditions that lead to painful episodes cannot be made to go away by just repressing the memories of the episodes. On a collective level, these keep coming back in various shapes, because the conditions that led to the pain were not treated. After watching Nazi atrocities, a Scottish psychiatrist, Donald Ewen Cameron, theorised that if “bad memories” could be wiped away from a person’s mind, s/he can avoid mental illnesses and also the impulse to commit atrocious acts.
Dr Cameron devised a method he called “psychic driving” that used a combination of electric shock therapy and powerful sleep-inducing drugs on mentally disturbed patients, to eliminate painful memories. He was largely successful. But what resulted were individuals with no memories, beyond basic instincts. And some regressed into a vegetative state. Not the ideally blissful state to be in.
(Courtesy: Dawn)
The only thing that actually happened in DC was that the UAE and Bahrain went public on their previously covert ties with Israel, especially in the arms trade
US President Donald Trump declared “the dawn of a new Middle East” in Washington recently as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain signed public agreements with Israel for the first time. Not “peace agreements”, as President Trump claimed, since neither country has ever been at war with Israel. Just documents involving an exchange of ambassadors, trade deals and the like. And it was significant that while Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were there in person, the UAE and Bahraini rulers just sent their foreign ministers for the signing of the papers. The only thing that actually happened at the White House was that two of the Gulf’s most progressive States went public on their ties with Israel, especially in the arms trade. This had previously not been a secret, but at least their ties with Jerusalem had been discreet. Apart from that, it’s still the same old Middle East, as corrupt, violent, dysfunctional and ironically as ambitious, glittering and fashionable as ever. The last time Israel fought an actual war against any of its Arab neighbours was in 1982, a full-scale invasion of Lebanon that ended in a prolonged Israeli military occupation of the southern part of the country. That’s long over now, although Lebanon remains a ghastly mess, but all the region’s other wars trundle on uninterrupted. The second Libyan civil war continues into its sixth year, with a cast of foreign participants and supporters that now includes Russia, Turkey, France, Egypt and the UAE. The atrocious foreign military intervention in Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia but involving most of the autocratic Arab States and their Western arms suppliers, is only one year younger and still killing around 5,000 a month.
The Syrian civil war is in its ninth year. It has killed at least half a million people and driven almost half the population from their homes. It may be creeping towards an end now, with only one province still in rebel hands, but the rebels have Turkish military support and the Russian air force fights for the Assad regime.
Iraq is enjoying only its second year of relative peace since the US invasion of 2003, but the signs are multiplying that Islamic State is going to launch a major comeback bid there. The collapse of the oil price has left much of the population destitute. Urban youth are in open revolt, with hundreds shot by the police this year. And when something genuinely new does crop up in the endless churn that distinguishes the region’s politics, it is often unwelcome. Saudi Arabia, once the stable, conservative linchpin of inter-Arab politics, has turned into a loose cannon, starting unwinnable wars (like Yemen), funnelling money and arms to jihadi extremists (in Syria), and commissioning the cold-blooded killing of critics of the regime (as in the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi).
Overshadowing all these wars, and actually driving some of them, is the religious and strategic confrontation between revolutionary Shia Iran and the conservative Sunni monarchies and dictatorships of the eastern Arab world. That’s what those huge Arab arms purchases are for, not for fighting Israel. Indeed, Jerusalem is a silent partner in this region-wide Cold War between the Sunni Arab States and Iran; that’s what made the little ceremony at the White House possible. There is no Arab-Israeli conflict. The major Arab players are already undeclared Israeli allies, and the Israeli army refers to its sporadic punitive strikes against the Palestinians as “mowing the lawn.”
Real change in this region happens with glacial slowness, if at all, but that does not mean that it is stable. On the contrary, it could tip suddenly into a radically different state. It almost did so in 2010-12, the years of the aborted ‘Arab spring’, and the forces that drove that uprising are even stronger now. Half the population in Middle Eastern and North African countries is under 25. As populations have soared (Iraq’s has doubled to 40 million since the first Gulf War in 1990), economies have not kept pace and living standards have fallen almost everywhere. A huge, mostly jobless young population living close to despair is now the Arab norm.
The oil-rich Gulf States used to be the exception to this rule, but no longer. The oil-price crash this time is not temporary: Demand is falling and will continue to fall as the climate crisis and cheaper new “clean energy” sources eat into oil’s traditional markets. The recent pantomime at the White House was about tidying up a few of the loose ends of an old conflict. It would have a certain relevance if the future was going to be just more of the present, but that is not the case. The timing is uncertain but the destination is clear: Big changes are coming that will sweep away many of the existing regimes and reshape the politics of the region. Happy endings are not inevitable, but different endings are practically guaranteed.
(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy and Work.’)
Whipping up religious sentiments is a powerful tool in Pakistan and it has always been used by rulers to control people and create pressure groups of religious parties to bolster their reign. Minorities, especially wealthy Hindus, are easy prey in Pakistan
In Pakistan, the majority community has licence to kill anyone, particularly persons from minority communities, in the name of blasphemy without waiting for court trials. The ugliest part is that the murderer is hailed as a “ghazi” or “martyr” to the nation.
It’s time the world wakes up to the medieval treatment of religious minorities in Pakistan. The blasphemy law was first introduced in 1860 by the colonial administration. The law stipulated ten years of imprisonment or fine or both. Later the law was amended in 1927. In 1953, when anti-Ahmadiyya riots erupted, Jamaat-e-Islami demanded amendments to the law but the Government of Pakistan did not entertain its requests. However, when anti-Ahmadiyya riots erupted again in 1974, the second Amendment was introduced in the Constitution of Pakistan and all Islamist parties came together under the banner of Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabuwwat (movement for the protection of the finality of the Prophethood). Later in 1984, the Zia-Ul-Haq regime passed an anti-Ahmadiyya ordinance, which decreed that “Ahmadis cannot call themselves Muslims” or “pose as Muslim”, and those who defied the law faced three years in prison.
Cases of extortion from minorities in Pakistan are frequent but rarely reported to authorities for the fear of reprisals. Victims pay huge ransoms as protection money to mosques and madrassas to save their lives. Otherwise they have to leave their business and properties.
A Hindu friend of mine narrated one such incident to me: “Due to coronavirus, our temple is closed so I am performing my early morning prayers (bhajans) at home only. One day my neighbour knocked at my door and threatened our family. ‘You Hindus should go to India and sing your bhajans there. If you want to live in Pakistan, live quietly, don’t chant Krishna nonsense early morning’.”
He added, “Believe me I was not chanting loudly. My neighbour always look for an opportunity to browbeat us so that under pressure we should sell our apartment to them and leave this place, while they always listen Indian music loudly all the time. Even there is a mosque-madrasa in our apartments where loudspeakers keep on blaring out.”
In 2009, Aasya Noreen, better known as Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian, was accused of blasphemy. “Why you used my cup for drinking water? You are non-Muslim, a ‘kafir’.” Argument over this led to Noreen’s arrest in 2010. She was convicted of blasphemy by a Pakistani court and sentenced to death. Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Punjab Governor Salman Taseer both were assassinated for advocating on behalf of Asia Bibi and opposing the blasphemy laws.
Under global pressure, in 2018, the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitted Asia Bibi on grounds that there was insufficient evidence. But she was not released from custody because of safety concerns. A Muslim cleric Maulana Yousaf Qureshi announced a bounty of 500,000 Pakistani Rupees to anyone who would kill Asia Bibi. In 2019, she finally got a safe passage and arrived in Canada, but she continues to receive threat to her life.
Mishal Khan, a student of mass communication of Abdul Wali Khan University, was killed in 2017 on the premises of the university by a mob on allegation of posting blasphemous content online. He was in the hostel of the university when he was stripped naked and severely beaten up by a group of students and then shot. He succumbed to his injuries. The mob was kicking his lifeless body and beating it with wooden planks. His body was then thrown from the second floor of the building. The mob even tried to burn his body while chanting “Allah-o-Akbar”. At least 25 law enforcement officers were present there, but no action was taken. Later investigations found that the content Mishal posted had only secular views and references to books on democracy and equality of humanity. But before this realisation came out, Pakistan had already lost a beautiful soul.
Recently, on July 29, Tahir Naseem, an American, was shot dead inside a Pakistani courtroom where he had gone for a trial for alleged blasphemy. He was an Ahmadiyya but one of my sources told me that he was having mental issues. His murderer justified the killing, “A light appeared in my dream last night and ordered me to kill this enemy of Allah so that I can be awarded with gift of heaven.”
The murderer was praised by a majority of people in Pakistan and even Government officials and politicians used his picture as their display picture (DP) on their social media profiles.
When I reported this case and announced a campaign on social media against the blasphemy laws, forced conversions and enforced disappearances in Pakistan and organised a protest at the Consulate General of Pakistan in Houston, I received many life threats and was targeted by unknown profiles on the social media.
Blasphemy Law (Clause , 295C) of Pakistan panel court reads: “Whoever by words, either spoken or written or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy prophet Muhammad (PBUH) shall be punished with death or imprisonment for life and shall also be liable to fine.”
The law prescribes the death penalty for those who are found guilty of blasphemy. The option of life imprisonment has been defunct since a 1991 Federal Shariat Court judgment.
Blasphemy laws in Pakistan are derived from the Holy Quran and Hadiths, but there are differences between different Islamic schools of jurisprudence in this regard. Several Islamic scholars believe that Quranic verses are misinterpreted by dominant Muslim groups in Pakistan with the support of establishment that allows them to use blasphemy laws as a tool to achieve their narrow sectarian interests and agendas. A Quranic verse, which directly mentions blasphemy, calls on Muslims to not blaspheme deities of other religions, lest people of those religions retaliate by blaspheming against Allah.
“And do not insult (wa la tasubbu) those they invoke other than Allah, lest they insult (fa-yasubbu) Allah in enmity without knowledge. Thus, we have made pleasing to every community their deeds. Then to their Lord is their return and He will inform them about what they used to do.” — Qur’an, 6:108
However, a few Hadiths justify severe punishments for blasphemy. But not everyone agrees. Secular Muslims in Pakistan have always demanded abolition of the blasphemy laws but didn’t succeed because of the interest groups. Whipping up religious sentiments is a powerful tool in Pakistan that has always been used by rulers to control people, and create pressure groups of religious parties to perpetuate fear. Minorities, especially wealthy Hindus, are easy prey in Pakistan.
(The writer, an exiled political leader from Sindh, is vice president of Jeay Sindh Thinkers Forum. He is currently living in the US)
If impersonating was Jessica Krug’s way of legitimising herself as an academic, mobilising the disenfranchised and then representing them as perpetual victims is another
The recent confession of Professor Jessica Krug about her true identity may have outraged many. However, it offers an opportunity to re-evaluate what academics given to consciousness-raising often do. Krug, a historian teaching African history at George Washington University, admitted in a blog that she is a Jew born of White parents and has nothing to do with African-American Blackness, something which she had been claiming for a long time. She regretted that her action was “the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures.” In the same breath, Krug declared that she is no culture vulture but a culture leech. Her actions though have proved otherwise. Prior to her outing of herself in the blog, Krug had used a more African-sounding name (Jessica La Bombalera) in her activist avatar, and during a demonstration had questioned the gentrification of New York by calling out the “White New Yorkers” for having failed to spare a thought for Black and Brown New Yorkers. We don’t know what prompted her to come out as White though it is said that there were increasing murmurs about her identity that forced her to do so.
The knowledge market: On the face of it, a situation such as this is not representative of the academic environment in the US or India. This is where the present intervention marks its departure. Krug’s admission, no doubt, betrays her inability to fake it any longer, but more importantly, it reveals the malaise of contemporary academic knowledge production. The difference between usurping the voice of the weak (what academics do) and pretending to be the weak (what Krug did) is perhaps one of degree and not of kind. When Krug claimed to be a culture leech rather than a vulture, she was highlighting that subtle difference. We can be reasonably sure that Krug is not the first one and won’t be the last, at least until the academic market stops converting experience of marginality to elitist knowledge and suspends placing a premium on the dish of victimhood.
Those who see Krug’s problem as an individual transgression are either oblivious of what goes in the name of knowledge or are beneficiaries of such methods. Academic scholarship has often been obsessed with not just representing cultural difference but also in producing, controlling and owning it. Few questions are raised about the moral foundation of such knowledge. It is taken for granted that if cultural difference does not exist, it is to be invented and if academic knowledge has to sustain itself, “savage slots” are to be continuously filled. Krug took it one step further. Instead of being content with immersion or academic self-othering, or sponging on cultural difference of the Blacks like a leech, she chose to become indistinguishable from what she was writing about.
A few years ago, Harvard University had gone to the market advertising its culture of diversity by projecting Elizabeth Warren, a law professor who claimed to be a Cherokee Indian (and went on to have a thriving political career). The difference between birth identity and assumed identity may appear as academically adventurous and a cool way of moving beyond fixed identities, but in reality, and for the people whose identity is thus stolen, it is an act of violence. In a post-modern academic world, race is increasingly seen as a political invention rather than a frozen identity, thus creating a pathway for becoming someone else, or belonging without believing. That way, what Krug did was chic because she was making herself a trans-individual. But we all understand that Blackness as knowledge and Blackness as experience (not just individual but collective and communal) are different things. One is of romanticisation, appropriation, exoticisation, even silencing, and the other of everyday-ness and its struggle.
Though living the marginal life involves costs in real life — humiliation, powerlessness, sub-human life and so on — the academic world knows the benefits of being Black or minority, at least in the latter’s potential for being objects of knowledge. In the market of scholarship, victimhood sells and is safely monetised: Black or Coloured in America and Muslim or Dalit in India. Cultural difference and victimhood are a minefield of fame and money.
That said, the demonstrations over the death of George Floyd or over atrocities against Dalits reveal a mindset of remembering the victim only when they can be used as a medium of accumulating symbolic capital. It is not just about dehumanising and instrumentalising them for advancing one’s career but also the belief that being a victim pays. The willingness to barter away one’s identity, as Krug did, springs from the conviction that academic benefit from such impersonation outweighs the losses.
Imaginary victims: What Krug did not acknowledge in her confession is that her violence was not only directed as genuine Black experience but also at White experience. While faking to be Black, she was creating a template in which Whiteness is antagonistic to Blackness and so was perpetuating a race binary. She was reducing her own race by making it appear inflexible, intolerant, exclusivist and the negation of Black experience. Her impersonation implied that sincere appreciation of Black history is not possible while being White. She also pandered to those radical elements who believe that genuine understanding of the other is possible only by denying one’s own authenticity. Her pretension perpetuated the academic world of make-believe that being majority is a matter of shame and its disavowal or degradation is necessary to speak for the weak.
Krug converted the Black experience to some bare codes defining Black authenticity: Angry, violent, abusive. That is what she was doing while appearing as Jessica La Bombalera. The resonance of this mentality in India is not difficult to find. Dalits and Muslims are often projected in the media as angry and violent because that is the only way to be weak and a minority. Being helpless and being violent are the expressions of the same authentic core. Academics like Krug not only stereotype or steal identity, they also create norms which guide victimhood. As long as the Black man is anti-police or a Muslim is anti-State or a Dalit is anti-Brahmin, they are authentic; a republican African-American is beyond this template as is a nationalist Indian Muslim.
An academic from Hunter College named Yarimar Bonilla said something very revealing about Krug, that the latter not only fooled others about being a woman of colour, but also into thinking that they are actually inferior, intellectually and politically. Krug was denying them their being, their worth outside her own writings and activism. What it reveals is that being a victim of violence has more moral, academic and perhaps political worth than being normal and majority.
So behind minority identity, its production and circulation, there is a political economy of cultural difference and of diversity that can be a passport to capital — economic or symbolic. Becoming the other involves a life-time of dedication to live another life. Krug must have internalised the new identity. In the acknowledgment section of her book Fugitive Modernities, she thanked her “ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. … Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.” It may be mentioned here that Krug had received financial assistance for writing this book from Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
It is not important to know whether being White or feigning Blackness is better for being a scholar of African history. What is important is the knowledge itself — of victims and minority. As long as we are getting ethnic food in Delhi haat (market), it does not matter if the cook is White or Brown. There may be many service providers but the good/service is the same.
Impersonation as passport: If impersonating was Krug’s way of legitimising herself as an academic, making common cause with a supposedly discriminating law or mobilising the disenfranchised and then representing them as perpetual victims is another. The latter is much more rampant and a fairly common practice governing funding agencies that guide research on minority cultures. Though such politically engaged research may appear as a fight for an inclusive polity, it also betrays the desire to be the source of all cultural politics.
That partly explains Brahmin academics monopolising Dalit experiences. At a poetry reading session, a very fair-skinned Brahmin poet advocated “our own” Dravidian cause and how her Dravidian skin will always be a marker of her identity. She spoke with a flair even as her complexion struggled to adjust itself to the victim narrative. Playing around this politics of “we” and trying too hard to be someone else in order to be legitimised is an effort complementary to Krug’s.
(The writer is Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras and a cultural critic.)
Despite Russia’s protests, it circulates fictitious map showing parts of India at SCO. Is China behind this adventurism?
Pakistan is playing a dangerous geo-political game, needling India from the other end as China’s serf State, without realising that all of it could boomerang on itself. Having failed to internationalise the Kashmir issue despite the abrogation of Article 370, it has now taken its territorial aggression to redrawing its maps and appropriating what it fancifully feels is owed to it. So in August it released a new map, incorporating Kashmir, parts of Ladakh and Junagadh in Gujarat. India had rightly called this vacuous and unilateral declaration, which is not backed by any credible reasoning, support groups, historical reasoning or legal validity, as a “political absurdity.” So Pakistan, in a bid to legitimise its claims, circulated this map at a virtual meeting of the national security advisors of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) member countries, despite host Russia’s resistance. India rightly walked out of the meeting, saying Pakistan’s move violated SCO norms, which mandated that no bilateral issue would be discussed and that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of member-states would be respected. The Russia-India-China axis dominates the SCO, which, as a counterweight to the US-dominated NATO, has emerged as one of the largest trans-regional international organisations accounting for almost 44 per cent of the world population, stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea. China is seeking to use it in its global domination against the US and while it has sufficiently debt-trapped Central Asian republics and other regional players to do its bidding, it is trying to neutralise Russia by becoming its biggest investor and is now needling India. Considering that India is intransigent on yielding to China’s terms on the Ladakh standoff, regardless of the meetings of the Foreign and Defence Ministers of both nations on the sidelines of the SCO, it just wanted to embarrass India, making it look like an “occupier” at a public forum. And for this it used its proxy, Pakistan. China has also been trying to convince Russia to scale down its defence deals with India following the border standoff and the map fiasco, which undoubtedly has left Moscow red-faced, was about strong-arming it as well. True, Russia is pragmatic enough about keeping both China and India on its side to establish its relevance in a multi-polar world and even front India to counter Chinese heft. But China certainly doesn’t want India, which has won brownie points at international fora for being decorous and respecting the rule of law, to prevail at SCO. In fact, it was what Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said recently that shows this cartographic offensive to be a part of a larger pattern and not just Pakistan’s independent move. “The new map shows Kashmir shares a clear border with China,” a clear indication that like Nepal, this attempt to redraw boundaries was made at China’s behest and underlines our eastern neighbour’s desire for strategic contiguity in the region than Pakistan’s any real concern for Kashmir. While India is firm on Chinese withdrawal from eastern Ladakh that seems to have driven a wedge in their greater plan to control the Karakoram by squeezing us with salami-slicing, Pakistan’s map claims are clearly intended to warn us of a two-front offensive. Pakistan is heating up the Line of Control (LoC), having moved almost 20,000 soldiers recently to match Chinese deployment on the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Its ceasefire violations and infiltration bids have gone up by about 60 per cent this year, something which didn’t happen even after the Balakot airstrikes. If recent reports are to be believed, then the Chinese are no longer shadow-boxing. Just like in Nepal, their officials have had a series of meetings with their Pakistani counterparts in Gilgit-Baltistan and have been aiding them clandestinely to revive old terror networks against India. Debt-trapped by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), with its economy in the doldrums and heavily dependent on borrowings and bailouts, Pakistan is but a pawn in China’s gameplan.
Yet Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan forgets that such unilateralism will beget unilateralism from the Indian side as well. And hurt its interests. The new map is nothing but an adventurist version of its 1947-48 map and in one blow scythes through all bilateral agreements that came after it, primarily the 1972 Shimla Agreement. If Khan wants to negate the understanding that bilateral disputes will be resolved bilaterally, is he also prepared for the negation of all other bilateral treaties we have regarding water-sharing? And if he has taken the liberty of depicting territories under Indian control as Pakistani territory, then how would he counter other valid land claims from our side? In that sense, Pakistan’s latest offensive is nothing short of playing with fire. Realising that the US is now more an ally of India and is humouring it, Pakistan is desperately coopting the Kashmir issue under the banner of pan-Islamism. So it is involving Turkey, which wants to be a leader of the neo-Islamic world, in its criticism of India and seeking Chinese endorsement. Only Pakistan doesn’t realise that its Kashmir strategy is still not quite exportable. And that China, while using it for posturing, will continue to engage with India for geo-strategic reasons.
Battle experience cannot be bought and this could expose the Chinese chimera on the battlefield
None less than the Chinese leader Xi Jingping himself has conceded that the world’s largest standing military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with more than 2.1 million active-duty strength, is afflicted by the “Peace Disease.” Since taking over the reins of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the General Secretary and chairmanship of the Central Military Commission (CMC) in 2012, Xi has unleashed transformational investments and restructuring in the PLA in terms of doctrinal, strategic, technological, cultural and on-boarding of weapon platforms. Yet, he remains acutely conscious of the combat inexperience that besets a military force that has not been tested since 1979, where it came a cropper against a decidedly inferior Vietnamese force. Importantly, the Vietnamese forces that had fought the Chinese in 1979 were still blood-soaked from fighting the American forces for nearly two decades, and had even worn out the supposedly better organised, trained and equipped military then. The essential mass of the Chinese PLA in 1979 had last seen a full theatre-level combat only in the early 1950s (Korean War) and soldiers, therefore, were raw and untested when they had taken on the Vietnamese. They were soon made to pay a price for lazily assuming that a larger force, better equipment and aggressive posturing could compensate for combat inexperience. It is this foreboding pertaining to the obvious inexperience of today’s PLA that Xi has been alluding to in the context of “Peace Disease,” even as it continues its optics of aggressive posturing, intimidation and global expansionism.
There are other elements compounding the “Peace Disease” that are pertinent in questioning the core spirit of PLA’s fighting abilities. First, the perennial concern of ensuring PLA’s loyalty and subservience to the civilian CCP – this got magnified by the purges initiated against the PLA Generals in the initial Xi years and elevating his own “young guard.” Not only was this “young guard” of post-1979 vintage but the essentiality of “unity of command” in a Chinese combat unit (at company levels) is always diluted and compromised with the shared command responsibility of the political officers, who are responsible for ensuring the non-military task of loyalty to the party, i.e. CCP. A vital chink in the structural formation of the PLA is the relative under-development of the non-commissioned officers (NCO cadre), which is invaluable for operational efficacy. The steel of the Indian Army that shone in the Kargil operations was attributable among other things to the “junior command” that led from the front, where the role of NCO cadre was significant. Unlike the militaries of India (or even Pakistan), which are bloodied in real time operational experience in internal urgencies or restive borders, the Chinese “Peace Disease” comes with accompanying laxities. Even the 1967 Nathu La and Cho La border clashes in the Indo-China history were symptomatic of a recalibrated Indian military that was by then battle-hardened and in a very different frame of mind from the Indian military of 1962.
Undoubtedly, China has embarked on mammoth military investments that ensure that its annual budgetary allocation (estimated at $261-266 billion in 2019) towards its armed forces is almost four times that of India. There is debatable realism about the Chinese claims in cutting-edge military technologies (the Chengdu J-20 Stealth ‘5th generation’ fighter plane) or about the quality of training, restructuring, command systems and so on. Despite its claimed proficiency in indigenous weaponry, China has openly sought S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft systems, SU-27 and SU-35 fighter jets from Russia, among other platforms and technologies to “reverse engineer.” But where the Chinese score over countries like India is in the way they have internalised “security” as an integral component of their national vision, international manoeuvres and strategic calculus for all policy decisions, be it internal or external. Whereas, beyond selective invoking of the “Indian soldier” whenever tensions looms, the Indian governance has diminished the role, relevance or priority on defence matters and only displays knee-jerk or politically competitive “investments” in the said domain. Ironically the mismanagement of India’s domestic affairs by its political classes has ensured that the armed forces have not suffered any “Peace Disease.”
Battle experience is one of the most important features that determines the fate of forces, along with others like the lethality of weapons, processes, leadership, numerical strength or even environmental factors like social, cultural or political moorings. Japan’s “banzai” culture and motivation levels could compensate for material disadvantages. The numerically far-superior and experienced Iraqi military (after the decade long Iran-Iraq war) got decimated within 100 hours by the superiority of American weapons, training and professionalism in the first Gulf War. At the same time, the same battle-experienced and obviously more professional American military has been forced to “pull out” of Afghanistan when faced by the rag-tag Taliban militia who neither have the matching weaponry, training, nor the infrastructural wherewithal.
The Chinese awkwardness with the reciprocal stare-down at Doklam, Galwan gallantry and recent operations of the Indian Army in occupying advantageous heights is reflective of the “Peace Disease” that has been sought to be compensated by sabre-rattling, deceit and troops/infrastructural build-up.
Lieutenant General He Lei of the PLA had famously remarked a couple of years ago that his biggest regret before retiring was that he never fought a war – his successors are even more distant from war experience, whereas, those on the other side may have other concerns and deficiencies, but “Peace Disease” is certainly not one of them. Battle experience cannot be bought and this could expose the Chinese chimera on the battlefield.
(The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands)
There are several reports globally on the rising economic disparities in the post-liberal era, upon which no political party is keen to act
Even as the world celebrates the International Day of Democracy today, it is clear that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept has gone awry throughout the world. Power and political activity are the essence of modern-day democracy. Yet, political authority, which is based on legitimacy and is a tool to deliver political, economic and social justice, has been rendering yeoman’s service to corporates, both domestic and foreign.
Ruling dispensations all around the globe have resorted to authoritarianism under the guise of the health emergency. In addition, democratic upheaval through excessive centralisation and the curbs imposed on political activities during this pandemic, have left minimal space to raise the concerns of the urban poor.
The contagion, a bolt from the blue, has caught our health systems off guard. In India, the labour class has been caught between the devil and the deep sea, thanks to the recent twin moves of the Government: Privatisation and the sudden lockdown. Seemingly, the rudderless policies of the Government have created enough space for further pauperisation of the underprivileged masses.
Now, the federal governments of Third World countries have to walk on razor’s edge to meet fiscal deficit targets on one hand and connect the welfare dots on the other. Amid this chaos, big corporations are making hay due to the relaxation of tax rates and labour laws. As the unemployment numbers in the country soar and the working class is hard put to find jobs, industries and businesses will expect this surplus labour to be at their beck and call. Amid this gloom and doom scenario, the ruling elite has been trying to divert the attention of the suffering masses by shifting the national discourse towards sensitive issues like religion and hypernationalism.
Neo-liberalism and corporatisation: The stringent measures taken by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) against Third World nations — like pruning subsidies, rollback of welfare measures and the abatement of labour laws as essential for any sort of relief package during the crisis of balance of payments — have left the labour class helpless.
The US, with the support of the WTO (World Trade Organisation), had exhorted all these countries to provide untrammelled access to its products. Apparently, the aims and paths of federal governments of these nations, the WTO and the IMF are congruent with regard to free trade and the globalisation of capital.
The lawful protection of the working class under the labour laws had proved disastrous for the interests of the capitalist class and was being viewed as an impediment to their exploitation. However, the decades-long struggle to retain these labour rights in independent nation states has come to a naught due to weakened trade unions and the decline of social capital in times of Covid.
However, despite the “new normal” of the Coronavirus era, the time has come to fight tenaciously to restore the rights of the working class, which have been tossed aside as of now.
When the market space is being dominated by monopoly, duopoly or triopoly, free and fair competition which unhindered markets guarantee, go out of the window. Extolling the virtues of neo-liberalism, the modern nation states have centred their development agenda in and around urban centres. Economically, in the post-liberal era of India, upward mobility is largely confined to sections of the urban middle class.
Welfare economics: It is wrong to mention that welfare economics is based on the “rob Peter to pay Paul” principle when Peter has direct access to resources (natural, political, economic and social) as opposed to Paul. It is not Peter but Paul who is running from pillar to post in search of opportunities. The notion of political equality of a liberal ideological stream revolves around freedom and liberty of an individual and overlooks the core elements of equality like social and economic justice. Governments all over the world have successfully repudiated the pro-poor agenda and this volte face from a welfare State to a pro-capitalist State has pushed the labour class into deeper penury.
The politician-capitalist nexus: The unholy nexus between the political class and corporates has been riding roughshod over the interests of the poor. This alliance makes it vital for the political class to safeguard the vested interests of tycoons. It is appropriate to mention here that representative democracy has been metamorphosing into a turncoat democracy.
Back in the day, politicians were known for their erudition, statesmanship and uncompromising ideological commitment. On the contrary, the present day representatives of the people are turning into snollygosters for their personal gains. There are several voluminous reports from different corners of the world on the rising economic disparities in the post-liberal era, upon which no political party is keen to act. As the late pop singer Michael Jackson once sang, “All I want to say is that they don’t really care about us.” The lyrics are still relevant in these pandemic-riddled times.
Globalisation and dependency: The South Asian nations started on their liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation path at the same time, with the exception of Sri Lanka, which opened up its economy slowly, in fits and starts. They had adjusted their economic apparatus with a new global integration process at a time when the global economic architecture was dominated by a unipolar power, the US. Since then, the lopsided globalisation process has been converting many Third World countries into dependents and in some cases they have been almost reduced to aid recipients dependent upon erstwhile colonial powers or the US.
Under the banner of global integration and in the name of free trade, the Western powers have been bleeding these nations of their resources. Asymmetrical globalisation has also challenged the sovereignty of these nations while the same has remained intact in case of developed nations.The US has been playing a rigged game of globalisation under the auspices of the WTO, the World Bank and other agencies. The time has come for Third-World nations to rise as one to have a just order in the international sphere.
(The writer is Director of an IQS academy in Hyderabad and a columnist on global affairs and trade)
Its problems of infrastructure can be traced back to its sudden transformation into a major city and to the lack of attention paid to its planning
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest and the world’s sixth-largest city. It is the provincial capital of Sindh province. Known as Pakistan’s economic hub, it generates up to 65 per cent of the national revenue. It is also Pakistan’s major port city. It is a fact that only during disasters, such as the recent urban flooding, do most Karachiites realise that there is not one political or administrative authority in Karachi but many. The city Government, the Sindh Government, the federal Government and various local administrative bodies. The administrative structure of this mammoth metropolis is thus complex and multi-layered, with some absurd overlaps. Karachi is also Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse city. Even though this diversity continues to sustain the city’s metropolitan status, and its rather pragmatically formulated pluralistic culture, it can also make the city’s many political and administrative stakeholders pull their individual weights in opposite directions. This makes it almost impossible for them to strike any workable consensus.
This is reflective of the city’s segregated ethnic construct. Ever since the 1980s, various ethnic communities have ghettoised themselves in their areas of numerical influence. During times of ethnic tussles over the city’s resources, ethnic groups prefer to remain in their areas. However, since economic survival demands venturing out and interacting with other groups, bridges do emerge and communities return to interact with each other. No matter how pragmatic the nature of this interaction, it often results in the creation of an overarching culture of interaction and inclusiveness, only to recede once again during ethnic commotions.
Common economic interests are what drive this interaction, until one community begins to suspect the motives of the other. The suspected motive is usually about usurping more than one’s unsaid share of economic resources. But there are no such bridges between those who administer this city. Communication gaps remain and in case of emergencies, these cause uncoordinated, chaotic responses and futile finger-pointing. The city’s ethnic diversity works in a curious manner, generating an always-squabbling pluralism.
Most large cities, even in developed countries, face a plethora of administrative and infrastructural problems. But lessons and data from their historical evolution aid them to adjust and resolve these problems. But unlike most cities, Karachi did not evolve as a city, as such, but it imploded into existence. Twice.
The region that became Karachi has an obscure history till the 18th century. According to ancient Greek texts, the Greek commander Nearchus, who accompanied Alexander during his invasion of India in 326 BC, called the region “Krokola”, a place by the sea inhabited by a tiny community of “primitive people.” However, 16th century Turks and Arabs called it “Kaurashi.” But it does not appear on any map until Sindh’s Kalhora dynasty annexed it in 1759. It was “gifted” to Balochistan’s Khan of Kalat in 1767 before being annexed by Sindh’s Talpur dynasty in 1794. By all accounts, it was still a small fishing town with less than 10,000 inhabitants, mostly Sindhi and Baloch, who called it “Kolachi.”
The British invaded and occupied Karachi in the early 1840s and then annexed the rest of Sindh. They made Karachi and Sindh parts of the Bombay Presidency. The British rapidly developed Karachi’s port and infrastructure. This led to migrations from the rest of India. From a population of less than 15,000 during the time of the British takeover, it witnessed a manifold increase. By 1856, the population had jumped to 57,000.
Suddenly, within a matter of a few decades, the rugged fishing town of 15,000 people became a rapidly-emerging port city. By the 1930s, the British were calling Karachi the “Queen of the East” and praising its enterprising, tolerant and diverse character. The city’s sudden urban emergence and swift increase in population did create issues but the British introduced an effective model of city governance that continued to upgrade Karachi’s infrastructure. The city governance system eschewed politics based on religion or ethnicity and succeeded in managing the city’s resources in such a manner that major and minor stakeholders felt included. In 1936, Sindh was restored as a province and Karachi was made its capital. According to the 1941 census report, Karachi’s population then was 435,887. Over 50 per cent were Hindus, 40 per cent were Muslims, while the rest comprised Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews. Over 65 per cent spoke Sindhi.
In 1947, the city imploded into another form of existence, this time as a capital of Pakistan. Karachi’s demographics witnessed a dramatic shift when millions of Urdu-speaking Muslims (Mohajir) migrated to it. There was a 161 per cent increase in Karachi’s population. The infrastructure left behind by the British could not accommodate the massive increase, and began to crumble.
In 1958, the Ayub Khan Government chalked out a resettlement plan which was to be accommodated by an ambitious industrialisation project. New low-income housing schemes emerged but factories and businesses were slow to reach these areas and there was lack of transport. Pashtun and Punjabi migrants also began to arrive in droves. Slums began to sprout. Failure to effectively adjust the city’s infrastructure to accommodate these changes led to ad hoc arrangements. In 1965, Karachi witnessed its first ethnic riot. In 1970, it once again became the capital of Sindh. In 1972, it witnessed another round of ethnic riots. Unable to check the influx of more inner-Pakistan migrations to Karachi, and stall the mushrooming of slums, the ZA Bhutto Government, in 1975, devised a “Karachi Master Plan” to upgrade the city’s failing infrastructure. It planned to build new road networks and housing; construct transport terminals, warehousing, mass transit and so on. But the plan was not implemented after the 1977 coup of Zia-ul-Haq. This resulted in the growth of the informal sector and mafia that emerged to serve a growing population of a failing city. Across the 1980s and 1990s, Karachi witnessed brutal ethnic and sectarian violence. Ethnic communities and mafia fought running battles to gain access to the city’s dwindling resources. In 2000, the Musharraf dictatorship launched a Karachi Development Programme. But this plan departed from the “social democratic” tenor of the previous (unimplemented) plans and adopted “neo-liberal” ideas. This meant putting more money in extravagant building schemes and less on the city’s degrading infrastructure. For example, according to Hasan, whereas in the past slums became the source of clogging drains with sewage, in the last two decades, the same is being done by high income areas.
Construction of residential areas, both high and low income, on natural drainage routes also continues. Due to clogged drains, these natural routes now go through residential areas and roads, flooding them over and again. Rain run-offs have used these routes for thousands of years but builders fail to take this into account by building on them without any adequate drainage facilities. Ancient Greek texts quote Nearchus as saying “a great storm was raging” when his army reached Krokola, and the storm waters were emptying into the sea. Of course, at the time, there was nothing coming in the way of these waters.
(Courtesy: Dawn)
The vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not ‘White Privilege’, is finally being dragged out into the open
To lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895.
In somewhat the same spirit, British journalist Robert Fisk wrote last week: “At some point in the next two months, we are going to have to decide whether we absolve the American people if they re-elect Donald Trump.” Losing one election to Trump is unlucky; losing two in a row may be saying something about the national character.
Fisk has been the Middle East correspondent of various British newspapers since 1976, so he was not on familiar ground when he wrote that about the US in The Independent recently. On the other hand, he was expressing a mostly unspoken but widespread attitude among all Europeans except the extreme Right. Let me quote some more: “Like all snobs, we’ve taken the view that Trump did not really represent American values — any more than the Arab dictators reflect the views of their people. We’ve hoped and prayed and fooled ourselves into believing this was only a temporary autocracy, a deviation, an old and reliable friend suffering from a serious but ultimately curable mental disease. Yet...I wonder how we are going to react to Americans if the Trump years become the Trump era; or if his dreadful, ambitious family transform themselves into the Trump Caliphate....if the America we felt we could always ultimately rely on — once they’ve straightened out their little Trump misadventure — turns into the nation we can never trust?”
I grew up in Canada, and Canadians, like Mexicans, while fond enough of individual Americans, are by nature mistrustful of the American State. “It’s like sleeping with an elephant,” as Pierre Elliott Trudeau put it. If it just rolls over or wakes up cranky, you can get badly hurt.
Europeans have a different perspective. Fisk grew up in the UK, which, like France, remembers (most of the time) that it would have lost both World War-I and II without American help. Even if the US was years late to both world wars, it showed up both times in time to save the day. And US troops stayed in Western Europe to protect it from Soviet power throughout the Cold War. Most Eastern Europeans see the US as the instrument of their liberation from the Soviet Union, even though it did not in the end involve a hot war.
So there is still a deep well of respect and trust for the US in Europe. Fisk is probably right that a second Trump election victory would finally poison that well, which would be a pity. Another four years would also see him complete the destruction of the existing international order (without giving a single thought to a replacement). Trump is, as Michael Moore noted in 2016, “A wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath.”
But would two terms of Trump mean the end of American democracy? Not necessarily. Not even likely. What Trump has triggered — and somebody was bound to trigger it around now, because every political niche, like every evolutionary niche, is always filled — is a final reckoning on the “race problem”, about 150 years after the American Civil War.
At the time of the Civil War (1861-65), Black Americans accounted for around 12 per cent of the total population and four-fifths of them were slaves. Whites accounted for almost all the rest; only a quarter-million were Native Americans. African-Americans still account for the same 12 per cent share of the population today, and many of them are still victims of the same White fear, exclusion and official violence that their ancestors experienced (mainly because they were slaves) 150 years ago. But since US immigration law changed in 1965, allowing people from the entire world to immigrate, the non-Hispanic White share of the population has dropped to only 60 per cent.
That share will to drop to 50 per cent by 2044, according to forecasts based on current birth rates and immigration trends. This has triggered a huge panic among the working-class White Americans, who often compete for the same jobs and used to depend on their whiteness as a competitive advantage. Trump is personally a racist, if his remarks and behaviour are any guide, but he is a cynical populist and would be exploiting White fears right now even if he really loved non-White Americans.
That is why the vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not “White Privilege”, is finally being dragged out into the open. Having been so exposed, it will probably finally be extinguished — but not necessarily in time to thwart Trump’s re-election. This is not the end of the US, nor the advent of a new Hitler either. It is a necessary evolution of American history, for which some people living elsewhere may also pay a substantial price.
(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy and Work.’)
Religio-political parties struggle to command a major chunk of the Pakistani votebank. Why then do they play an oversized role in the country’s politics?
The combined vote share of religio-political parties in the 2018 elections in Pakistan was 9.58 per cent, slightly lower than what it was in the 2013 polls and much lower than the 11 per cent they bagged in 2002. The 2002 tally was the highest the Islamist parties have ever received in polls. In 2018, the performance of religio-political parties was weak because there were a lot more Islamist parties competing. Apart from the established ones, two new religio-political outfits emerged: The Milli Muslim League (MML) and Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). Their entry into electoral politics was encouraged by the establishment to usurp the “religious vote” of the Centre-Right PML-N so that Imran Khan’s Centre-Right PTI could benefit. None of the new religio-political parties could win many seats, but that was never the “plan.”
Whereas the MML could not perform in the manner in which some expected it to, the radical Barelvi TLP not only succeeded in usurping PML-N’s Barelvi vote, but also gobbled up the secular MQM’s lower-middle-class Barelvi votes in Karachi. This certainly aided PTI in challenging the PML-N in Punjab and the MQM in Karachi. Historically, Islamist outfits in South Asia are not built as electoral parties. They emerge as evangelical groups or residues of movements. And even when they do convert into electoral outfits, they struggle to do well in polls because the non-religion-based mainstream parties pragmatically co-opt their causes and rhetoric.
Plus, the religio-political parties are closely associated with one Islamic sect/sub-sect or the other. This limits their appeal to voters from other denominations. Some are even understood to have developed a sect of their own, as the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) was once accused of doing. Islamist groups in South Asia developing political interests is a 20th century phenomenon rooted in the Khilafat Movement of 1919-1924. When the European theory of the State began to attract Centrist and Leftist groups in South Asia in the early 20th century, Islamist groups, too, began to be attracted by it and started to theorise the possibility of creating an “Islamic state.” But most of them could not find the means or the need to devise any electoral tools to achieve such a State. They often saw electoral politics as contrary to their Islamist dispositions. That’s why the demand for a Muslim-majority State Pakistan arose from a Centrist and quasi-secular All India Muslim League (AIML). What’s more, almost all major Islamist parties opposed this demand on one pretext or the other. But they could not neutralise AIML’s plans because, by the 1940s, it had not only become an experienced electoral entity, but it was able to juxtapose its “modernist” Muslim nationalism with rhetoric from their Islamist opponents. These opponents had no plan to stall the League through electoral means.
The Islamist parties remained in an electoral limbo during the first 20 years of Pakistan but they did retain their evangelical and agitational disposition, in an attempt to influence the ideological character of the new country. But even during the years of indirect elections (1957-58) and hybrid democracy (1962-69), they could not devise any effective electoral tools and send members to the first two constituent Assemblies, and the two Assemblies that came into being during the Ayub Khan dictatorship.
Yet, just before the country’s first direct elections in 1970, parties such as JI were claiming that they would sweep the polls. But the opposite happened. From 1947 till 1972, Islamist parties operated from outside the Assemblies and had no significant influence on policymaking, other than through the threat of agitations. Though 18 members from three religio-political parties managed to enter the 1972 Parliament, they were no match for the mainstream electoral parties. That’s why, in 1974 and then again in 1977, Islamist parties once again banked on their penchant for agitational politics to undermine a regime. With the sidelining of some major parties during 1977, the religio-political parties were given space to develop their electoral skills and expand constituencies. Separate electorates were introduced to favour them. But the idea, on the part of the military regime, was to manoeuvre them in a manner that would help the Zia dictatorship ward off challenges posed by the Opposition parties.
Most of them became tools of the establishment, without whose backing they believed they could not become effective electoral entities. In the 1990s, the PML-N continued to co-opt religious rhetoric of the Islamist parties. However, the self-proclaimed “enlightened moderate” Musharraf decided to aggressively sideline the PML-N and the PPP during the 2002 polls, by creating the conditions required for the religio-political parties to win in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This was when these parties bagged 11 per cent of the vote but this could not halt the return of the PPP and the PML-N after the 2008 elections.
In the eyes of the establishment, the mutable utility of the old religio-political parties has been exhausted. With growing mistrust between the PML-N/PPP and the establishment, the latter “allowed” the growth of new religion-based groups like the TLP and the MML. In an environment where the State was at war with religious militancy and with the sword of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) still hanging over the country’s head, the idea was to quietly nurture new religious groups, not to help them win, but to aid the pro-establishment PTI by way of scattering PML-N’s religious votebank. The fate of the religio-political parties in politics is thus likely to continue being dependent on their utility to the establishment.
(Courtesy: Dawn)
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