Saturday, December 31, 2005

Sipah-e-Sahaba in Japan!

Daily Times, December 31, 2005
Banned SSP man plans base in Japan: report

TOKYO: Police believe a member of an Islamic extremist group based in Pakistan has entered Japan with the aim of setting up a base in Washington’s closest Asian ally, a report said on Friday.

A male member of the Islamic extremist group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) entered Japan in 2003, according to documents from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the Sankei Shimbun newspaper said. Police have discovered that this man in his 30s frequented mosques in the Tokyo area and that he told other people that he came to Japan to set up a launch pad for the group, the report said. The police arrested one of the Pakistani men who had contacts with him on suspicion of illegal overstay and has put other suspects under observation, it said. Japanese police are on heightened alert for possible terrorist activities and fear a move by the militant group to recruit members from Japan’s Muslim community and create a support network, the newspaper added. A police spokesman could not immediately confirm the report. Al-Qaeda has repeatedly threatened Japan, a close US ally that has troops in Iraq and hosts the largest US military base in Asia. afp

Friday, December 30, 2005

"An Out of Box Kashmir Solution": A proposal worth considering seriously...

The News, December 30, 2005
An out-of-box Kashmir solution
M Ismail Khan

Autonomy and demilitarisation -- take it or leave it. This is as simple and straight as any Pakistani government may ever afford to offer on Kashmir. Let us hope that Indian leaders will have the vision and guts to grab the opportunity. If they don't, it is India who will have to regret in the years to come -- just as they are today regretting their decision to climb up the Siachen glacier without knowing how to get down from there. The cost of hanging on to the status quo over Kashmir is too high for South Asia in general and India in particular.

Delhi's 'take it easy' reaction to this 'mother of all proposals' by President Musharraf is unfortunate, to say the least. It is correct that the idea has been shared at a time when Pakistan-controlled Kashmir is in disarray following the earthquake of October 8. It is also right that the level of political autonomy currently available to Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas is far from satisfactory, but Indian Foreign Office should have risen above the 'Cold War' mindset, and should have wholeheartedly welcomed the suggestion, just as they did for the five intra-Kashmir crossing points.

The October 8 earthquake is a divine opportunity for the two countries to workout an honourable exit from this historical predicament. Pakistan has demonstrated courage to move beyond the Security Council resolutions and plebiscite; India must not chew its oft-repeated rhetoric of 'making borders irrelevant.'

One really doesn't understand India's insistence for 'behind the scene negotiations, and or action on written proposals only' tactic. Guess, that is how India's democracy operates these days, from Natwar Singh's alleged behind the scene activities in Iraq's food for oil programme and other underhand ministerial activities routinely exposed by tehlika.com, it seems that this overly secretive attitude by Indian establishment is something Islamabad will have to bear within the days to come. On the other hand, Pakistan has been consistent, vocal and transparent in its moves on the Kashmir issue, which is the right course to tackle a deeply politicised and publicised dispute such as Kashmir. Just as both countries have been encouraging increased people to people contacts, it is imperative that public in India, Pakistan and various parts of Jammu and Kashmir are fully informed of the emerging thinking at the highest level.

Said that, let me warn you that I am not a so-called Kashmir expert, I am not a Kashmiri either, I and around a million poor folks in the Northern Areas are mere collateral damage of the Kashmir dispute. My interest in the debate primarily stems from a desire to right the wrong inflicted on my own innocent people in particular, and millions of Kashmiris and poor South Asians in general. At home in the Northern Areas, we are at a loss to understand on what basis our most fundamental human and political rights have been denied for the last 57 years. I am not a politician either; it is sheer coincidence that as a civil society member I got an opportunity to take part in the people to people exchanges on Kashmir in the year 2005.

I had the opportunity to sit with the Hurriyat leaders in Srinagar, listen to the nationalist Kashmiri leaders' dreams of a United States of Kashmir in Jammu and Muzaffarabad, and hear the apologists running governments on both sides. I also met many Kashmiri mujahideen waging liberation struggle, Kashmiri pundits living in exile, and people like Dr. Kiran Singh, son of Maharaja Hari Singh, and Sardar Qayyum Khan, mujahid-e-awal-turned-statesmen. Due to this interaction, I can comfortably profess that 'if India and Pakistan do not move decidedly towards a settlement of Kashmir dispute in 2006, the two countries will find themselves grappling with the same set of problems, at least till 2066.

One can say that if it was so easy an issue to resolve, it would have happened long ago. But I would insist that at this point in history we look forward rather than look backward on Kashmir. I would rather draw your attention to an ominous development in Jammu and Kashmir, which seems to have gone almost unnoticed on both sides of the divide. Ladakh as you might be aware is one large chunk of the former princely state of Jammu & Kashmir. Here an election for the autonomous body, Ladakh Hill Development Council, was held in October 2005, in which the Ladakh Union Territory Front (LUTF) --a nationalist party that has been struggling to get Ladakh declared as a Union Territory (UT), reporting to Delhi, won 25 out of 26 seats, while the mainstream Congress Party managed only one seat. It was a cleansweep by those who would like to see Ladakh developing as an independent province within India and separated from Jammu & Kashmir.

Please remember that out of 84,471 sq miles of the princely state disintegrated in 1947, Gilgit–Baltistan (Northern Areas) and Ladakh cover 63, 554 sq miles. From the election result it is clear that Ladakh, particularly the Buddhist dominated Leh district, does not want to remain part of the Jammu & Kashmir. On the other hand, there is no way that Pakistan could think of negotiating the strategically critical Gilgit–Baltistan or the Northern Areas, which houses a highway to Beijing and has important natural resources. Jammu, 12,378 sq miles, is predominantly Hindu and would be least interested in becoming an integral part of Muslim dominated United States of Kashmir. What is left are 8, 539 sq miles of Kashmir Valley and its surrounding hilly areas, which include the 5,134 sq miles of Azad Kashmir. Thus, there is very little scope for revival of Maharaja Hari Singh type unitary authority in the State.

Therefore, for all practical purposes, solution to the dispute depends on a formula which could offer a sense of vindication to competing parties in Kashmiri speaking Kashmir Valley controlled by India and non-Kashmiri speaking Azad Kashmir in Pakistan. Given, the ground situation in Ladakh, Jammu and Northern Areas (Gilgit–Baltistan), the two governments and Kashmiris need to focus on finding common grounds on Azad Kashmir and Kashmir Valley. If India, Pakistan and Kashmiri leaders can seize the extraordinary facesaving opportunity provided by the earthquake, following steps may lead to a win-win solution for all competing parties in the Kashmir dispute:

1. Continue with increased people to people interaction, opening of more crossing points along the LOC to facilitate local interaction and revival of social, economic and cultural contacts.

2. Immediate release of political prisoners, and a general amnesty for dissidents.

3. Complete ceasefire, and inclusion of freedom fighters/militant leaders, who have actually fought for a cause, in the negotiation process and on the dialogue table.

4. Timetable for a phased withdrawal of troops from the main population centres on both sides, establishment of a locally raised security set-up and eventual withdrawal of regular and paramilitary force from Kashmir Valley and Azad Kashmir.

5. Create necessary administrative mechanisms to regulate intra-Kashmir trade, travel and communication etc.

6. India to carry out necessary amendments in the constitution to curve out Jammu and Ladakh as new provinces. Necessary boundary adjustments should be made regarding Poonch and Rajouri in J&K, and Kargil and Baltistan in India and Pakistan.

7. India to allow a fully empowered and Independent Kashmir Province headquartered at Srinagar, Pakistan to also make Azad Kashmir an Independent Kashmir Province

8. Free and fair election on both parts of Independent Kashmir Provinces under international monitors and supervision of the two countries.

9. Establishment of a Joint Council or Assembly comprised of elected members from both parts of Kashmir Provinces, which could meet regularly and deliberate on a concurrent list of subjects.

10. Northern Areas to become a separate province of Pakistan, and to be granted adequate representation in the both houses of Pakistan's parliament.

11. Soft borders within Jammu, Ladakh, Kashmir and the Northern Areas, and also with the bordering provinces of India and Pakistan to enable cross-border trade and interaction of the people.

12. A time line, based on mutual agreement of the Kashmiris for eventual unification of the two Kashmir Provinces as one Independent Province under a special arrangement and relationship with both Pakistan and India.

The writer is a development consultant and analyst from the Northern Areas
Email: ismail.k2@gmail.com

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Plight of health reforms in Pakistan...

The News, December 29, 2005
Tawana Pakistan
Drugs purchased for schoolgirls were meant for pregnant women
By Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: The most inhuman aspect of the recently suspended Rs 3.6 billion Tawana Pakistan project was that the substandard micronutrients purchased by the government for 5 to 12-year-old schoolgirls were actually meant for women, particularly having pregnancy, but no head rolled for the lapse.

Almost 100 girls of a school in Pakpattan, one of the 29 poor districts where the project was launched, suffered the side effects. Many even fainted but no action was initiated either against the importer of the medicine or against those who recommended the dose to the innocent girls.

Nuclear Export Controls

Daily Times, December 28, 2005
Nuclear and biological weapons material: Pakistan issues fresh export control lists
By Umer Farooq

ISLAMABAD: The government on Tuesday issued fresh lists of technologies and material related to nuclear and biological weapons which will be subject to strict export control.

Officials told Daily Times that the relevant government departments had taken several steps to strengthen export controls on nuclear material. The government has also issued a statutory regulatory order (SRO) for the implementation of export controls on goods, technologies, material and equipment related to nuclear and biological weapons and their delivery systems. It has sent a notification to all the departments concerned and law enforcement agencies for effective control at the frontiers. The lists of banned nuclear and biological materials have also been sent to manufacturers in the country. The lists have been notified pursuant to the Export Control Act passed by the parliament in September 2004.

Foreign Office officials said that the step indicated Pakistan’s commitment to nuclear export control and would highlight Pakistan’s policy to implement its national and international non-proliferation commitments.

Pakistan is planning to set up additional nuclear power plants to generate 8,800 megawatts of electricity by 2025 under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. Pakistan has been in talks with various countries, including the United States and Japan, and international organisations on nuclear export control issues. Pakistani officials have received training in Japan for the strict implementation of nuclear export controls. A delegation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group visited Pakistan last year to examine its nuclear facilities when the latter applied for its membership. “The export control lists adopted by Pakistan encompass the lists and scope of export controls maintained by the NSG and the Australia Group, which relates to biological agents and toxins, and the Missile Technology Control Regime,” said a press statement.

Monday, December 26, 2005

Being a Christian in Pakistan means...

Dawn, December 25, 2005
Christmas musings By Ardeshir Cowasjee

MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH came, made a country to suit the genius of his brethren, and died. He told the men who would govern his country that religion would not be the business of the state, that the state would not be ruled by priests with a divine mission. He was clear on this.

He was also clear enough to decree that his official birthday would be commemorated on the day when the world at large joyfully celebrates the birth anniversary of Jesus of Nazareth, the Second in Trinity, and this continues. We wish and hope, though it is extremely difficult to do so, that his soul rests in peace.

Now for the usual Sunday whinge and whine : Rather than getting better and better day by day, year by year, this republic of ours seems to be slipping fast in the wrong direction. Strange things are happening, of which we were previously unaware — they may well have been with us for decades, since the rule of religiosity in the 1980s, but now the press, thanks to President General Pervez Musharraf, has become freer than ever before, and thus bolder, and it does its best to tell it as it is.

In the immortal words of Robert Lowe, editorial writer for The Times (London) in 1851 :

“The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions.

“The press lives by disclosures For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences — to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice or oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

The judgment of the world — on that front we do not do well. The judgment is against us, it is harsh, and it is justified.

There happened this month an event which was classified by none other than the chairman of our Higher Education Commission, the learned Professor Doctor Atta-ur-Rahman : “It is such obnoxious behaviour that has led to the downslide of this nation in ethics.”

What was the obnoxious behaviour? Why, mere discrimination, which is constitutionally institutionalized in Pakistan, the much amended constitution making it mandatory that the minorities of this country should not be treated on an equal footing with the larger, much larger, majority (which within itself also discriminates violently and fatally at times between its numerous sects).

This year a young Christian girl from Gujranwalla did well and obtained 878 out of 1,100 marks in her intermediate examinations. Wishing to study medicine, she applied for admission to the MBBS course at that most upright institution of Lahore, the King Edward Medical College, which in days of yore has turned out many a fine man of healing. Qandeel Sultan, the young Christian, obtained 77.97 per cent in the final selection merit and rightly should have been admitted. She was not.

A Muslim student who had obtained lesser marks than she overtook her as he was awarded 20 additional marks on the ground that he is a Hafiz-e-Quran (this apparently is the institutionalized practice). Qandeel, obviously wronged as she is excluded from being able to take advantage of the 20 point bonus, did the unexpected. As an aggrieved minority member she went to court and filed a writ petition (18634/05) in the Lahore High Court which was admitted on November 28. The matter has been fully covered in the press and we all await the decision of the honourable court. We all think we can guess what it will be.

Now, thankfully, we have as the HEC Chairman Atta-ur-Rahman, and we must be grateful that it is not a ‘competent’ retired or serving army general who occupies this slot. Atta has written and promised to investigate and advise the KEMC that it should base its admission policy strictly on merit, without consideration of race or religion. This is how it should be. And, if the college does not toe the line, it gets no further development funding. Good. The lion has roared — even though he be toothless. Sadly, we have no authority (other than the president of the Republic) who is capable of issuing the order : ‘Admit the girl, see that she loses no time. The fluff can be sorted out later.’

Karachi this coming week has a bit of luck. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz will not descend upon us to cause the usual havoc, and make a thorough nuisance of himself, bringing down upon his head much justified vituperation. The general also will spare Karachi (as far as we know) and concentrate on making himself popular in Sindh. We wish them both a merry festive season.

Men on a Mission from Boston

The Boston Globe
Men on a mission
Their Boston-based nonprofit funds life-changing projects in Pakistan
By Omar Sacirbey, Globe Correspondent | December 26, 2005

For Justin Stone, it's the image of a car running a one-legged beggar off a street in Karachi that sticks in his mind. For Omar Biabani, ''it's a collage of images" -- of malnourished children, illiteracy, and lack of plumbing -- that haunts memories of his native land.

Biabani, 29, and Stone, 32, grew up thousands of miles apart. But spurred by the images of Pakistan's overwhelming poverty and a desire to help humanity, they are leading a Boston-based nonprofit in developing, little by little, one of the poorest countries in the world, which also happens to be a pivot point in the war on terror. Biabani cofounded the Association for the Development of Pakistan in 2003 with a handful of other young Pakistani-Americans, while Stone, a native New Yorker and New England transplant, is its president. Although lacking in philanthropy experience, the young professionals who make up ADP have turned the fledgling organization into a model of efficiency that has come to represent a new sophistication in social activism among South Asians.

''It's so easy to spend your life in a comfort zone without worrying about anything," said Biabani, who left Pakistan for Montreal's McGill University in 1996 and moved to Boston four years later to work as a software engineer. ''If we don't invest in human lives there, there'll be no one to blame but us. If we neglect it, it'll come back to us."

Poverty is a serious problem in Pakistan, a nation of 162 million people. In a report last year, the International Monetary Fund estimated that 32 percent of Pakistan's people lived in poverty in 2001, up from 26 percent in 1991. More than 51 percent of its people are illiterate, a figure that jumps to almost 65 percent for women. Life expectancy is 63 years, compared to 77.6 in the United States.

In the short time ADP has been around, it has funded six life-changing projects in Pakistan's poorest regions, including eyesight restoration for 50 rural women and the establishment of an eye clinic in their district, a computer lab with Internet access at a school for underprivileged children, and vaccinations against hepatitis B for 200 nomadic children. Total cost: $8,314 (ADP purchased products at a discount and got health care workers to volunteer their services). Its workers are all volunteers, and more than 96 percent of its funds goes to projects.

Despite these accomplishments, it was the devastating South Asian earthquake on Oct. 8 that tested the group's mettle. Biabani had just finished suhoor, the pre-dawn breakfast that Muslims eat during Ramadan, and went to check the news online. What he saw terrified him: a headline that a 7.6 earthquake had struck Pakistan and an accompanying photo of two buildings, one collapsed and one standing. He instantly recognized the neighborhood in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, where the once-identical buildings were, and knew his mother and younger sister and brother lived in one of them. ''Just by looking at the picture, I couldn't tell which one fell. So what was going through my mind was that there's a 50-50 chance that my mom is . . . dead."

A phone call to his father in nearby Faisalabad confirmed that his mother and siblings had survived, but Biabani would later learn that more than 80 people had died in the collapse and more than 80,000 in the region were hurt. Although emergency response was not what ADP had set out to do, Biabani and Stone started working the phones and encouraging people to donate to Pakistani relief organizations through the nonprofit's website. Within 48 hours the group had raised $50,000, a figure that had grown to almost $364,000, including a $25,000 grant from the Levi Strauss Co., by mid-December.

''The earthquake spawned literally hundreds of organizations, but ADP was already well organized," said Adil Najam, an international relations professor at Boston University and Tufts University whose book ''Portrait of a Giving Community: Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora" is due out next spring. ''The earthquake allowed ADP to rise to their potential."

Biabani hardly imagined such potential, let alone such a disaster, when ADP launched in 2003. Back then, the group had to find projects to fund. The first was providing six computers with Internet access, classroom furniture, and a teacher to a school for first- through fifth-graders in Nilore, a village about 17 miles east of Islamabad but light years away socially. The school was founded in 1999 by Ibtida (''Beginning" in Urdu), a volunteer organization that runs literacy programs for women and three secular schools in Pakistan's rural north, where the educational alternative for poor kids is madrassahs, the religious schools often under scrutiny for fostering extremism.

''It was amazing seeing the kids' reactions, because they'd never seen a computer before," said Nuzhat Ahmad, a 36-year-old gastroenterologist in Philadelphia who helped set up the school and returns there for a few weeks every year to teach. She noted that about 50 percent of Pakistani children drop out of school before reaching fifth grade. But in Pakistan, computer skills are almost a guarantee of a job, and thus an incentive for parents to keep their kids in school.

Nongovernmental organizations in Pakistan now come to ADP. The nonprofit's members scrutinize each project based on criteria such as social impact, cost, scalability, and the reliability of the group making the proposal.

Besides doing its own due diligence, what distinguishes ADP from other nonprofits is its emphasis on ''holistic development," Stone said, explaining that funding a school does a community no good if there are no job opportunities later or if parents are likely to take their kids out of the school. He hopes ADP is now at the stage where it can begin complementing existing projects. ''We want to go back to these projects that we've already funded and build upon them," he said.

Humility is also important, Biabani said, stressing that familiarity with Pakistan's problems and having money to help solve them are not a license for ADP to force projects they think sound good on others. Rather, it's important to listen to the people on the ground. ''I can say, 'Hey, I'll educate you.' But you say, 'I have an empty stomach.' What good is an education? Who am I to force help on someone? How do I know what it's like to have an empty stomach?" he said. ''We have to be willing to learn, to say, 'No, we don't know.' "

While it might seem extraordinary that an all-volunteer group has built a successful philanthropy in less than three years, Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog in Chicago, said such beginnings are not unusual. ''Groups are inspired by people closest to the issue or the cause, such as someone close to a child or a spouse that dies from a disease. That is how these groups tend to get started," said Borochoff.

Biabani says he's also involved because of his Islamic faith, which counts charity among its cornerstones. ''That drive to help humanity is core to any religion. People ask, 'Why are you doing this?' It's because I can, because I've seen the poverty," he said.

Like Biabani, Stone also has a connection to Pakistan -- his wife, Shazia Bakar, 27, whom he married this year after knowing her for eight years. But he says there are other things that compel him to help. ''It's a sense that I've had that my birth in a specific place, in a specific condition, is really coincidence, or luck," he said. ''And the same person I am could have easily been born in a completely different place with nothing. And a person, no matter how well they're doing, should be appreciative of what they have and make every effort to give back."

Trying to improve living conditions in the country where one's roots are is nothing new for immigrants and their children, and Pakistani-Americans are no exception. But the 20- and 30-somethings who constitute ADP differ from members of the generations that preceded them. ''There's a new generation of organizations being run by Pakistani-Americans which are more focused, more organized, because they know the American environment much better. The generation that came earlier is less familiar with the US," said Najam, who belongs to an informal network of reform-minded Pakistani-Americans, the Boston Group, that never made the jump to a formal institution.

Today's Pakistani-Americans also know there's a battle within Islam between moderates and extremists, and that poverty is one of the best recruiting tools the extremists have. That's why Biabani believes development and democracy are critical to Pakistan's future. ''When you create an environment where there are checks and balances, and where there's a lot of opportunities, educational, vocational, recreational, then you start valuing life."

Potential US' Arms Sales to South Asia in 2006: An Unwarranted strategy if peace is the goal

China Daily, December 26, 2005
US eyes big Pakistan, India arms sales (Reuters)

The Bush administration is maneuvering to balance possible big new U.S. arms sales to archrivals India and Pakistan in the new year.

In the past week, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have made separate visits, not announced in advance, to Pakistan, a key ally in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

Islamabad will make up its mind in the coming year on a U.S. offer to resume F-16 fighter aircraft sales after a 16-year break, Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri was quoted by the Associated Press of Pakistan as saying after Cheney left.

Earlier this month, Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kohler, head of the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, said he expected Pakistan to modify buying plans because of the October 8 earthquake that killed more than 73,000 people.

"I think that what we were ready to do right before the earthquake is probably going to have to change," Kohler said in a December 7 interview with Reuters in Washington.

"We'll get back with Pakistan early in the new year and see what they want to do," he added. Before the temblor, Pakistan had asked about buying as many as 75 new F-16C/D models and 11 refurbished F-16s, Kohler said in May.

The single-engine multi-role F-16 is built by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. New purchases would boost a fleet of about 32 F-16s acquired before Congress cut off sales in 1990 over Pakistan's nuclear program.

In May, the Pentagon told Congress it was proposing to let Pakistan buy 300 AIM-9M-1/2 "Sidewinder" heat-seeking, air-to-air missiles and 60 Harpoon missiles with a combined value of up to $226 million.

Arms sales to India

Separately, the United States is poised to push in the new year for major arms sales to India.

The Bush administration is weighing, among other things, whether to let India buy a state-of-the-art radar system as part of a U.S. bid for a potential $5 billion contract to supply 126 multi-role fighters, Kohler said in the interview.

The possible supply of Active Electronically Scanned Array Radar, or AESA, would boost U.S. prospects against expected competition from Sweden, France and Russia. The technology is meant to let U.S. fighters detect and destroy enemy aircraft at significantly longer ranges.

An Indian purchase of either the F-16 or the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet built by Boeing Co., the other U.S. fighter on offer, would cement a sea change in U.S.-Indian bilateral ties since the end of the Cold War.

"Their pilots (would) come to our schools. We'll train with them. We will work very closely with their maintenance technicians," said Kohler, who has visited India three times in the past year. He said he may go back to New Delhi in March and was planning to send his deputy, Richard Millies, in late January or early February to coincide with an arms bazaar.

New Delhi's ultimate choice of its next fighter aircraft "will be a fairly significant political statement," he said.

India is widely said to be interested also in a range of U.S. arms, including P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, PAC-3 anti-missile systems and electronic warfare systems.

Analysts fear U.S. sales could fuel an arms race between India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars since the 1947 partition of British India.

If their rivalry flared anew, the United States could be on the hook to deliver sophisticated weaponry to a region on the brink of war, said Matt Schroeder of the Federation of American Scientists' arms sales monitoring project.

Indians can go home again: Potential lessons for Pakistan

The New York Times, December 26, 2005
Indians Find They Can Go Home Again
By SARITHA RAI

BANGALORE, India - Standing amid the rolling lawns outside his four-bedroom villa, Ajay Kela pondered his street in the community of Palm Meadows. One of his neighbors recently returned to India from Cupertino, Calif., to run a technology start-up funded by the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

Across the street from Mr. Kela is another Indian executive, this one from Fremont, Calif., who works with the outsourcing firm Infosys Technologies. On the other side is the top executive of Cisco Systems in India, who returned here after decades in the Bay Area and New York.

Also on the block is a returnee from the United Kingdom, who heads the technology operations of Deutsche Bank.

Mr. Kela's neighborhood is just a small sample of a reverse brain drain benefiting India. The gated community of Palm Meadows in the Whitefield suburbs, and many others in the vicinity, with names like Ozone and Lake Vista, are full of Indians who were educated in and worked in the United States and Europe, but who have been lured home by the surging Indian economy and its buoyant technology industry.

"Nothing unusual about this lane at all," said Mr. Kela, 48, who moved from Foster City, Calif., to Palm Meadows last year and is president of the outsourcing firm Symphony Services, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Nasscom, a trade group of Indian outsourcing companies, estimates that 30,000 technology professionals have moved back in the last 18 months. Bangalore, Hyderabad and the suburbs of Delhi are becoming magnets for an influx of Indians, who are the top-earning ethnic group in the United States. These cities, with their Western-style work environment, generous paychecks and quick career jumps, offer the returnees what, until now, they could only get in places like Palo Alto and Boston.

And now they offer something else: a housing boom. Homes have tripled in value in Palm Meadows over the last 12 months, and rents have quadrupled. "Expatriates are returning because India is hot," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, India's second-largest outsourcing firm, which recruited 25 returnees from top American schools for its 100-seat summer internship this year. "There is an increasing feeling that significant action in the technology industry is moving to India," he said.

While most returnees are first-generation expatriates, second-generation Indians living in the United States are also returning, said Lori Blackman, a recruitment consultant in Dallas. "Among them I sense an altruistic pull to return to India to help build their home country to a greater power than the country had ever hoped to achieve," she said.

But the trend is raising fears among American specialists that it could deplete the United States of scientific talent and blunt its edge in innovation. "The United States will miss the talents of people of Indian origin who return to India," said Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute in Washington, adding, that the moves could create greater possibilities for trade between the two countries.

For many returnees, the newly challenging work environment in India has tied in neatly with personal reasons for returning, such as raising their children in Indian culture and caring for aging parents.

"When I left India 25 years ago, everybody was headed to the United States," said Mr. Kela, who pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and stayed two decades, working for companies like General Electric and AutoDesk. For India's best and brightest, a technology or engineering career was an irresistible draw to the United States, even until four or five years ago.

"But now they all want to get on the plane home," said Mr. Kela, who returned with his wife and two children.

Once a regular at Silicon Valley job fairs, trying to woo Indians back home, Mr. Kela no longer needs to sell India. He receives 10 rƩsumƩs a month from people with decades of work experience in the United States yearning to relocate.

With globalization, many Americans of Indian origin in the high-technology industry are looking at India as a "career-enhancing move," said Anuradha Parthasarathy, the chief executive of Global Executive Talent, a search firm in Menlo Park, Calif., who is swamped by such job-seekers. Many technology companies - multinationals and Indian outsourcing firms as well as start-ups - are eager to hire returnees with Western managerial experience or technology specialization.

Companies based in the United States, like ipValue, a company in Palo Alto that commercializes intellectual assets for large technology companies like British Telecom and the Xerox Corporation, are helping accelerate the trend. When ipValue recently decided to expand its operations, it chose to do so in India.

"We are really betting on the Indian diaspora returning home," said Vincent Pluvinage, its chief executive. The firm just hired a top executive from Oracle to head its Indian operations and expects a third of its 20-member team in India to consist of returnees by January 2006.

The passage back is no longer an ordeal, because much has changed in India. Whereas watching a movie in a dingy hall was once a weekend high point, now fancy multiplexes, bowling alleys and shopping malls offer entertainment, and pizzerias and cafes are ubiquitous at street corners. Indians who once could choose between only two car models and fly a single airline find they have returned to a profusion of choices.

Even as the lifestyle gaps between India and the West have narrowed rapidly, salary differences at top executive levels have virtually disappeared. Annual pay packages of a half-million dollars are common in Bangalore, but even for those taking a pay cut to return home, the lower cost of living balances smaller paychecks. Starting salaries for engineers are about $12,000 in India, versus $60,000 in Silicon Valley.

But relocating is not without its challenges, as Venki Sundaresan, 38, discovered a year ago when, after 15 years abroad, he moved to India with his wife and twin daughters to be the information technology director of Cypress Semiconductor.

In atypical fashion, Mr. Sundaresan scorned the "soft landing" that many returning Indians seek by living in gated communities. Instead, to have the "true Indian experience," the family opted to live in the teeming Indiranagar neighborhood. For his 5-year-old twins, he spurned upmarket international schools popular with other returnees and enrolled them in a neighborhood school. Mr. Sundaresan owns an Indian-made car, a Maruti Baleno.

"We've already driven the Mercedes and the BMW in the United States," he said. "What is the point of dodging around Bangalore's potholes in a limo?"

Living in Palm Meadows, Mr. Kela and his neighbor Sanjay Swamy, 41, who heads the Indian operations of Ketera Technologies, face very little transition anxiety. Mr. Swamy bought and moved into a Palm Meadows villa with his wife, Tulsi, a financial consultant, and 8-year-old son, Ashwin.

The communities buffer returnees from Bangalore's bumper-to-bumper traffic, unpaved sidewalks and swarming neighborhoods. Mr. Kela; his 9-year-old daughter, Payal; and 6-year-old son, Ankur, enjoy riding bikes on weekends, and they often play cricket, which Mr. Kela is passionate about. His daughter is learning the classical Indian dances of Kathak and Bharatanatyam. For Halloween this year, Mr. Kela led his children on a trick-or-treat walk.

Mr. Kela says he misses the freedom to drive anywhere or go on long hikes. Yet, life is comfortable, with two live-in maids, a full-time driver and another on call, all of whom are "outrageously affordable."

His neighbor Mr. Swamy is immersed in building a Silicon Valley-style team in Bangalore, but with some local adjustments. When he learned that the company routinely received calls from prospective fathers-in-law of employees, asking to verify their ages, titles and salary details, Mr. Swamy wrote a memo titled "HR Policy on Disclosing Employee Information to Prospective Fathers-in-Law."

"While I want to be entirely supportive of ensuring that our confidentiality agreement does not result in your missing out on the spouse of your dreams," Mr. Swamy said, "I don't want competitors to use this as a ploy to get at sensitive information."

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Kashmir 1947: Krishna Mehta's Story



Dawn Book Review, December 24, 2005
Kashmir 1947: A Survivor’s Story
By Krishna Mehta
Penguin India.
For more information log onto
www.penguinbooksindia.com
ISBN 0-14-400017-2
168pp. Indian Rs200

It has been nearly 60 years since partition, but never has the environment been more conducive to discuss Kashmir than it is now. Once regarded as dangerous and taboo, the subject dominates most forums today. As hatred turns into understanding, several books on the partition and on Kashmir are seeing the light of the day. Kashmir 1947: A Survivor’s Story is one such book written by Krishna Mehta. Mehta was the wife of a senior civil servant stationed in Muzaffarabad as the Wazir-i-wazarat. Her first-hand account of the conflict in a region which both countries were determined to acquire makes for a chilling read. In no time, the author sets the scene of the problems that her family was faced with.

Mehta belonged to a well-known and well-to-do Kashmiri family. It was in July 1947, a month before partition, when Muzaffarabad turned into a volatile city, gripped by communal tensions. One fine morning, her house was attacked by bloodthirsty raiders when her husband was not at home. He had, in fact, gone to defend the city but never came back. In order to survive, Mehta, along with her children and faithful servants, escaped and watched their house being looted and razed to the ground from a distance.

The author describes, in detail, the events of those frightful days and nights in a simple and forthright manner. It was in such trying times, when even the most trusted friends refused to provide shelter, that her family was rescued by strangers (mostly Muslims).

The book is absorbing but the most touching part of her story is her vivid description of the happenings at the Domal Veterinary Hospital. Several Hindu families had taken refuge in that hospital. When the raiders eventually got there, they forcibly took the attractive women. But many such women preferred death to dishonour as they jumped from the Domal Bridge into the river. Mehta writes: “The desire for self-immolation was too great and they all went to their death with a seeming lack of pain, pity or feeling.”

Then her life at Dutiyal Camp is also rather disturbing. Women everywhere were prime targets of looters. Some of them were even married to their kidnappers against their will and had to live with them for a while. Even at the end of captivity, these women were caught between the devil and the deep sea for fear of rejection by their families.

Even under such circumstances, Mehta helped many women to overcome their problems and empowered and educated Muslim women in adjoining villages to take a stand against the practice of forced kidnapped marriages. All in all, Mehta’s book, an autobiography of sorts, is a very heart-rending account of the partition. — Moniza Inam

Jinnah between Myth and Reality: Book Review

Dawn, December 25, 2005
Book Review
Between myth and history
This book is a collection of essays and articles on Mohammad Ali Jinnah by some of the most distinguished scholars of South Asian history

Ayesha Jalal sets the record straight about the misconception over Mohammad Ali Jinnah using Pakistan as a mere ruse against the Congress

Pakistan’s impeccable record in commemorating the landmarks in its national struggle has not always been matched by an ability to coherently explain their historical significance. Sixty-five years since its adoption by the All-India Muslim League, the Lahore Resolution remains mired in contentious debates among historians of South Asia as well as the protagonists of provincial versus central rights in Pakistan.

Not surprisingly, most Pakistanis are no nearer to understanding how the would-be Magna Carta of their territorial statehood relates to their citizenship rights, far less squares the circle of the multiple conceptions of nationhood articulated by Muslims in the pre-independence period.

The Resolution’s claim that Indian Muslims were not a minority but a nation was raised on behalf of all the Muslims of the subcontinent. Yet the territorial contours of the newly created homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947 left almost as many Muslim non-citizens outside as there were Muslim citizens within. Even after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 administered a rude shock to the official narratives of national identity, the contradiction between claims of nationhood and the achievement of statehood was never addressed, far less resolved. The silence has been a major stumbling block in Pakistan’s quest for an identity which is consistent with the appeal of Islamic universalism as well as the requirements of territorial nationalism.

Instead of treating the Lahore Resolution as an issue of metahistorical significance, an analytically nuanced history of the circumstances surrounding its passage can make for a stronger and more coherent sense of national identity. Discussions about the historical significance of the Resolution have concentrated more on the political implications of the transformation of the Muslim minority community in India into a “nation” rather than on the ambiguities surrounding the demand for Muslim “statehood”.

A close analysis of the historical content and actual content of the Resolution, however, suggests that there was no neat progression from an assertion of Muslim nationhood to the winning of separate statehood. My book The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand of Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985) delineated the uneasy fit between the claim of Muslim “nationhood” and the uncertainties and indeterminacies of politics in the late colonial era that led to the attainment of sovereign “statehood”. Instead of grasping the salience of the argument, some historians and publicists on both sides of the 1947 divide have interpreted this as implying that the demand for a Pakistan was a mere “bargaining counter”. In so far as politics is the art of the possible, bargaining is an intrinsic part of that art. To suggest, as some have glibly done, that Mohammad Ali Jinnah used Pakistan as a mere ruse against the Congress is a gross distortion of not only my argument but of the actual history.

My argument in The Sole Spokesman, and one that I confirmed in Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850s (Routledge, 2000), was that while the insistence on national status of Indian Muslims became a non-negotiable issue after 1940, the demand for a wholly separate and sovereign state of “Pakistan” remained open to negotiation as late as the summer of 1946. A refusal to acknowledge this is a result of the failure to draw an analytical distinction between “nation” and “state”. More problematic has been a flawed historical methodology that takes the fact of partition as the point of departure for interpreting the historical evolution of the demand for a “Pakistan”.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The historical backdrop of the Lahore Resolution makes plain why a claim to nationhood did not necessarily mean a complete severance of ties with the rest of India ... “Describing India as the greatest Muslim country in the world”, Iqbal called for the establishment of a Muslim state in north-western India which would remain part of the subcontinental whole
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The historical backdrop of the Lahore Resolution makes plain why a claim to nationhood did not necessarily mean a complete severance of ties with the rest of India. Beginning with Mohammad Iqbal’s presidential address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad in December 1930, a succession of Muslims put forward imaginative schemes in the 1930’s about how power might be shared between religiously enumerated “majorities” and “minorities” in an independent India.

In staking a claim for a share of power for Muslims on grounds of “cultural difference, these schemes in their different ways challenged Congress’ right to indivisible sovereignty without rejecting any sort of identification with India. Describing India as the greatest Muslim country in the world”, Iqbal called for the establishment of a Muslim state in north-western India which would remain part of the subcontinental whole.

If even Iqbal was thinking in terms of an all-India whole, outright secession was simply not an option for Muslims hailing from provinces where they were in a minority. Virtually all the schemes put forward by Muslims living in minority provinces considered themselves as “a nation in minority” that was part of “a larger nation inhabiting Pakistan and Bengal”. If Muslims in Hindustan were seen as belonging to a larger nation in north-western India, religious minorities in “Pakistan” and Bengal were expected to derive security from sharing a common nationality with co-religionists dominating the non-Muslim state.

For the notion of reciprocal safeguards to work, Muslims and non-Muslims had to remain part of a larger Indian whole, albeit one that was to be dramatically reconceptualized in form and substance by practically independent self-governing parts. Even schemes with secessionist overtones, most notably that of Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, wanted to carve out half a dozen Muslim states in India and consolidate them into a “Pakistan Commonwealth of Nations.”

What all these schemes led to was the claim that Muslims constituted a nation which could not be subjugated to a Hindu majority represented by the Congress. Taking this as its point of departure and avoiding mention of “Partition” or “Pakistan”, the League’s draft resolution called for the grouping of the Muslim majority provinces in northwestern and north-eastern India into independent states “in which the constituent units would be autonomous and sovereign”.

There was no reference to a centre even though the fourth paragraph spoke of “the constitution” to safeguard the interests of both sets of minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim. The claim that Muslims constituted a “nation” was perfectly compatible with a federal or confederal state structure covering the whole of India. With “nations” straddling states, the boundaries between states had to be permeable and flexible. This is why years after the adoption of the resolutions, Jinnah and the League remained implacably opposed to the division of the Punjab and Bengal along religious lines.

Historians and publicists in India have seized on the contradiction in the demand for a Pakistan based on the Muslim right of self-determination and the apparent unwillingness to grant the same right to non-Muslims living in Punjab and Bengal. Much like their counterparts in Pakistan, they have conveniently glossed over the difference between a purely secessionist demand and one aimed at providing the building block for an equitable power sharing arrangement at the subcontinental level between two essentially sovereign states — “Pakistan based on the Muslim-majority provinces and Hindustan based on the Hindu-majority provinces.”

With their singular focus on a monolithic and indivisible concept of sovereignty borrowed from the erstwhile colonial rulers, scholars and students of history on both sides of the 1947 divide have been unable to envisage a political arrangement based on a measure of shared sovereignty which might have satisfied the demands of “majorities” as well as safeguarded the interests of religious minorities in predominantly Muslim and Hindu areas.

In 1944 and then again at the time of the Cabinet Mission Plan, the All-India Muslim League at the behest of Mohammad Ali Jinnah refused to accept a “Pakistan” based on the division of the Punjab and Bengal. It was Congress’ unwillingness to countenance an equitable power sharing arrangement with the Muslim League which resulted in the creation of a sovereign Pakistan based on the partition of Punjab and Bengal along ostensibly religious lines.

Cast against its will in the role of a state seceding from a hostile Indian union, Pakistan has tried securing its independent existence by espousing an ideology of Muslim “nationhood” over the provincial rights promised in the Lahore Resolution and dispensing with democracy for the better part of its history. It is no wonder that the claims of Muslim nationhood have been so poorly served by the achievement of territorial statehood.

Such historical insights may not appeal to the authors of the contending narratives of a Pakistani or an Indian identity. But even national myths require some resemblance to history. Charting a linear course to the winning of Muslim statehood cannot even begin to grasp the vexed nature of the problems which faced a geographically dispersed and heterogeneous community in its bid to be considered a “nation”.

Nor can it explain why there are more subcontinental Muslims living outside Pakistan, the much vaunted Muslim homeland, in India and Bangladesh. Instead of being weighted under by opposing national reconstruction informed by the teleology of 1947, Pakistanis and Indians could craft a more accommodative future for the subcontinent by acknowledging the domain of political contingency, containing possibilities for different outcomes, that lay between the adoption of the Lahore Resolution and partition seven years later.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excerpted with permission from
M.A. Jinnah — Views & Reviews: A Collection of Articles Written by Eminent International Authorities on South Asian History
Edited by M.R. Kazimi
Oxford University Press

A Solution for Kashmir from Kuldip Nayyar

Dawn, December 24, 2005
No let-up in feudal attitude
By Kuldip Nayar

A FRINGE of liberals is emerging in Pakistan. They need to be supported by India through unilateral steps in the way of liberalizing visas and reducing tariffs on products from across the border. I noticed the change when an audacious questioner from the audience in Lahore asked me after my lecture on political options in Kashmir why Islamabad had not stopped sending jihadis into the Indian side of Kashmir.

Yet another question from the floor was why I had not mentioned Gilgit and the Northern Areas when talking about Kashmir on the Pakistan side. He was from Gilgit and said that miserable conditions had prevailed there since Islamabad took control of the area. I have been going to Pakistan since 1951 but never before had I heard such talk beyond the drawing rooms. I find the distance between government and people increasing. Not only that but it appears both are trying to acquire more space than they occupy at present. The nation seems to be at war within itself, at every tier of society. For example the controversy over the construction of Kalabagh.

The old religious fervour is there in one form or the other. Textbooks still preach hatred against Hindus, but serious efforts are on to rewrite them. Private schools have already revised new textbooks which do not disseminate past prejudices. The maulvi may be a pejorative term and very few join issue with him, but the combination of his parties, Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, rules over the NWFP and has a solid presence in the National Assembly. But it is generally said that they are a creature of President General Pervez Musharraf who uses them against India.

Nonetheless, feudal behaviour continues to prevail in every segment of society. Military commanders, politicians and bureaucrats act like masters in their domain, not allowing dissent. This is the main reason why institutions have not come up. A few which have, lack credibility because they are at the beck and call of rulers. The military is most to blame. It has tried to put the gloss of democracy over authoritarianism — achkan over khaki uniform. The military itself has become a problem, although it tries to give the impression that it is solving problems. Yet it is the only institution that works, despite its initial failure at relief and rehabilitation for the earthquake victims in Azad Kashmir.

True, adverse relations with India have made people dependent on the military and they have a feeling that it stands between them and India which is not trustworthy. However, the price the military exacts is heavy: it has most of the top civilian positions, most of the big contracts and most control over expanding businesses.

The judiciary is a check, but in a country where the military has been in power for more than four decades, judges have been overwhelmed at times.

No military coup — Pakistan has had three of them — has been held unconstitutional. It is impressive to find the Supreme Court directing federal and provincial governments to ensure implementation of judgment on prohibition of wasteful and exorbitant wedding feasts. (I wish we could emulate the example). Still, the judiciary seldom locks horns with the military.

However one may blame the military, it is a product of the feudal attitude that prevails in Pakistan. The talk of Musharraf’s exit is laced with the return of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif. Issues are not discussed, personalities are. My fear is that if one of them — Benazir or Nawaz Sharif — were to return to power, the feudal outlook would not change. They would use their parties in the same way as they did when they were in power in the past. The party is the means, they are the ends.

The media is free and there is an explosion of TV networks. Journalists have never had it as good as now because their salaries have trebled. One thing distinctive about the Pakistani press is that it is conscious of the limits beyond which it cannot go. The government, too, issues “advice” on what not to use.

The press has dutifully obliged. Still, Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri is correct when he says that the Pakistan press is far more critical of its government than the Indian press which he described as “pro-establishment.”

In my lectures on Kashmir, one at Lahore and the other in Islamabad, I proposed a solution to the problem: that Azad Kashmir, Gilgit and the Northern Areas should be merged into a state and integrated with Pakistan.

The state should enjoy power over all subjects, except foreign affairs, defence and communications. Similar autonomy should be given to Jammu and Kashmir. The sovereignty of the first should vest in Islamabad and of the second in New Delhi.

The LoC between the two Kashmirs should be abolished and the two can jointly have trade offices abroad, an international airline and directly seek aid from foreign countries or the World Bank. The representatives elected to the Pakistan National Assembly from the integrated state of Azad Kashmir should sit in the Lok Sabha and those elected from J&K to the Lok Sabha in the National Assembly.

The formula in Pakistan did not evoke any official reaction, except that it could make a basis for a solution. Many Pakistanis met me after the lecture, both in Lahore and Islamabad, to convey their favourable response. Some said ultimately such a formula would solve the Kashmir problem.

I think that it should be saleable in India because Jammu and Kashmir has already a special status and the instrument of accession gave New Delhi only three subjects: foreign affairs, defence and communications. Moreover, the Kashmir problem would be out of the way once and for all.

However, the best way of selling such a formula is to increase people-to-people contact, which appears to be lessening day by day. The impression in Pakistan is that India is not “flexible” and, to quote opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rahman, “New Delhi has not reciprocated Pakistan’s gestures even by an iota.”

I was criticized by a retired lieutenant-general when I said that Indians and Pakistanis were “similar” people. His argument was that since they were not similar, they left India and created a new country.

I wondered whether religion made people from the same subcontinent different. We have the same history, speak the same language and enjoy the same food. As for me, I have spent my youth in Pakistan studying in the same colleges as the Muslims did. On this side, there are as many followers of Islam as in Pakistan. I have close friends in the community on both sides. How am I not similar?

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi

Friday, December 23, 2005

An idea whose time has come...

The News, December 24, 2005
An American-Muslim hospital?
Mahjabeen Islam

Just as it is downright stupid for Iranian president Ahmedinejad to wish away Israel, it is fantasy to think that America's six to eight million Muslims will convert, simultaneously die or at the minimum, magically disappear. With a total of 1.5 billion across the world, one can understand how overwhelming and coming-out-of-the-woodwork we seem to the non-Muslim.

Muslims born in America have ingrained ties; even those of us who are first-generation immigrants have a sense of identity and a deep love for this land. The first wave of Muslim immigration came to America as slaves and soon lost their religious identity to that of their masters. The second wave brought blue-collar workers from the Arab world and Europe and the third wave brought the highly educated from South Asia. We are all done now with getting ourselves the good life, replete with wealth and status.

Mosques dot the American landscape from sea to shining sea. Travel down Interstate 75, from Ohio to Florida is like an architectural trek of mosques. The Turkish architecture of the Islamic Centre of Greater Toledo, which kids call its minarets "rockets" sits flush with the freeway. A few hours south, a bend on the highway and the stately Cincinnati mosque greets you. Many mosques have full-time Islamic schools and almost all have weekend schools.

Just as I was getting tired of seeing invariably non-Muslim donor names on doors, rooms and auditoriums of hospitals, we have the advent of Sara and Sohaib Abbasi who have donated five million dollars for an Islamic Chair at Stanford and for computer sciences at the University of Illinois.

But it was 2 am on Tuesday December 13 that I think my life changed. Though breakfast with the New York Times classifies as a major treat for me, I am also like Charlie Brown: I hate mornings. The treat can only happen on a weekend anyway. So late that night, sleepless post extra-brewed Earl Grey, a news item in the New York Times snagged my attention. Saudi prince and businessman, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, fifth on Forbes' 400 list of the wealthiest in the world, had donated $20 million to Harvard and Georgetown universities. The Harvard donation was for Islamic Studies and the Georgetown one for promoting Christian-Muslim understanding.

It suddenly occurred to me that the American-Muslim community needs to build hospitals across America. There are numerous Catholic, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Jewish hospitals. Not a single one is Muslim. Muslims cannot be part of the melting pot of America for our culture precludes formless integration. Being part of the American mosaic is the paradigm: distinct and yet part of the whole.

APPNA, or the Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America has 3000 members, but there are about 8000 physicians of Pakistani descent in North America. I put the idea on the APPNA listserv and suddenly it is not the driftings of an insomniac anymore. The interest is overwhelming and plans have begun. A vote for the name seems to indicate that it will be called AIMC, or American-Islamic Medical Centre.

A very pertinent question showed up on the listserv: why an American Muslim hospital? To me this institution will underscore and in a sense ratify the Muslim presence in America. Muslims in America are a minority but they are 6-8 million strong and they are about everywhere: the on-call list of 15 doctors in my hospital had nine Muslim names. And yet (thank you Osama) we are the lepers that people wish would disintegrate somehow.

I wrote on the list: "for myself I will say that the idea is amazing to me because I want to prove to myself and America that Muslims are part and parcel of America, that we are intrinsic to it, not some alien transients. That this country runs not on Judeo-Christian but Judeo-Christian-Islamic values. I want us to give back to the community, to prove to ourselves and the world that we are not these wealthy self-absorbed people, that we do have philanthropy in us, in fact it is enshrined as zakat in our faith."

Obviously all patients will be treated, and all employed, regardless of race, religion or gender. For-profit or non-profit status will be decided by the Board of Trustees. The care of Muslim patients remains a bit of a mystery, even a challenge to the medical field in America. Perhaps the American Muslim hospital will have an ethics department that can be looked to for providing solutions and educating non-Muslim professionals in regard to this.

We plan a state-of-the-art facility not one run by volunteers. The idea is to get the creme de la creme in all areas, from architects to CEOs. Only the Board of Trustees would need to have a good representation of Muslims so that the mission of the hospital and its Muslim focus is continued. A certain percentage of care will be provided on a charitable basis, but the primary idea is a hospital administered by Muslims, with a keen eye on financial solvency.

Inshaallah with the success of one hospital, for instance the American-Islamic Medical Centre of Chicago, we would be in the position to clone it in other cities, after feasibility is determined. Eventually a medical school and nursing homes can be envisaged.

There is no intention to facilitate employment for Muslim physicians or potential residents or provide total charitable care. Being at the receiving end of xenophobia and persecution, we plan to operate on a totally integrated, race and religion-blind perspective. To ensure success, perhaps the model simply stated would be a hospital based on a strong spiritual and a sharp business basis.

Many Muslims, especially Muslim physicians and businessmen are in the highest income echelon in this land. We are the followers of a faith that teaches discipline and punctuality on a daily basis. Get a bird's-eye-view of prayer at any mosque -- the symmetry of the rows and the unison of motion make me proud to be part of this magnificent faith.

We must break the tradition that Muslims are the tardiest, for when it is necessary, we show up ahead of time! We have all the ingredients for the creation of an American Muslim hospital: the vision, the passion, the money, the diligence, the commitment and most of all we are practitioners of a faith that keeps good deeds as the passport for eternal bliss. For the religiously inclined donation or participation would be sadqa-e-jaria; a marvellous spiritual legacy that multiplies even after death.

The listserv is abuzz with ideas and plans. Some doctors say they are real excited about it and write the word with a capital E. One of them wrote "I have never been so excited since the Olympic hockey Gold Medal for Pakistan 1984 in LA."

The idea is so encompassing that it reminds me of being in love, it seems to be all that I can think about. The Ohio winter this year is already severe, but I don't seem to notice the snow. SADD, or seasonal affective depressive disorder gets me in the winter; I am strangely rather cheerful now. The office parking lot is a veritable skating rink, threatening a hip fracture in seconds; used to make me inwardly swear at the lazy landlord, but now I reflect on the euphemism of "black ice".

The building of an American-Muslim hospital may begin the start of an Islamic renaissance, even more interestingly, from the West. I know this can be labelled as grandiose ideation. Even more interestingly contempt and scepticism slide off, for my dream of building the hospital, I know, will come true. If it revives Islamic culture and civilisation, I will about die with joy.

The writer is a physician and freelance columnist in the US
Email: mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Hearts and Minds: Pakistan

Wall Street JournalDecember 19, 2005

HEARTS AND MINDS
Our Friends the Pakistanis
Support for the U.S. is surging in some parts of the Muslim world.
BY HUSAIN HAQQANI AND KENNETH BALLEN

So much for the popularly peddled view that anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is so pervasive and deep-rooted it might take generations to alter. A new poll from Pakistan, a critical front-line in the war on terror, paints a very different picture--by revealing a sea-change in public opinion in recent months.
Long a stronghold for Islamic extremists and the world's second-most populous Muslim nation, Pakistanis now hold a more favorable opinion of the U.S. than at any time since 9/11, while support for al Qaeda in its home base has dropped to its lowest level since then. The direct cause for this dramatic shift in Muslim opinion is clear: American humanitarian assistance for Pakistani victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed 87,000. The U.S. pledged $510 million for earthquake relief in Pakistan and American soldiers are playing a prominent role in rescuing victims from remote mountainous villages.

Released today, the poll commissioned by the nonprofit organization Terror Free Tomorrow and conducted by Pakistan's foremost pollsters ACNielsen Pakistan shows that the number of Pakistanis with a favorable opinion of the U.S. doubled to more than 46% at the end of November from 23% in May 2005. Those with very unfavorable views declined to 28% from 48% over the same period. Nor is this swing in public opinion confined to Pakistan. A similar picture is evident in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. Again that's largely because of American generosity in the wake of a natural disaster. A February 2005 poll by Terror Free Tomorrow showed that 65% of Indonesians had a more favorable opinion of the U.S. as a result of American relief to the victims of last December's tsunami. If these changes in Pakistan and Indonesia influence thinking in other countries, then we could be looking at a broader shift in public sentiment across the Muslim world.
While support for the U.S. has surged, there's also been a dramatic drop in support for Osama bin Laden and terrorism. Since May, the percentage of Pakistanis who feel terrorist attacks against civilians are never justified has more than doubled to 73% from less than half, while the minority who still support terrorist attacks has also shrunk significantly. There's been a similar increase in the number of Pakistanis disapproving of bin Laden, which rose to 41% in November up from only 23% in May.

The important point is that direct contact with Americans on a humanitarian mission, including military personnel, has a positive impact on how Muslims view America. In Pakistan, 78% of those surveyed said that American assistance has made them feel more favorable to the U.S. America also fared much better in the opinion of ordinary Pakistanis than the other Western countries that also provided aid, or even local radical Islamist groups that made a much-publicized effort to provide earthquake relief.

That doesn't mean there isn't still more work to be done. The Muslim "street" is still not sold on specific American policies, with the poll finding the Pakistani public now opposes current U.S. policy in the war on terror by a larger margin than in May. But the overall message from Pakistan, pointing towards a potential trend in the Muslim world in general, is a positive one. By cutting out the middlemen who all too often portray a poisonous image of the U.S., direct American engagement in humanitarian assistance not only ensures its aid reaches those in need, but can also play a powerful role in marginalizing the foot-soldiers for bin Laden and other supporters of extremist Islamic causes.
Mr. Haqqani is director of Boston University's Center for International Relations and author of "Pakistan Between Mosque and Military" (Carnegie, 2005). Mr. Ballen served as counsel to the House Iran-Contra Committee and the speaker of the House, and is president of Terror Free Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization in Washington.
Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

JUI Politics: Confusing Signals

Daily Times, December 20, 2005
Sami expelled from JUI-S, says Fazl

ISLAMABAD: Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, has said that Maulana Samiul Haq has been expelled from the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Sami (JUI-S) and that now the party will take part in MMA activities under the name of JUI-Senior.

Fazl quoted Pir Abdur Rahim Naqshbandi, who represented the JUI-Senior at Monday’s MMA Supreme Council meeting, as saying this. Talking to reporters after the meeting, Fazl said the meeting stressed the need for constructing water reservoirs in Pakistan. He said the meeting was of the view that Kalabagh Dam should be built after consensus between the provinces.

Fazl said, “The Supreme Council is of the opinion that water reservoirs should be constructed, but Kalabagh Dam should be built with the consent of the smaller provinces and the government should not create a situation that might damage the federation.” Fazl, who is also the MMA secretary general, said the council also proposed that the government should select another site for Kalabagh Dam. He said the council supported the proposal of an in-camera briefing to the joint sitting of parliament.

“The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl’s (JUI-F) proposal to allow the opposition leader in the NA and NWFP Chief Minister Akram Durrani to participate in National Security Council (NSC) meetings was also tabled in the Supreme Council meeting,” Fazl said, adding that discussions on the issue would continue and a final decision would be taken after reviewing every aspect of the proposal.

He said the council had decided to observe Friday as protest day. He said the council condemned the military operation in Balochistan.

“I am not in favour of a protest campaign against one army general,” he said, adding, “I am a strong supporter of the argument that the army has no role in politics. If you oust a general from power after a successful protest campaign, another will grab power.” He also said a decision over the MMA’s participation in the parliamentary committee on earthquake would be taken after consulting other opposition parties. mohammad imran

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Iran-India-Pakistan Pipeline: Prospects

Daily Times, December 19, 2005
EDITORIAL: Pipeline contradictions proliferate

There seems to be an aggressive edge to the way India and Pakistan have announced their intention to go ahead with the construction of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline in 2007 and finish it by 2010 despite a ban on the level of investments in Iran enforced by the US Congress. For one, India’s fears about Pakistan’s “trustworthiness” and the pipeline’s safety in Khuzdar in Balochistan not long ago seem to have evaporated. Also, New Delhi, which appeared to give in to Washington’s pressure at the IAEA (where it did not vote in favour of Iran), seems no longer putty in the hands of the US whose Congress has not so far sanctioned a proposed Indo-US nuclear deal. Are the decks clear for the pipeline at last? Let’s look at the contradictions.

The US wants India and Pakistan to normalise relations. But not too long ago, India had adopted the policy of sitting back and wishing Pakistan would fall apart. It did not feel the need to normalise with a neighbour that appeared not to have long to live. Then it saw its energy supply drying up. It first thought it could meet the need with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). So it invested in an LNG fleet. Soon however, it was obliged to take stock of the cost and listen to those who preferred the Iranian gas pipeline across Pakistan. This met with the approval of many think tanks in the US who thought the project would not only defuse tensions in South Asia but also drag a clerically-dominated Iran out of its isolationism. Indeed, well-known experts on strategy were ready to advise Washington to take another look at its policy of sanctions against Iran.

Then Iran began acting up under President Ahmadinejad, who seems to be spoiling for a showdown with the US and doesn’t care if the European Union joins up with Washington for some kind of punitive action against Iran. The signs are that he no longer enjoys the plain sailing he got for a while after receiving a kiss of approval from the Spiritual Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and could now be upping the ante in Tehran to sort out some clerics who don’t like him and are blocking his ministerial appointments in the Majles. Does Mr Ahmadinejad want the pipeline? It seems not, considering his recent politicking. He is too keen on anti-American and anti-West charisma at home to think too deeply on the pipeline project.

As for Pakistan, a polarised society is throwing up all sorts of contradictory views. Here the contradictions emanate from the isolation which the Musharraf government suffers vis-Ć -vis the entire gamut of the political parties in the opposition and populations located in the provinces that have learnt to hate Islamabad. Indeed, many Pakistani “intellectuals” think that America will soon attack Iran with the help of Pakistan to destroy its second victim in the region, after which, of course, it is certain to also invade Pakistan. In this scenario, the Pakistan Army is supposed to give a helping hand to American troops as they land in Pakistan to head for the Iranian border. The other big contradiction is that Pakistan has not yet established control over the province of Balochistan and especially the Mengal-dominated Khuzdar territory through which the Iranian pipeline will pass. The last time President Musharraf showed the flag in the province by visiting the Marri-dominated Kohlu region, the visit was followed by a rocket attack on the FC helicopter carrying its IG.

The pipeline project is estimated to cost $7 billion. As things stand, unless there is a political change in the region during 2006 when the Americans start thinking of leaving Iraq, the US Congress may make things difficult for the three parties engaged in it. For some time in the past the US had looked like relaxing its position on the anti-Iran sanctions which were first imposed quite understandably in 1984 — because of the way the Iranian Revolution had treated the staff of the American embassy in Tehran against all international diplomatic conventions — and strengthened in 1995. But under President Khatami much of the venom secreted by Iran over Israel was toned down and support to Hizbollah in Lebanon was cut too. Unfortunately, however, President Ahmadinejad has reversed that trend and resumed the old aggressive posture.

Now comes another contradiction, proving that someone in Iran is thinking laterally too. Iran has pocketed most of the insult offered daily by Pakistan and its madrassas through Shia-baiting in areas where the Shia population is concentrated. During the earthquake earlier this year, Iran came forward and contributed generously (more than Turkey) to the international fund for relief and reconstruction in the quake-hit area. So if there was competition with other suppliers of gas to South Asia, that has been rationalised. Pakistan’s old “mistake” of going for the Turkmen gas “in cahoots with the Americans” has been forgotten. Now Iran may not mind Pakistan and India also trying out the Turkmen option as long as the Iranian project goes ahead. Therefore, unless the US Congress continues to act out of pique, there is an opportunity to save the region from more conflict through economic networking.

An American scholar, George Perkovich, who opposes Washington’s nuclear deal with India, has summed up the “realistic” approach that America may be abandoning: “Democrats and Republicans alike, especially in Congress, have consistently misdiagnosed Iran’s political dynamics. Nationalism has largely supplanted revolutionary religious fervour in Iran, and American pressure only feeds it. Iranians from across the political spectrum are convinced that the United States aims to keep their nation down. Washington can’t have it both ways. We can’t argue that Iran does not need nuclear energy because it has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas and then block Iran’s investments in its gas industry. To wean Iran from its nuclear programme, including its pursuit of uranium enrichment facilities that could be used to produce weapons, Washington must convince Iranians that the United States supports their peaceful economic development.”

Indo-US Nuclear Deal: The Next Phase Begins...

The News, December 19, 2005
Taking forward the Indo-US nuclear deal
Jyoti Malhotra

America is back on the Indian radar this week, despite the north Indian obsession with Pakistan which allows public opinion to stray westward from time to time. And so, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran is winding his way to Washington DC for talks with his counterpart, Nicholas Burns — and a "drop in" on the most powerful woman in the world, as well as certainly amongst the most interesting, Condoleezza Rice — for talks on how to take the Indo-US nuclear deal forward.

The world would do well to keep a close eye on the peripatetic Saran. He was in Nepal last week, during which time he said hello to King Gyanendra and to the major Nepalese political figures — even as the Nepalese army chief was at the exact same time shaking hands with Pakistan’s very influential generals in Islamabad. He goes forth from his office in South Block to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Parliament almost every other day these days, a two-km stretch that is definitely the most influential piece of real estate in this country. And now he’s going to the US.

The American trip is all about taking forward the nuclear deal signed on July 18 between India and the US during Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington, in which the US committed to the start of a civilian nuclear relationship with India.

Admittedly, that was quite a coup for the Congress government, because any strategic analyst worth his/her salt would tell you that the way the P-5 have fixed the world’s nuclear architecture, no country in the world (except one belonging to the P-5, of course) can get nuclear fuel to run its civilian nuclear plants if you haven’t signed the NPT. Of the three countries that haven’t (India, Pakistan and Israel), India is the only country with which the US has started such a relationship. And despite the Pakistani clamour in recent months demanding the same thing, Washington has quite firmly said no.

Neither does it take a rocket scientist to tell you that this deal puts India in a very special category. And so, Shyam Saran & Co. are in DC this week to structure its many explicit and implicit elements. The major implicit element is that America, the most powerful country in the world, now recognises India as a nuclear-weapons power. Because, you see, trade in nuclear energy is either restricted to the P-5 or to countries which have signed the NPT. India, so far, is neither.

Common sense would dictate that to be able to get this nuclear fuel, and thereby produce nuclear energy, India would need to bifurcate its nuclear programme. Meaning, the outside world will only sell nuclear fuel to India if India guarantees that this fuel will be used for civilian purposes only — that is, for the production of nuclear energy and not for military uses, such as the manufacture of a nuclear bomb. Therefore, India must provide a plan for separating its civilian reactors from its military ones. (Right now they are integrated.)

So when Saran meets Burns in DC, he will give him a plan or a roadmap for separating its nuclear programme. Is the Kalpakkam complex going to be in or out? What about Kaiga? Or Narora? India has a host of reactors at this moment, which variously reprocess plutonium (the stuff that makes a bomb), multiply it and enrich uranium, and include research facilities as well as produce nuclear energy. (Many of these are not under international safeguards, although a few, like the ones at Tarapur in Mumbai and the set being built by the Russians in Kudamkulam in Tamil Nadu, are.)

In turn, Burns will give him some idea of how the US intends to take this forward. George Bush promised Manmohan Singh in July that he would get Congress to pass legislation to this effect. So, after the Indians present their plan, the US will pass the law allowing the trade of nuclear energy with India. After which, the US will persuade the Nuclear Suppliers Group to modify their own restrictions. The final step in this bilaterally-agreed-upon sequence is that India will, after the US law is passed, implement its plan for separation.

The hullabaloo in recent weeks about "India having sold out to the US" or "India being dictated to by the US" amounts to the last embers of an old world order (read, reflexively anti-American) that is possibly enjoying its last stand at home. The point to be noted is that none other than Anil Kakodkar, the chief of India’s atomic energy programme at the moment, was on PM Manmohan Singh’s plane in July. And he was the one who agreed with every word of the statement that was signed.

Interestingly, a sign of India’s political maturity is its increasing engagement with the US, on the one hand, and a continuing criticism of its role in Iraq, on the other. In fact, many Indians would argue that a weakened America — and Bush’s own admission that 30,000 Iraqis have been killed by coalition forces since the invasion of Iraq only underlines this point – is in India’s interest.

Engaging with a defanged America, but one that is still powerful enough to influence world events (especially in South Asia), is the pragmatic thing to do. Surely, a lone superpower is too much trouble and therefore in nobody’s interest. And so, when China begins to regularly nudge the Americans, the rest of the stupefied world stands and watches. The Europeans embark upon the "bra wars" – and lose. Pakistan pushes for a relationship that is "higher than the mountains and deeper than the oceans," which in simple English means, intensive linkages on everything from Gwadar to the Karakoram, via Chaghai. India, meanwhile, jumps up its trade with Beijing.

In the middle of this international whirligig, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran goes to America this week. Let the fun and games begin.

The writer is diplomatic editor of Star News, India

Human Rights in India: The Sikh Episode

Human Rights Journal
Volume 18, Spring 2005

TWENTY YEARS LATER: RECENT REPORTS HIGHLIGHT THE CONTINUING STRUGGLE FOR SIKH HUMAN RIGHTS
By Jasmine Marwaha

As my auto rickshaw wound its way through New Delhi one July afternoon, I felt a peculiar sense of familiarity and sadness. While on the streets one can see the poverty associated with India’s large population, what to me represented the greatest threat to the human rights movement in India was the road itself, one of the so-called “flyovers” superimposed on the city. Flyovers are roads that allow vehicles to rise above the narrow streets, beggars, cows, and potholes that swallow tires whole. For years, they have been touted as the answer to the congestion and chaos that plague modern, urban India. Although the flyovers do not hide the persistent problems below, from the perspective up above, the problems seem less urgent and the remedies less imperative. If the traffic keeps moving, the government appears effective. Many of India’s survival efforts employ the same strategy: adopt any means to keep moving. While the government creates powerless commissions and delays hearings on the widespread human rights violations against minorities in India, recent reports such as Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab[1] and Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India[2] focus our attention below, so that we may address and repair the damage caused by state violence.

Although this Recent Development focuses on the condition of Sikhs, many other minority groups in India have been victimized, including Kashmiris, “Untouchables,” and Muslims in Gujarat, to name only a few. This Recent Development uses the Sikh experience to illustrate the urgency of compelling the Indian government to address its past crimes, without intending to diminish the experiences of other groups. Indeed, recent efforts on behalf of Sikh victims, particularly before the National Human Rights Commission (discussed below), can serve as an instructive precedent for how to investigate and address other human rights abuses in India.[3]
Recent publications by Jaskaran Kaur, Ram Narayan Kumar, Ashok Agarwal, and Amrik Singh shed light on the human rights situation in Punjab during the last two decades. In Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, Kaur compiles hundreds of affidavits, police records, and journalistic accounts to describe the lengths to which Indian government agents went to kill Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. In Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, Kumar and his colleagues assemble thousands of documents and eyewitness testi-monies to record and investigate the disappearances of hundreds of Sikh men in Amritsar, Punjab since 1984.

These authors uncovered thousands of documents that conclusively implicate police, local administrators, and even Parliament members in the deaths of tens of thousands of Sikhs in the 1980s and early 1990s. The authors document the violence not to change history or to overthrow the government, but rather “to empower the families of disappeared [sic] to reclaim their dignity, to press the institutions of the state to perform their obligations, and to lay the ground work for an honest retelling of a tragic part of recent history.”[4]

Prelude to the Pogroms: Operation Blue Star

Constituting sixty percent of the population in the state of Punjab and two percent of the population overall, Sikhs have had a troubled relationship with the national government since Independence, primarily due to policies and decisions that Sikhs have perceived as discriminatory. In the late 1970s, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale tapped into Sikh discontent and organized a separatist movement to fight the “Hindu conspiracy” against Sikhs.[5] In 1982, Bhindranwale moved his headquarters into the Golden Temple Complex, the holiest place of worship in Sikhism.[6] He remained there until June 5, 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent the Indian army into the temple complex to capture Bhindranwale in a mission called “Operation Blue Star.”[7] According to the Indian government, the Operation resulted in 83 army casualties and 493 civilian deaths.[8] In addition, the fighting destroyed the main administrative building and Golden Temple library, which contained original copies of Sikhism’s most sacred texts.[9] Bhindranwale and almost all of his top aides were killed.[10]
Whether Bhindranwale supporters or not, Sikhs were shocked by the cruelty of the Operation, particularly because the Indian government carried it out during the week on which one of the holiest days of the Sikh calendar falls (the anniversary of the martyrdom of the fifth Guru). At the time, 3680 pilgrims were staying in the hostel inside the Golden Temple complex, leading scholars to question the accuracy of the government’s estimated death toll.[11] According to eyewitness accounts, over 10,000 pilgrims and 1300 workers were unable to flee the complex before the attack.[12]
Scars from this blow to the Sikh community are visible today as the Operation set off a cycle of extreme violence by state agents and Sikh civilians. On October 31, 1984, two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi; they blamed her for the civilian deaths from Operation Blue Star.[13] While post-Operation crimes by Sikhs have been widely reported, it is only in the past two years that scholars and activists have begun fully uncovering the systematic human rights abuses by the government. The abuses include a four-day pogrom after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and a sustained campaign against Sikhs that some believe continues to this day.[14]

History Revisited: Kaur’s Report of the 1984 Pogroms

New Delhi was in complete chaos in the days following Gandhi’s assassination. In his groundbreaking report, Twenty Years of Impunity, Kaur revisits the pogroms, utilizing never-before published affidavits and reports submitted to closed investigatory commissions. One of these unpublished affidavits helps readers to begin to grasp the level of destruction in some of the hardest hit areas of New Delhi. According to pacifist leader Swami Agnivesh:

The carnage was mind boggling. Half burnt bodies were still lying scattered. Some had been mutilated by gorging their eyes. Some had smoldering tyres around their necks. The houses had been completely destroyed and burnt.[15]

Unrelenting mobs forced their way into households over and over again to ensure that they had killed every Sikh.[16] Women were sexually assaulted, often in front of family members.[17] The number injured or sexually assaulted is not fully known, but some authors estimate that Hindu civilians, politicians, and police officers killed nearly 3,000 Sikhs in four days.[18]

Kaur argues that the pogroms did not result from spontaneous action by the masses, as commonly believed, but rather were encouraged and organized by political leaders. Leaders of the dominant Congress Party who owned oil depots provided kerosene, the primary weapon used to kill Sikhs and a resource that many could not afford.[19] Affidavits uncovered by Kaur reveal that many Congress Party members were seen distributing kerosene and iron rods to mobs.[20] Moreover, because many assailants were illiterate or unfamiliar with Sikh villages, Congress leaders helped by reading Sikhs’ names and addresses found on voter, school registration, and ration lists.[21] The police were also implicated; for example, they spread rumors throughout New Delhi neighborhoods that Sikhs had poisoned the drinking water.[22] Kaur’s report convincingly shows that the 1984 pogroms were efforts orchestrated at many levels of government to kill as many Sikhs as possible.

Aftermath: Sikhs “Reduced to Ashes”

Following the extreme polarization of Hindus and Sikhs, Sikh separatism and terrorist activities peaked in the mid-1980s. The situation led to Punjabi police operating “largely as a parallel administration because of the priority given to fighting the militant movement.”[23] The brutal extent of police autonomy was not known until January 16, 1995, when Sikh activists Jaswant Singh Khalra and Jaswant Singh Dhillon released copies of official documents, including crematoria records, showing that Punjab security forces had secretly cremated thousands of bodies that they had labeled “unidentified/unclaimed.”[24] Eight months after the publication of these documents, Khalra was abducted from outside his house.[25] The event, while tragic, focused attention on the cremations. Soon after, upon petition by the Committee for Information and Initiative in Punjab (“CIIP”), the Supreme Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (“CBI”) to investigate the alleged disappearances.[26] Issued in December 1996, the CBI’s report documented 2,097 cases of illegal cremations at three crematoria in the Amritsar district, with only 582 of the bodies fully identified.[27] Subsequent claims for compensation filed with the National Human Rights Commission have been limited to these cases in the Amritsar district, ignoring Punjab’s twelve other districts.

Reduced to Ashes tries to reconstruct and supplement the list of people cremated. The report provides a critical reminder of these families’ ongoing need for justice. By meticulously documenting and summarizing over six hundred disappearances, the report also brings to light critical errors in the CBI’s investigation, which now appears deeply flawed. Kumar notes several discrepancies and questionable findings in the CBI report. For example, based on past newspaper reports as well as family and eyewitness statements, Kumar and his associates Ashok Agarwal and Amrik Singh identified a number of the 1,238 “unidentified” bodies.[28] The authors also note that the government has failed to mention or investigate other victims reportedly killed in police encounters alongside those cremated.[29] Finally, the CBI’s data contains duplications, and discrepancies often exist between the date of cremation and periods during which family members claim that the victim was alive.[30]
Continuing the Search for Truth

As security forces in Punjab were killing Sikhs in the name of combating terrorism, New Delhi struggled to recover from the 1984 Pogrom. Given the paucity of police reports filed by victims of mob attacks and the government’s reluctance to hold police or individual parliament members accountable, it is unsurprising that the organizers named in Kaur’s report have not been convicted of any crimes. In fact, the administrators and police officials most responsible for the Sikh disappearances are now considered by some as “authorities” on fighting terrorism.[31] A significant portion of Reduced to Ashes analyzes the persistent culture of impunity in Punjab. Twenty years later, human rights organizations such as the CIIP, the Committee for Coordination of the Disappearances in Punjab (located in New Delhi), and ENSAAF (based in California) are still struggling to expose the government’s culpability in the Pogrom violence.

Some argue that the efforts of these organizations are hampering the “healing” process in Indian communities. However, this argument fails to recognize that the recent end to violence does not necessarily signal peace, but perhaps, for example, fatigue and a lack of resources. Many in the Sikh community, especially family members of the disappeared, seek some acknowledgement of their suffering and accountability for those who are responsible. Reports such as Twenty Years of Impunity and Reduced to Ashes advocate holding abusers duly accountable, and attempt to recognize the suffering of victims of human rights abuses so that they too may move forward with the rest of the population.

[1]. Ram Narayan Kumar et al., Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab (2003).
[2]. Jaskaran Kaur, Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India 34 (2004).
[3]. See ENSAAF, National Human Rights Commission, at http://www.ensaaf.org/nhrc.html (last visited Feb. 27, 2005).
[4]. Peter Rosenblum, Preface to Kumar, supra note 1, at i.
[5]. Sharda Jain, Politics of Terrorism in India: The Case of Punjab 161 (1995).
[6]. Id. at 166.
[7]. See id. at 174–80.
[8]. Id. at 179.
[9]. Id. at 178–79.
[10]. Id. at 179.
[11]. Id.
[12]. Ram Narayan Kumar, The Ghalaghara: Operation Bluestar, Sikh Rev., June 2000, at 8.
[13]. Id. at 181–82.
[14]. See generally Kumar, supra note 1.
[15]. Kaur, supra note 2, at 34.
[16]. Id. at 35.
[17]. Id. at 37.
[18]. Jain, supra note 5, at 182; see also Kaur, supra note 2 (implicating Hindu politicians and police officers as well as civilians).
[19]. Kaur, supra note 2, at 29.
[20]. Id. at 27.
[21]. Virginia Van Dyke, The Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984 in Delhi: Politicians, Criminals and the Discourse of Communalism, in Riots and Pogroms 207 (Paul Brass ed., 1996), cited in Kaur, supra note 2, at 30 n.211.
[22]. Kaur, supra note 2, at 32.
[23]. Human Rights Watch Asia, Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab 13 (1994).
[24]. Kumar, supra note 1, at ix.
[25]. Id.
[26]. Id. at x.
[27]. Id.
[28]. Kumar, supra note 1, at 162–63.
[29]. Id.
[30]. Id. at 166.
[31]. See, e.g., Rosenblum, supra note 4, at i.
Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College