Indian Press on Love, Faith and Consent, Nirankaris’ Mission and Hyderabad’s Culture: New Age Islam's Selection, 7 December 2020
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
7 December 2020
• Love, Faith and Consent in a Hindu Rashtra
By Tanika Sarkar
• Nirankaris’ Mission And Christ’s Message Of Love
By CL Gulati
• Indians Should Thank These Three Journalists For Bringing
1971 Bangladesh ‘Genocide’ To Light
By Commodore Hari Krishnan
• Hyderabad’s Culture, Modernity Are Intertwined
By Dinesh C Sharma
• Proxy War Between Iran And Israel Heats Up
By Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty
• By Way Of Assassination Of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh
By Vivek Katju
• India Low On Biden’s Watch List
By KP Nayar
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Love, Faith And Consent In A Hindu Rashtra
By Tanika Sarkar
7 Decvember 2020
Photo: Prashant
Kharote/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
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In the last few days, three excellent articles in the Indian
Express (by Christophe Jaffrelot, Apurva Vishwanath and Abhinav Chandrachud)
have clarified the provisions of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful
Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020. I will try to consolidate their larger
implications.
No doubt the ordinance will attain a permanent legal shape
in all Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states sooner or later: Madhya Pradesh and
Karnataka are already keen to emulate it. There is a very real possibility that
it may become the national template for regulating and punishing inter-faith
marriages and conversions in the near future. It may also be seen as an
anticipation of parts of the Uniform Civil Code that the BJP has long promised
– the only pledge it is yet to redeem. Feminists across the board should be
asking them to submit their blueprint for the Code in the public domain for
debates and discussions. Otherwise, they would be staring at an irreversible
fact of life soon.
Those who pray together…
The hallmark of the ordinance is that it draws two most
intimate and meaningful parts of human life together: love and faith. It brings
both under the purview of a state that now takes full charge of who can love
and marry whom and who can hold which faith. Or rather, it decides who cannot
do what. The ordinance prohibits and punishes, it closes doors and segregates
religious communities as if they are different species.
The ordinance outlaws conversions supposedly based on fraud,
coercion and what it strangely calls
“allurement”. The potential convert must apply to the magistrate for
permission to convert and the magistrate
– not the person whose faith is at stake – will take the final call on it. The
person who is accused of making unlawful conversions will need to prove that he
is not guilty of fraud, etc. Once again, the would-be convert’s own religious
preference will not possess legal validity.
If the magistrate decides that the conversion is unlawful,
then the offence becomes non-cognisable and non-bailable, condemning the
offender to arrest without warrant and years in prison. If the potential
convert is a minor, or from the SC/ST communities, then the sentence is
significantly enhanced. The right to worship and adore God in a form of one’s
own choosing ceases to exist. The state regulates religious choice.
If a person wants to convert in order to marry outside her
community, then it will not be her words or consent that will matter but those
of her parents’. Her desire to convert would not count as a genuine religious
choice but as one insidiously imposed on her by seductive ‘love jihadists’ from
another community. Civil marriages have so far been exempted from the scope of
the ordinance, but the prolonged two months’ notice that the couple is obliged
to wait out before they can register their marriage at court already provides
ample scope for obstructive parents to drag their daughter back, and allege
coercion, abduction or enticement on the part of her lover from another
community.
The ordinance prohibits marriages which involve conversion.
But far-Right organisations have long designated inter-faith marriages, with or
without conversion, as ‘love jihad’. That BJP-ruled states are calling the
ordinance a long-awaited blow against so-called love jihad makes it clear that
all such marriages will be put under the most rigorous scanner.
The logic of anti-love jihad vigilantism has now received
the stamp of official sanction. The state has formally endorsed the view that
inter-faith love marriages are a political conspiracy, organised by minority
communities to convert Hindu women and, thereby, depopulate the majority
community and enlarge their own until they have reduced Hindu numbers to
nothing. And so does conversion to non-Hindu Indian faiths.
The real beauty of the ordinance lies in the way it entirely
exonerates Hindus from all charges of fraud, allurement or intimidation when
they convert people from another community. For in the case of shifting from
another faith to Hinduism, conversion ceases to be conversion. It will be
defined as “homecoming” or ghar wapsi –
returning to one’s authentic roots, one’s true faith. Conversion in this case
is bathed in an ambience of warmth and self recovery. It becomes, by
definition, innocent of malfeasance which strongly adheres to all other kinds
of conversion.
One stone, many birds
The Sangh parivar shows real genius in the way it kills
several birds with one stone. The ordinance couples marriage and conversion, love
and faith – and, simultaneously, detaches both from freedom of conscience,
thought and self-determination. But it goes much further than this. Because its
consequences are not explicitly spelt out, we cannot clearly see their
far-reaching implications, nor gauge how carefully the ground has already been
prepared for them. We cannot anticipate the directions in which they will move.
In the first place, the ordinance radically violates Article
25 of the constitution which allows for the profession, practice and
propagation of faith according to one’s conscience. Coming in the wake of
annulling Article 370 for Kashmir, this is yet another major blow against the
constitution which critically weakens its foundations. Since the diminution of
constitutional provisions is happening piecemeal, we find it difficult to pull
together the sundry moves to see what they add up to. Bit by bit, without much
fuss, the constitution is becoming irrelevant.
Second, by shifting the burden of proof onto the accused, it
overturns a fundamental legal norm and principle – that one is deemed innocent
until proved guilty. By exempting Hinduism from the scope of the ordinance,
moreover, it militates against yet another basic legal morality – that of
equality before law. In that sense, citizenship is once again communalised and
made unequal, just as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act did, by rendering certain
kinds of citizenship entitlements conditional upon religious affiliation for
the first time in our history.
In an even broader sense, the ordinance negates the adult
will and informed consent of the marriage partner or the would-be convert. In
their place, it installs parental and community control – already confirmed by
a very high age of consent and the two months’ notice period before courts for
a civil marriage. Adults are now placed firmly under their guardians’ authority
in their own crucial life decisions. They lose the right to think for
themselves in these domains. As I have argued elsewhere, this enables the
continuous production of docile citizens who learn to follow orders and not to
think against the social grain, or to trust their own judgment.
The ordinance brackets Dalits/Adivasis with minors. Their
conversion will now fetch a more stringent sentence. It infantilises them by
classifying them as equivalents of minors – people incapable of knowing their
own minds.
By classifying conversion to Hinduism as a return to one’s
original faith, the ordinance makes Hinduism the single authentic faith for all
Indians. In the same stroke, all other Indian religions get branded as products
of force, fraud, coercion or seduction, in the present or in the past – hence
illegitimate and deserving of annulment and punishment.
What free will?
Such ideas have deep and strong roots in longstanding social
conventions. Arranged matches, even when they are non-consensual, are still the
order of the day and many parents object when their children choose to marry
without their consent, even if it is within the same caste and community. That
convention, too, is anchored in the principle of endogamy – people from another
caste or faith are definitionally mlechha or untouchable, while inter- caste
marriage leads to varna sankara or miscegenation: a social offence that
demolishes family and lineage honour and caste status. There can be no open
explicit condemnation of inter-caste marriage as yet since the rhetoric is one
of Hindu unity and sameness. But in practice, such marriages are punished as
brutally as inter- community ones by community guardians.
We saw how deep-seated such convictions are in the case of
Hadiya’s marriage and conversion. Hadiya, indubitably an adult girl with a
strong will and mind of her own, had converted and then married a Muslim in
2016. When her parents approached the court, alleging coercion, even the
progressive state of Kerala agreed with them and sent Hadiya to her parents,
away from her husband. After a prolonged wrangle, even while Hadiya firmly declared her decision to convert and
marry a Muslim, the couple could be reunited only after the National
Investigative Agency declared the marriage to be valid. We may not expect the
Agency to repeat this elsewhere.
There is a historical precedent that comes to mind if we try
to assess the possible trajectory of such changes: the Nuremberg Laws that
Germany had enacted in 1935. They had two main provisions. One was the Law for
the Protection of German Blood and Honour which prohibited love and marriage
between Jews and “pure” blooded Germans. To prevent extra-marital relationships,
no Jewish women under 45 was allowed to work in a German household. The second
was the Reich Citizenship Law, which restricted citizenship to people of German
blood alone. Non-German minorities were designated as non-citizens, with no
rights or claims in the Reich. In the case of Indian marriage and citizenship,
the distinction is not racial or blood-based but a religious one. The
direction, however, is rather similar.
Such selective denial of free will and agency is strangely
inverted in the case of Indian farmers. The government claims that its new farm laws have released
farmers from controls of the government and middlemen, and have allowed them to
access the market on their own terms and according to their free will. In
reality, however, it leaves them stranded under the machinations of gigantic
corporate wholesalers and retailers, whose operations are opaque and completely
beyond the farmers’ control. In this case, extreme vulnerability gets
translated as total freedom. Indeed, the BJP possesses an exceptional semantic
ability to turn around meanings.
But none of this should come as a surprise. The Sangh
parivar has always been perfectly open and honest about its intentions. Its
agenda for realising a Hindu rashtra in India is almost 100 years’ old and,
from 2014, Modi’s electoral campaigns had promised economic “reforms”. They
have, indeed, been true to their pledge of constructing the Ram temple on the
site of a demolished mosque, of reading down Article 370, of ensuring cow
protection at the cost of minority lives. We need to reflect on whether
opposition parties have been similarly faithful to their proclaimed agenda.
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Tanika Sarkar is a historian who retired as professor,
Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
https://thewire.in/communalism/hindu-rashtra-love-faith-consent
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Nirankaris’ Mission And Christ’s Message Of Love
By CL Gulati
December 5, 2020
The four main pillars of mainstream spirituality are that
the formless cosmic God belongs to all; divine revelation is possible through a
genuine master; rites and rituals cannot by themselves help us gain divine
knowledge; and all true masters who blessed seekers with revelation of the one
formless supreme power, promoted qualities of humanism, altruism, humility,
love, mercy, compassion and service. All prophets, scriptures and their
messages that transcend divisions, belong to entire humanity.
Jesus Christ said: “Do not think that I have come to abolish
the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfil them.”
Christ spoke of God as Spirit, as formless Being, there being no exception to
this divine principle. He spoke of the significance of knowing the formless
with the help of prophets: “I am the gate, whoever enters through me will be
saved.” Speaking of surrender, he said, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek
and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Christ gave great
importance to love, humility and humanism and declared that the humblest are
the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. Arrogance and pride have no place here.
Nirankari Baba Hardev Singh ji advocated selfless service.
“Life gets a meaning, if it is lived for others,” he said. True religion is
about love and God and the ideal way to live peacefully with all beings. The
Sant Nirankari Mission, as an all-embracing religious, socio-spiritual and
charitable organisation, promotes the concept of Nirankar, the one formless
God, and believes that God can be realised with the grace of a living satguru,
true master.
The Mission’s philosophy is in sync with the teachings of
all past prophets and globally accepted scriptures, enjoined by the message,
“Man is human when entire humankind is his family and he is aware that his real
home is God.” Nirankari Baba ji said, “No God, no peace; know God, know peace.”
The Mission believes in unconditional love in action through selfless service.
Since we are mere trustees of all material and non-material
assets that belong to God, we need to use them for the common good. The apostles
laboured hard, the evolved proclaim the beauty of a higher life, sociologists
speak of the duties of a good citizen to promote an ideal society, philosophers
pioneer sublime thoughts, and all agree that God is one and realising this is
the ultimate goal.
Religion essentially means knowledge of God. In the absence
of actual knowledge, God is different for different persons and for the same
person on different occasions. The concept of one God for all, foresees the
idea of one religion for all, that suits the whole human race.
Mata Sudiksha ji Maharaj, present spiritual head of Sant
Nirankari Mission says, “The world needs to be united as a family, accepting
and loving each other.” The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted the whole world to
‘shut down for renovation’. A time for reflection, rejuvenation and
restoration. Restoration of enlightened faith holds out the promise for a
happier world eagerly waiting for a ‘grand opening.’
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CL Gulati is Vice-Chairman, Sant Nirankari Mandal, Delhi.
Sant Nirankari Mission is holding its 73rd Annual Nirankari Sant Samagam
online, December 5-7, 2020.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/nirankaris-mission-christs-message-of-love/
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Indians Should Thank These Three Journalists For Bringing
1971 Bangladesh ‘Genocide’ To Light
By Commodore Hari Krishnan
4 December, 2020
As the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of Bangladesh
draws near, what also draws near is the 50th anniversary of a genocide so
gruesome that it ought not to be allowed to slide into oblivion.
To begin at the beginning, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was not part
of the deception — he was the deception. Having won only 85 seats, Bhutto’s
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) had been a runner-up in the elections of December
1970, losing to the Awami League’s 167 seats. In the political stalemate due to
then-West Pakistan’s attempt to modify the people’s mandate, Bhutto’s presence
in Dhaka, on 25 March 1971 for “talks” with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (the
legitimate Prime Minister-Elect for the whole of Pakistan), probably lulled
Awami leaders into thinking that “the 26th would be just another Friday, like
every other Friday before it”.
Although it was almost an open secret that the thousands of
crew-cut youth who had been arriving in civil clothes onboard civil flights,
day after day for over a month, were actually soldiers, the Pakistan Army
troops in Dhaka had always behaved with deference and remarkable restraint
towards Sheikh Mujib – at least on the surface. Despite martial law being in force,
the Pakistan Army had withdrawn into their cantonments on 3 March, with nearly
no indication that they would not continue to remain there. The sporadic
clashes were largely attributed to the eagerness of free agents. After all,
Awami supporters were also creating civil nuisance by going on strikes,
blocking roads, etc.
So, even after his face-to-face talks with Pakistan’s
military ruler Yahya Khan had failed, Sheikh Mujib’s call to his people, “to
prepare themselves for an all-out struggle”, was still only a call for
non-violent civil resistance. While Yahya left Dhaka, Bhutto stayed to
ostensibly ‘continue the talks’ that he had come for. A wily deception.
An H-Hour of 01:00 am on the 26th and the arrest of Mujibur
Rahman had already been green-signalled at 11:00 am on 25 March, but Bhutto’s
presence had successfully crafted the impression that ‘talks would go on’,
creating the belief that the night would be peaceful, and the days ahead
conducive for democratic protests through civil disobedience.
VDO.AI
Evening of 25 March. The iconic clock of St Thomas had just
struck 10, its chimes soothing. But soldiers, many with shawls to hide their
insignia, started streaming into the telephone exchanges, radio and TV
Stations, teleprinter and telegraph offices, and also around the
InterContinental hotel in Dhaka. Even as the last of the city’s busybodies were
getting ready for bed, the stroke of 10, that night, was the sign for the
Pakistan Army to effectively blockade any foreign journalists who hadn’t
already been expelled or left the country on their own, to stop every means of
communication, and to quietly encircle Sheikh Mujib’s residence. All of this
took them just over an hour. Killings, thus far, remained purposeful – limited
to what was necessary to take over control of the communication.
By 30 minutes to midnight, all that changed. The H-Hour had
apparently been advanced. And the true purpose of Operation Searchlight harshly
shone forth: to kill and show. Each kill had to be a signal to the other
Bengalis, and Pakistanis went out of their way to make it so.
Mass deaths
Sheikh Mujib was fortunate in a way, he didn’t have to
personally witness all these killings, for at about 1:30 am on the morning of
26 March, he was abducted from his home, flown to Rawalpindi and then taken to
solitary confinement in West Pakistan. But his people suffered. The armed
soldiers of East Pakistan Rifles, and the armed constables of the local police,
were not spared either, if they were Bengalis.
Even the name for their operation was apt. A searchlight can
be used either to ‘search for’ or to ‘illuminate’. This operation met both
aims. Search out every person suspected of being a politician, a student
leader, a teacher of Bangla, or a cultural activist. Don’t hide the deaths, but
emphasise the gruesome details of these deaths as symbols and signals to
illuminate the choices before people who didn’t kowtow. It was macabre.
“The killing began shortly after 10 pm,” says Mashuqur
Rahman, describing the demons of 1971, “in the first 48 hours the orgy of
killing had ravaged Dhaka city…… (but)….. the genocide had just begun”.
The intensity of the genocide in Bangladesh surpassed that
of the Holocaust. The Nazis had cruelly notched a monthly average of over
80,000 innocent lives between 1941 and 1945, but the Pakistan Army broke the
Nazi speed-record five times over in 1971, with their savage murders averaging
about 400,000 Bengalis each month, not counting their rapes and other
unspeakable atrocities. The ‘Gear 5’ intensity of the Pakistani Genocide stands
out — the Pakistanis had committed approximately three million murders in nine
months, and more than 200,000 rapes.
And most Western countries looked the other way.
Had India not intervened; had Pakistan been allowed to
continue the killings for six years as the Nazis had, there would have been 24
million Bangalis dead, and the Lord knows how many more women violated.
Though the Nuremberg Trials had in no way offset what the
European Jews had suffered, they had at least attempted to bring many of the
Nazis to justice for murdering an estimated six million Jews.
It is one of the deepest shames of the Seventies, that the
Pakistani officers responsible for the murder of nearly three million Bengalis
could not be tried for their crimes. India, which had proclaimed East Pakistan
a free nation, had to set free 93,000 prisoners of war (PoWs) in order to
obtain the release of ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose presence was
central to the fledgling nation of Bangladesh. Blackstone’s ratio of ten
criminals to one innocent, has perhaps never in history been skewed on a
grander scale.
The role of the media
From Governor General Tikka Khan, the infamous ‘Butcher of
Bengal’, or his successor General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, to the soldiers who
made beauty their booty (to paraphrase Andrew Jackson) – everyone escaped
trial.
But, even if so many criminals got away, what ensured that
their crimes pierced the world’s conscience? To quote Walter Lippmann, “News
and (the) truth are not the same thing”. Indeed, when it comes to news about
India, Western media often chooses authors and journalists who tell their
readers what they wish to hear. That becomes news. That news becomes cited
history, through the sheer perversity of ‘pervasity’ (even if it’s not a real
word). Western media is so pervasive that history cannot be written by the
victors unless they happen to be from the West.
The news in the West may never have resembled the whole
truth even in the 1971 War, had it not been for a few brave souls, thanks to
whom the truth of the genocide got through to the Western media, and changed
the colour of the “News” as being reported there.
Who are these heroes?
Foremost among them is Archer Kent Blood, who, as the Head
of the United States Consulate in Dhaka, sent a series of cables to Washington,
commencing with the one on 27 March, which read, “Here in Decca we are mute and
horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak Military….”.
On 6 April 1971, he sent a ‘dissent cable’ (later dubbed
‘The Blood Telegram’) to the US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, which
read: “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our
government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take
forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over
backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government and to lessen any
deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our
government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,… But we have
chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict,
in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an
internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust.
We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and
fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our
policies redirected in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader
of the free world….”. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger didn’t react,
but the Blood Telegram found its way into the press, and the ‘truth’ suddenly
became the ‘news’ in the US.
The moment of convergence came in the British media too.
First, a small snippet by Simon Dring appeared on the front page of The Daily
Telegraph on 30 March 1971. Dring had gone underground just before the murders
began, and collected evidence of the atrocities at great risk to himself, but
his article failed to really alter the tone of reporting in Western media. Even
though the BBC subsequently carried a broadcast made on the 27th of March 1971 by Major Ziaur Rahman from a
small clandestine radio station in Chittagong (reading out Mujibur’s
declaration of Bangladeshi independence), it had mostly been interpreted as the
justification for a Pakistani crackdown rather than the right way around.
The defining change came when Pakistani journalist Neville
Anthony Mascarenhas, penned his article, “Genocide“, in The Sunday Times on 13
June 1971. He had originally been embedded by the Pakistan government with the
Pakistani forces in East Pakistan in order to report favourably, but was so
disturbed by what he saw that he escaped to the United Kingdom. His article on
the Bangladesh genocide has been credited by the BBC as having “exposed for the
first time the scale of the Pakistan army’s brutal campaign …”, and indeed even
“impelled India to look at a military option to resolve the humanitarian
crisis”.
As the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of Bangladesh
draws near, what also draws near is the 50th anniversary of a genocide so
gruesome that it ill behoves humanity to ever forget it.
It would only be a befitting tribute to the millions of
Bengali lives lost in the Pakistani genocide of 1971, that in the year 2021,
the Indian government appropriately honours the names of three good men: the
Late Archer Blood, the Late Anthony Mascarenhas, and Simon Dring, for their
courage of conviction and honesty.
Thanks to them, news came much nearer to the truth.
------
Commodore Hari Krishnan is currently Director of the
Indian Navy’s Centre for Ethics, Leadership and Behavioural Studies, and has
earlier headed the Directorate for Strategy at Naval Headquarters.
https://theprint.in/opinion/indians-should-thank-these-three-journalists-for-bringing-1971-bangladesh-genocide-to-light/557443/
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Hyderabad’s Culture, Modernity Are Intertwined
By Dinesh C Sharma
Dec 07, 2020
It is usually the bread-and-butter issues of bijli, sadak
and paani that dominate local body elections. But the Greater Hyderabad
Municipal Corporation polls which concluded last week proved to be an
exception. It was history, culture and geography that figured prominently in the
campaign. The tone was set by the big guns of the Bharatiya Janata Party from
Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. They talked of ending the so-called ‘Nizami-Nawabi’
culture of Hyderabad and also referred to a geographic area — the old city — in
deriding terms. For ardent Hyderabadis, it amounted to an assault on Hyderabadi
culture which is celebrated for being tolerant, peace-loving and steeped in a
rich food tradition. As the results have shown, the campaign rhetoric seems to
have paid rich dividends. This is despite the fact that while his party leaders
were targeting Hyderabadi culture in one part of the city, the Prime Minister
was busy reviewing the progress of Covid-19 vaccines with vaccine companies in
another.
The public discourse during the election was about aspects
of Hyderabadi culture in the context of its feudal past that ended in 1948,
ignoring the present realities of the pandemic during which the city is playing
a critical role as the global hub of science and medicine. This is what makes
Hyderabad an enigma to outsiders. Is it a city steeped in old ways of life, the
Nawabi culture, or is it a modern metropolis buzzing with new ideas? The truth
is that the culture and modernity of Hyderabad are intertwined.
The ‘oriental splendour’ that Hyderabad was, in the late
19th and early 20th century, now only belongs to history books and museums. Mir
Osman Ali Khan (the seventh and last Nizam), once named the richest man on the
planet, died half a century ago. Descendants of Nawabs and Rajahs — who
represented the nobility in princely Hyderabad — are not a force in Hyderabadi
society. Barring a few notable exceptions, most of the deodhis, havelis and
palaces of the Nizam era have given way to real estate dreams of their owners.
The city does not have any statue of the Nizams or main thoroughfares named
after any of them.
Yet the Nizam, or the culture he epitomised, became a
central figure in the local body elections in 2020. This is because the present
day Hyderabad is intrinsically linked to its past — not through built heritage
or road names, but through the uniqueness of culture dating back to the very
founding by the Qutub Shahis over four centuries ago.
The basic tenets of Hyderabadi culture — multilingualism,
multiculturalism, religious tolerance and peaceful co-existence, respect for
knowledge, typical food traditions — have not eroded since then. The city has a
sizeable number of people who speak each of the four principal languages of the
princely Hyderabad — Telugu, Urdu, Kannada and Marathi — in addition to Hindi,
Odia, Tamil, Gujarati, Marwari and so on.
The eclectic mix of the modern and traditional is not new to
Hyderabad. Western science was introduced in the city a decade ahead of the
founding of universities in the British presidencies. The Hyderabad Medical
School was established in 1846, when the city had barbers conducting
‘surgeries’ and blood sucking by leeches was the main line of treatment. The
Darul Uloom theological college of learning, established by Turab Ali Khan
(Salar Jang I) in 1854, not only taught Persian and Arabic, but also English
along with Telugu and Marathi. The ideas of setting up an Islamic University in
Hyderabad by visitors like Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Sheikh Jamaluddin Afghani
had few takers. Instead, Salar Jung invited Dr Aghorenath Chattopadhyay,
chemist and educationist, to become the principal of the English-medium
Hyderabad School which later morphed into the famous Nizam College.
He also inducted Syed Husain Bilgrami from Lucknow to shape
public instruction in the state. Chattopadhyay’s children — Sarojini and
Virendranath — were among those granted government scholarships to pursue
higher studies in England. Sarojini later married Dr MG Naidu, a product of the
Hyderabad Medical School who was also sent to England for advanced degrees in
medicine. The medical school earned global recognition for clinical research,
resulting in the landmark Hyderabad Chloroform Commissions. In contrast, state
support to Unani and Ayurvedic education came many decades later.
The investment in building knowledge institutions and
modernisation continued in the early twentieth century. Mir Mahbub Ali Khan,
the sixth Nizam, invited M Visvesvaraya — then in service of the British — to
plan rebuilding the city after the devastating Musi floods of 1908. The seventh
Nizam carried forward the task, established the City Improvement Board and
funded construction of iconic buildings on the riverfront. Bureaucrats and
intellectuals from British India like Akbar Hydari and Syed Ross Masood helped
conceive the Osmania University — the first Indian university to teach in a
vernacular language. Japan, where all scientific and technical education was in
the Japanese language, served as a model. The Nizam being an ally of the
British, Hyderabad participated in both the world wars. The war effort
triggered industrial production as well and research, paving the way for
Central laboratories for scientific and industrial research, a starting point
for research attracting talented scientists and nurturing future leaders of
Indian science — Dr S Husain Zaheer, Dr GS Sidhu, Dr G Thyagarajan and Dr PM
Bhargava.
It is often argued that modernisation projects during the
Asaf Jahi era were a result of direct and indirect British influence. And some
of them, like the war effort during the time of the last Nizam, were
implemented for strategic gains. The Nizam, in the 1940s, had also developed
the ambition of becoming a king and making Hyderabad an independent state. He
was a feudal autocrat, muzzling dissent and cries for participative government.
But all this does not diminish core values of the Hyderabadi culture, of being
composite and inclusive, which has made the city a melting pot of new ideas and
development. The need is to preserve, not eradicate, this culture.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/hyderabads-culture-modernity-are-intertwined-180869
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Proxy War Between Iran And Israel Heats Up
By Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty
The recent assassination of Ira
07th December 2020n’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh,
has ignited another round in the proxy war between the two countries that have
been sworn enemies ever since the Mullahs took over power in Tehran after the
1979 Iranian revolution.
Predictably, the Iranian leadership has pointed the finger
of suspicion at Israel for the assassination that took place 65 km outside the
Iranian capital, when a motorcade ferrying the nuclear scientist on a highway
was first blasted by a car bomb and then came under direct gunfire by car- and
motorcycle-borne assassins. There can be little doubt that the brazen attack
was meticulously planned.
The attackers are yet to be identified. The Iranian
dissident organisation Mujahedin-e-Khalq has cropped up as a possible
perpetrator that mounted this assassination. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu had
publicly named the Iranian scientist in a presentation on Iran’s nuclear
programme in April 2018. Israel believes he is the mastermind behind Iran’s
nuclear weapons programme.
Recent reports indicate that US President Trump had been
advised not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities as this would trigger a wider
conflagration in West Asia. Any US attack will also complicate matters for the
incoming Biden administration. Israel has strenuously opposed Iran’s nuclear
programme and put in place plans to stop Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons
by any means.
This assassination is another milestone in Israel’s plan.
This is not the first time that Iranian nuclear scientists have been
assassinated. Between 2010 and 2012, four scientists were killed; while no one
claimed responsibility, fingers were pointed at Israel. The most audacious
attack was in 2018, when armed men broke into a vault in a warehouse in Iran
and carted away reams of documents on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Iranian leaders have vowed to take revenge and continue with
the nuclear programme that has been in the crosshairs of Israel and the US ever
since it began. Israeli officials have denied any involvement, as per the
standard operating procedure. In an already volatile West Asia, this killing,
coming after the assassination in Baghdad in January this year by America of
Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC), raises tensions once again with unforeseen consequences.
The EU and some other countries have called the
assassination a criminal act and called for restraint. Sections of the US media
have quoted a former CIA director as having said that Israel was behind the
assassination, which he has called highly reckless and a criminal act. This
could be another standard operation procedure, in which former senior US
intelligence officials point a finger at Israel but the latter denies all
knowledge.
Intriguingly, the assassination came days after PM
Netanyahu’s secret trip to Saudi Arabia, where he reportedly met Muhammad bin
Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, and Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State.
Both Israel and the US have been monitoring Iran’s nuclear programme after the
Trump administration abandoned the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, in 2018.
Iran has since raised production of Low Enriched Uranium
(LEU), a vital ingredient in nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons, much
above the limit prescribed by the JCPOA. Iran has always maintained that as a
signatory to the NPT, its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful and its
leadership has affirmed that Iran shall never produce such weapons. The problem
is no one believes Iran. Israel had staunchly opposed the JCPOA which,
according to it, had merely postponed Iran’s march towards nuclear weapons
capability. Israel has no interest in the revival of the JCPOA and this
assassination can be seen as creating hurdles for the new Biden administration
to rejoin the agreement.
Over the years, tit-for-tat attacks by Iran and Israel have
continued. Iran launched attacks on Israeli targets, including a diplomat’s
wife, in New Delhi in 2012; Iranian agents botched up an attack in Bangkok and
a potential strike was thwarted in Tbilisi. For decades, Iran has armed the
Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian organisations Islamic Jihad and Hamas to
attack Israel, though the motivation for these outfits is their fight against
Israel for the Palestinian cause.
Currently, an Iranian diplomat is on trial in Brussels for
his complicity in planting a bomb in Paris to target anti-Iran demonstrators.
Iran may have vowed retaliation as part of its rhetorical posturing to satisfy
domestic public opinion. But by retaliating, it risks scuttling a deal with the
Biden administration and extricating the nation from the crippling sanctions
that have debilitated its economy.
The hardline sections of the Iranian media are calling for
an attack on Haifa, the port city in north Israel on the Mediterranean coast.
Pragmatists in Iran would be calling for restraint, as Tehran wrestles with the
dilemma of retaliation at a time when Biden is on the cusp of taking over from
Trump. Iran must be hoping that the new administration will live up to its
declared campaign promise of reviving the JCPOA. Biden has already indicated
his policy on the pact, by naming Antony Blinken, a strong supporter of the
JCPOA, as the incoming US Secretary of State.
Iran has to deal with domestic public opinion that is
questioning its leadership about the hollowness of its superior intelligence
capabilities. But it is unlikely to retaliate in a knee-jerk mode and has
already declared that it will not fall into any such trap. It has vowed to
increase activity on its nuclear programme that has reached a stage where it is
not dependent on one scientist.
While India has not reacted to the assassination, Trump’s
trashing of the JCPOA reduced India’s space for manoeuvre in view of US
sanctions. India was forced to reduce oil imports to zero from one of its
leading suppliers. Financial sanctions also deterred many companies from
dealing with Iran. Hence, India would prefer removal of sanctions on oil
imports and other financial curbs.
Sanctions on Iran are directly linked to the rejuvenation of
the JCPOA with American participation. Iran-US negotiations on this issue, when
it happens, will be long-drawn, complex and difficult, because it will hinge on
how far back Iran would be willing to roll back its nuclear programme.
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Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty (pr.chakravarty@gmail.com)
https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2020/dec/07/proxy-war-between-iran-and-israel-heats-up-2232775.html
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By Way Of Assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh
By Vivek Katju
December 5, 2020
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading Iranian physicist, was
assassinated on November 27 near Absard, a city around 70 km to Tehran’s east.
Fakhrizadeh was reportedly involved in Iran’s clandestine programme to develop
nuclear weapons. On its part, Iran has always denied that it has ever had any
interest in making nuclear weapons, leave alone undertaking any activities to
manufacture them. It is a fact though that it was enriching uranium which it
implicitly claimed was never going to be of weapons-grade. It committed to end
the enrichment programme in its deal with the US which was endorsed by the
other permanent member-states of the UN Security Council. President Donald
Trump took the US out of the agreement. His move was opposed by other countries
which were parties to it but was greatly supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
These two countries had lobbied very hard to prevent a US-Iran nuclear
agreement but the Obama administration had gone ahead despite their opposition.
It is also noteworthy that as a non-weapons member-state of the Nuclear
non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Iran had pledged not to make nuclear weapons.
There were initially conflicting reports about the mode of
Fakhrizadeh’s assassination but later Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s
Supreme National Security Council said that electronic devices were used to
‘remotely’ carry out the assassination. He pointed a finger at Israel and has
been reported by an international TV channel as saying that Israel wanted to
kill Fakhrizadeh for 20 years. The same channel went on to quote him asserting
“this time, the enemy used a completely professional, sophisticated and new
method”.
Shamkhani also alleged that the Iranian group
Mujahedin-e-Khalq had a ‘role’ in Fakhrizadeh’s killing. The group founded in
1965 waged a struggle against the Shah, was aligned with Ayatollah Khomeini for
a couple of years but later fell out with him and since 1981 gradually became a
great enemy of the Iranian clerical system. It has been in exile since the past
two and a half decades and has used violence to target prominent Iranian
figures in the past.
Clearly, the object to target Fakhrizadeh was to greatly
damage Iran’s nuclear programme. In the past too Iranian nuclear scientists
have been murdered and no one has taken responsibility. Many believe that these
killings were carried out by Israeli intelligence. This shadowy game has thus
gone on for years. Israel holds that Iran is committed to develop nuclear
weapons. It fears that an Iran with nuclear weapons will endanger its security.
There is abiding enmity between Iran and Israel; the former supports some Arab
groups such as the Hizbollah which undertake violent and terrorist attacks
against the Israeli people.
Some security analysts have said that the Fakhrizadeh’s
killing is meant to queer the pitch for the incoming US President Joe Biden’s
West Asia policy. As US Vice-President Biden was part of the Obama
administration which was instrumental in initiating purposeful contacts with
Iran which culminated in the nuclear deal. That deal not only eased Iran’s
economic situation but also ensured that it could play a larger role in the
region. It is expected that Biden would seek to return to updated Obama format
with Iran. Naturally, Israel would not wish that to happen. Fakhrizadeh’s
killing would have only increased anti-West feelings in Iran. That would assist
Iranian hardliners to press President Hassan Rouhani to adopt more rigid
approaches towards a Biden lead US. For the time being Rouhani has expressed
great anger at Fakhrizadeh’s assassination but has been cautious not to
foreclose the possibility of a dialogue with the Biden after January 20 when he
will be sworn in as President.
The Fakhrizadeh assassination compels consideration of the
wider issue of states targeting officials of another state to cause injury or
death. Countries seldom undertake such actions for fear of reciprocal acts but
they are not unknown. They are obviously meant to retard the progress of
programmes that the state undertaking these actions regards as hostile to its
interests. Thus, in this case, Israel’s fear of an Iran with nuclear weapons.
On its part Israel maintains silence, clearly, as a matter of policy, whenever
such events take place in Iran.
Of course, states should never undertake to bodily harm or
even harm the reputation of officials of another state. The international
system coheres on the premise that all states respect this basic principle.
Indeed, this principle extends to the sanctity of all nationals from injury or
bodily harm from the direct and targeted actions of other states. If this
principle is violated as in Fakhrizadeh assassination it can only be called a
rogue and barbaric act.
The international system also rests on the principle that a
country would not seek the overthrow of foreign governments through provoking
violence or interference in their political processes. This principle is
however often violated. But naturally the targeting of individuals is
inherently different from that of regime change. It is a fact that the US,
especially under President Trump has favoured the demise of the clerical system
in Iran. Israel too has sympathy with such an approach.
The question is if the principle of the sanctity of foreign
nationals can be extended to those private persons or officials who undertake
clandestine violent or terrorist activity against a country. Thus, what is the
validity of drone strikes undertaken by, for example, the US against persons it
calls terrorists? It may be doing so through processes which are legal and
justified in its own system but there is no binding international instrument on
these matters as yet.
https://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/by-way-of-assassination/
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India Low On Biden’s Watch List
By KP Nayar
Dec 07, 2020
Strategic Analyst
Human rights campaigners are already lining up in front of
Joe Biden with their familiar demands, although six weeks are left before he
becomes President of the US. Their queue is long and will lengthen evermore
once he assumes office.
The Indian Government has no reason to worry that it will
face any action from the Biden administration on this score, unless New Delhi
works overtime to lower India’s rights standards to the level of North Korea,
for example. Such a prospect is unlikely, even the harshest critics of Modi’s
government will concede.
On Gandhi Jayanti, in the thick of the presidential
campaign, Biden said: ‘I will defend the right of activists, political
dissidents, and journalists around the world to speak their minds freely
without fear of persecution and violence.’ It offers a clue to the incoming
administration’s freedom policies that his statement had nothing to do with the
Mahatma’s birth anniversary.
Instead, his statement was devoted to Saudi Arabia. ‘Under a
Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the
kingdom…and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell
arms or buy oil. America’s commitment to democratic values and human rights
will be a priority, even with our closest security partners.’ The statement was
issued to commemorate the second death anniversary of Saudi dissident and
journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who Biden asserted, was ‘murdered and dismembered
(by) Saudi operatives, reportedly acting at the direction of Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman.’
Yet, it is not even Saudi Arabia that will be on top of
Biden’s list of human rights violators. Biden missed a more convincing victory
because he lost Florida to Trump. That loss was on account of Cuban-American
voters in the Miami area, who feared that under a Biden presidency, the US will
revive the rapprochement with communist Cuba.
Venezuelan-Americans in Florida too liked Trump’s policy of
delegitimising the Chavista government in Caracas, even creating a presidential
alternative to Nicolas Maduro in Juan Guaidó, whom the US now recognises as
Venezuela’s President. Early on in his first term as US President, Barack Obama
had unsuccessfully attempted to mend fences with Venezuela, then led by the
charismatic left-wing populist, Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan vote bank rejected
Biden en masse.
Given the compulsions of US domestic politics and broad
Latin American opposition to Maduro, it is Venezuela and Cuba which may incur
the Biden administration’s wrath most of all on the human rights front. In a
few months, spadework will begin across America for mid-term elections to the
House of Representatives, one third of the Senate and several gubernatorial
vacancies. In a Senate precariously balanced between Democrats and Republicans,
Biden would want to make an all-out effort to defeat Florida’s Republican
Senator Marco Rubio, who is up for re-election in 2022. Rubio is of Cuban
descent, which makes it all the more important for Biden to hold Havana to
account for alleged rights violations.
Then there are urgent triggers for action to protect the
vulnerable: Tigray in Ethiopia, where the central government in Addis Ababa has
launched military action against ethnic peoples. Nigeria, which has seen
political and jihadist violence is another. Egypt will be yet another focus for
protecting rights. Political capital is Biden’s to gain by appearing to be
tough on the Kremlin, especially because Trump was perceived to have been soft
on Vladimir Putin.
If the Tibetan exile community worldwide pushes for a Dalai
Lama visit to the White House, can Biden turn down a meeting with someone who
is seen as a beacon of religious and cultural freedom? Also, there will be
pressure on Biden from Britain to do more to protect human rights in Hong Kong.
All of this realistically puts Modi’s India very low on the
incoming US administration’s list of global human rights priorities. Of course,
the US cannot be seen as doing nothing about charges that rights and freedoms
are at risk under a ‘Hindu nationalist’ government, in J&K after the
abrogation of Article 370 and nationwide after the enactment of the Citizenship
Amendment Act.
To satisfy this requirement of political correctness,
responses from Washington to such charges are expected to be predictable, but
inconsequential. The Congressional Research Service (CRS), for example, may
issue a damning indictment of how liberties have been trampled upon in India
and about the pressures on freedom of the Press. The US Commission on
International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its next annual report, may come down
even harder on India over its treatment of religious minorities and loudly urge
the US State Department to sanction BJP leaders whose actions promote
majoritarianism.
The reality is that more often than not, CRS reports are not
read even by US legislators, although the mandate of the CRS is to ‘provide
policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and
Senate, regardless of party affiliation’. As for the USCIRF, a US government
commission created by an Act of Congress, it is not taken seriously by anyone
who matters in Washington. But administrations often use the body to appease
religious lobbies complaining of persecutions by foreign governments.
In India’s case, any damage to Indo-US relations on the
human rights issue will be more of perception than real. In an environment
where it makes big news in this country even if a worm in the US is crawling on
a piece of cardboard on which ‘India’ is written, there will probably be more
sound to report than action about America’s human rights approach towards India
in the short term.
That said, like everywhere else in the world, there are
politicians in India too, who could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for
their country on the human rights issue, not only in the US, but also on the
global stage.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/india-low-on-bidens-watch-list-180861
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