:: Saturday, March 22, 2003 ::

Imperialism and the Origins of Modern Science-Fiction:

A friend recently argued with me that many of the classical tropes of European colonialism was reflected in most of the literary genres since the end of the 19th century; sometimes in the least expected places. A fair enough suggestion and one that is more than plausible; what surprised me was one of her examples which was HG Well’s War of the Worlds (1898) one of the most famous Science Fiction novels and one of the most influential. While Well’s own racial and imperialist views are known to most students of the period it is less clear to many of his readers as to how this operates in his fiction. It is to this that I now turn.

One of the reasons that the War of the Worlds has had such a lasting impact on the traditions in Science Fiction has to do with the way Wells is able to work his material into a sort of wrought, mournful beauty something akin to poetry. He takes a perfectly ordinary man, an especially ordinary place, Woking, and then he imagines the extraordinary erupting into it, in the form of a giant cylinder crashing into Earth from Mars. Tentacled Martians climb out of this cylinder to make war upon humanity from towering mechanical tripods, laying waste to South East England before eventually succumbing to Earthly bacteria against which they have no natural defence. But all this is rendered that much more effective by Well’s impeccable sense of the interlinked nature of the familiar and the strange/ The early chapters of the book build an understated but brilliant sense of anticipation by stressing that very ordinariness:

There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost to melody by the distance…. It seemed so safe and tranquil.

The same sort of poetry that Wells can find in the evening shunting of trains at Woking is repeated in the desolate beauty he evokes in a London emptied by the Martian threat and overrun by the red weed they brought across space. At this point in the book the last Martian is ceasing its weird cry and dying:

Abruptly as I crossed the bridge, the sound of ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla’ ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunder-clap.
The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees towards the park were growing balck. All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of something – I knew not what – and then a stillness that could be felt.

It is less the specifics of finding a beautiful strangeness in this scenario, and more the ways in which it parallels the scenes of calm before the war; it is Well’s dialectical sense of the interrelationship between sameness and otherness that gives this work much of its potency: the cognitive estrangement, in other words.

Well’s potently imagines symbolism and metaphor in The War of the Worlds distils the concerns of the age – but in a way that is not too far removed from the concerns of our own period. His Martians are imperialists who use their superior technology to invade a nation, England, which had been accumulating its own Empire in part because of superior technological sophistication. In other words, the arrival of the Martians and their mechanised brutalities are the symbolic forms Wells chooses to explore a deeper set of concerns: concerns about the British (rather than the Martian) Empire, about the violence of Empire-building, and about the anxieties of otherness and the encounter with otherness that Empire imposes on the Imperial peoples. Brian Aldiss suggests that Well’s novel “showed the Imperialist European powers of the day how it felt to be on the receiving end of an invasion armed with superior technology”; however I am not sure that the text is necessarily so straight-forward as this. Wells actually inhabits a subtly balanced position between expressing concern for European Imperialism in coded form, and reinforcing exactly the ideological underpinnings of that Imperialism with a scare story about how easily a ruthless, racially distinct military threat might destroy an under-prepared Britain. More specifically, there is something “Eastern” about Well’s conception of his Martians, from their pseudo-Arabic cry of ‘Ulla’, like the Islamic cry of ‘Allah’, to their towering mechanical tripods striding about on metal legs, which may derive from Russian folklore of a house that moves about on gigantic chicken legs. In other words, the deftness of Wells’ conception is that he is able simultaneously to critique the European Imperial excesses while also coding the ‘Eastern’ threat against which European Imperialism specifically justified itself. Mark Suvin captures something of this ideological ambiguity by invoking the name of Nazi propagandist and anti-Semite Joseph Goebbels. As Suvin observes: “the Martians from The War of the Worlds are described in Gobbelsian terms of repugnantly slimy and horrible ‘racial’ otherness and given the sole function of bloodthirsty predators (a function that fuses genocidal fire-power – itself described as an echo of the treatment meted out by the imperialist powers to colonised people – with the bloodsucking vampirism of horror fantasies)."

The effectiveness of a novel like The War of the Worlds, in other words, depends partly upon the sophistication of its balancing of familiar representation and the strangeness of its technology; but this technological symbolism also relates back to key concerns of the society and culture out of which it was produced. It was not a narrow mapping of imperialist anxieties onto symbolic form, but rather a complex symbolic meditation of the paradoxes of Imperialist ideology.

Following on from this one can argue that Science Fiction as a distinctive genre comes out of the Colonial ‘Age of Empires’ precisely because it is a necessary part of the official ideology of Empire-forming that difference needs to be flattened, or even eradicated. Science Fiction, in other words, figures as the expression of the subconscious aspect of this official ideology. Under the 19th century British Empire the pressure is to conform upwards to a certain model of ‘civilised’ behaviour. We can see similar elements at play today, under what can more loosely be called the 20th century American Empire, where culture treats everybody in the world, whatever their actual identity, as a ‘sort-of American’. A film such as Independence Day (1997), for instance, figures a world catastrophe as an American catastrophe, with other nations represented in cameo as acquiescing under American leadership and sharing American values. The world, in that film, is America. Similarly, Star Trek postulates a ‘Federation of Planets’ encompassing a wide range of alien worlds, but none the less manages to flatten difference into a kind of Galactic Americana. The ‘USS’ in USS Enterprise stands for ‘United Space Ship’, but by no coincidence it is also the present-day abbreviation for ‘United States Ship’. It is not just a question of American actors filling almost every role (which, of course, we might expect in a show filmed in Los Angeles); but of a representative cultural identity which is Western, bourgeois, family-centred, aspirational, rational, centrally concerned with ‘freedom’ as the freedom of individualist enterprise – American in short. Much of the success of Star Trek depends on the way in which it is subtly able to undercut the conformist ideological message that it tends to share with other world-winning American cultural productions. A scene on Nicholas Meyer’s film Star Trek 6: the Undiscovered Country (1991), where the Klingons quote Shakespeare ‘in the original Klingon”, is an example of this: it wittily forces us to rethink our assumptions about the ‘Western’ cultural dominance. In the film the Klingons criticise the Federation as a ‘humans only club’, foregrounding the cultural essentialism behind much of the original series.

One of the ways, then, in which an empire establishes itself, justifies itself and continues, is by putting out the cultural message that the dominant culture in that Empire is best, and that (therefore) other cultures should conform to it. It does that one the one hand by raising up the values of the dominant culture, and on the other by attacking those who are not part of that culture. In other words it is involved in praising the Same and demonising the Other. That Other might be many things: history has given us the Other as Jew, as Black, as Arab, as East Asian (the ‘Yellow Peril’) and as Woman. On the other hand, history’s verdict on the Same has been remarkably consistent: the same has tended to be male, white, Western, and associated with military power and technology.

This is, it goes without saying, a crude and brief account of a complex set of historical and cultural circumstances. However, I just wanted to explore the way a genre like Science Fiction can emerge as the underside to this set of cultural dominants: as in sense, the dark subconscious to the thinking mind of Imperialism. Where much mainstream Victorian culture, for instance, is about the patent rightness and decency of ‘civilisation’ as it was then conceived, Science Fiction explores the problematic of that term. According to this sort of model, much Science Fiction can be keyed into cultural and historical specifics. It is no coincidence, the argument would go, that British Science Fiction experienced a burst of inventive creativity at around the time of Wells, Bram Stoker, Olaf Stapleton and Rider Haggard because this period saw the high summer of the British Imperial project. Similarly, the rise to world domination of the USA after the Second World War saw a cognate flourishing in American Science Fiction, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Science Fiction during the 1950s and 1960s both to Science Fiction texts that articulated Imperial anxiety (like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers) but also works (like the ongoing Star Trek series) that are all about exploring the new frontier, transferring the colonisation of the American continent directly onto the galaxy.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:01 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Some Essential Reading:

Common Place has a good piece on the differing views that have been expressed over the role the Indian Diaspora can play. I have to say I am galled at the suggestion of the Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha that the Indian Diasporic model itself on the Jewish one. This is a precedent that is a minefield and certainly not a path that the Diasporic Indian community should take. It is not surprising that a Saffronist administration is pushing for this kind of Long-distance Nationalism as it inevitable tends to play into the agenda of Conservative and Rightist forces in the country of origin.

Jonathan Edelstein has a very good careful analysis of the legal aspects of the past sub-contracting of torture that took place during America's War on Drugs and the damage it did to normal legal process and democratic functioning. He draws disturbing parallels between what is happening now and then, something I have alluded to as well.

Laura has an excellent piece on race, identity and cultural representation in film. I especially liked the article as it partly based on an allusion to an Otto Preminger film "Carmen Jones"; being an avid fan of film noir I had seen past Preminger classics in this genre such as Angel Eyes (1947) and the extremely influential Laura (1944); but it was interesting to look at some of his other work through such a different angle.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:06 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Nationalism, Battle Rhetoric and the First Gulf War:

I don’t want to write too much about this war or think about it too much as there is enough commentary circulating in the public sphere as it is; but it keeps on impinging on my consciousness one way or another. So as a compromise I want to look at not this Gulf War but the previous Gulf War of 1991; more specifically I want to look at it the tools of linguistic and symobolic mobilisation used in order to prepare democratic nation-states for War; bearing in mind Vikahs's post below about the use of metaphors in such discoruse. Again here we find some of the same contingent factors a Bush in the White House, facing another military confrontation with Iraq, and many of the old symbolic tools being used. Let us examine this past event and see what similarities and differences emerge.

Eve of battle rhetoric is always revealing, for this is the occasion when the leader will remind the followers why the most supreme of all sacrifices is being called upon. When George Bush Snr. Speaking from the Oval Office in the White House announced the start of the first Gulf War, he expressed the contemporary common sense of sacrifice: “ All reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful resolution had been expended,” acceptance of peace at this stage would be less reasonable than the pursuance of war. “While the world waited,” claimed Bush, “Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged and plundered a tiny nation no threat to his own.” It was not individuals who had been raped or pillaged. It was something more important: a nation. The President was not just speaking for his own nation, the United States, but the United States was speaking for the whole world: “ We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.” In this new order “no nation will be permitted to brutally assault its neighbour” (George Bush, 16th January, 1991.).

The moral order Bush Snr. was evoking was an order of nations. In the new world order, nations would apparently be protected from their neighbours who would also be nations (Quo custodet ipses, was a question that went implicitly unanswered). Of course much was left unspecified. Bush did not say why the notion of nationhood was so important, nor why its protection demanded the ultimate of sacrifices. He assumed his audience would realise that a war, waged by nations against the nation, which had sought to abolish a nation, was necessary to affirm the sacred principle of nationhood. At the end of his speech he quoted the words of ‘ordinary’ soldiers. A Marine Lieutenant-General had said, “these things are worth fighting for” because a world “in which brutality and lawlessness go unchecked isn’t the kind of world we’re going to want to live in”. Bush had judged his audience well. As on previous occasions, bold military action against a foreign enemy brought popular support to a US President. During the campaign, public opinion polls indicated that the President’s ‘approval rating’ had soared from a mediocre 50% to a record level of nearly 90%. Opposition to the war in the USA was minimal and was castigated as unpatriotic by a loyal press. A recording of the national anthem went to the top of the pop music charts; T-shirts and hats, with patriotic insignia were being sold on the streets. Britain’s largest selling tabloid the Sun, carried a full colour front page, depicting a Union Jack with a soldier’s face at its heart; readers were invited to hang the display in their front windows.

Within weeks the enemy had capitulated. On 27th February 1991, Bush Snr. Again speaking from the Oval Office was able to announce victory. He spoke of flags: “Tonight the Kuwaiti flag once again flies above our embassy.” Roughly 100,000 Iraqis had died; the exact figure is not known. The Western coalition was not counting its victims; it was enjoying its own victory. The American flag was flying proudly. The episode illustrated the speed with which Western Public can be mobilised for flag-waving warfare in the name of nationhood. Protagonists were not fighting on behalf of a God or a political ideology – they claimed on both sides to be fighting for rightful nationhood. The American-led coalition in the Gulf spoke of the crime of national invasion. The new world order, would according to Bush, protect nations from aggressive neighbours. He had nothing to say about protecting citizens from the crimes of their own governments. No one had suggested that this Gulf War was waged to rescue Iraqis from their dictatorial President (ahh how times change!). The gassing of Kurdish women and children did not provoke the sort of global reaction, which followed the abolition of Kuwait, an established nation with UN membership, flag and postage stamps.

Parallels were frequently drawn in 1991 with WWII. When Bush first announced that US troops would be sent to Saudi Arabia, five months before the war was started, he referred Iraq’s tanks storming Kuwait “in blitzkrieg fashion” (speech, 8th August, 1990). The coincidence is instructive: the Second world War had not been prompted by the German government’s mistreatment of its own citizens: no foreign government had committed its soldiery to rescues German Jewry. Once the German government started to make national flags, rather than individual citizens disappear; then war became inevitable. In this one can see the force of nationalism within political thinking of the 20th century. The assumptions of this nationalism is not so much revealed by the actions of ruling cliques that have territorial ambitions over neighbouring nations: after all, such actions harkens back to an earlier era before the rise of nation-states. The assumptions are demonstrated in the actions of established and powerful nation-states, which will readily fight, with mass popular support, to prevent, or reverse, such annexations. These assumptions are expressed when leaders can cite a world of morality of national integrity. It was not ever so. In the feudal era such justifications were rarely sought or given.

In our age it seems as if an aura attends the very idea of nationhood. The rape of a motherland is as bad as the rape of actual mothers; the death of a nation is the ultimate tragedy, beyond the death of flesh and blood. The aura attached to sovereign nationhood is not, however, absolute, as if all similar incidents produce a similar response. The United States led no coalition of outrage when its ally the government of Indonesia, annexed East Timor in 1975. A quarter of the East Timorese population have been killed in the ensuing conflict. Unlike the case of Kuwait the oilfields fell on the wrong side of the abolished border. The aura of nationhood always operates within the contexts of power. If there is an ideological aura attached to nationhood, then the role of God in this down-to-earth mysticism is interesting. The order of nations is not designed to serve God, but God is to serve the order. Saddam Hussein, using a rhetoric, which echoed pre-national times, claimed to be fighting “the army of atheism”; he asserted that the Iraqis were “the faithful and obedient servants of God, struggling for his sake to raise the banner of truth and justice”. The defender of the new order spoke very differently in his eve of battle address. Only in his closing remarks did President Bush Snr. Invite God to make a rhetorical appearance. He called on God to bless “our forces” and the “coalition forces at our side”. He finished with the imprecation: “May He continue to bless our nation, the United States of America”. In this way, God was asked to continue serving the national order.

In all this, an ideological consciousness of nationhood can be seen to be at work. It embraces a complex set of themes about ‘us’, ‘our homeland’, ‘nations’, the ‘world’, as well as the morality of national duty and honour. Moreover these themes are widely diffused as common sense. It is not the common sense of a particular nation, but this common sense is international, to be found across the globe in the nations of the so-called world order. At regular, but intermittent intervals, the crisis occurs and the moral aura of nationalism is invoked: heads will be nodded, battle rhetoric evoked, flags waved, tanks roll, aircraft bomb: and the War-Machine put into action.

Nationalism in the contemporary world makes universal claims. The talk of a new world order suggests how intertwined the national and international are; yet one nation, in particular is seeking to represent this order. At the present juncture, special attention needs to be paid to the United States and its nationalism. This nationalism, above all, has appeared so forgettable, so ‘natural’ to many social scientists and critical observers, and is today so globally important.

:: Conrad Barwa 2:20 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Betrayal in Kerala: A Tale of the Wayanad Adivasis:

The following story is typical of many state governments in post-colonial India; where progressive legislation and intent to protect arboreal communities such as Adivasis have been systematically thwarted by local elites and political classes unwilling to implement such measures. Even a state such as Kerala normally lauded for its achievement in Human Development spheres is not immune to this abuse; in some senses this is a case where Gunnar Mrydal's analogy of a "weak-strong" state apply to India - it is weak in enforcing laws which are very bold and progressive on paper but strong when it comes to protecting the interests of dominant propertied groups to accumulation and expansion of economic activities. The tale of Wayanad's tribals is one of betrayal and exploitation by "settlers" and successive Governments, writes R. Madhavan Nair.

IN the evening of his life, Ramu, patriarch of a family of the Kurumar tribe, spends his time reminiscing about his glorious past. His story is one of a tragic slide from prosperity to penury. Like many other members of his tribe, which dominated Kerala's Wayanad district, Ramu (not his real name) was once well-off, owning 16 acres including eight acres of fertile paddy fields. Now he has lost almost all his land. The decline of his fortunes began with the arrival in Wayanad of Mathew (not his real name) from central Kerala in search of livelihood. The Kurumar patriarch developed a weakness for his illicit brew which cost just Rs. 5 a bottle. In a few years time he and many other landowners went broke and started borrowing from Mathew and other settlers who had prospered at the expense of the local people. Many tribals had to hand over their land to the migrants to clear their debts. Soon the settlers, as the migrants came to be known, became prosperous owners of plantations. And the land-owning tribal families slid into poverty.

The tale of Wayanad's tribals is one of betrayal and exploitation by "settlers" and successive Governments. Of the more than one lakh tribal people in Wayanad, nearly 75,000 are landless. The remaining, mainly Kurichiars and Kurumars, were once landowners but had to give it up to settlers to clear debts and other obligations. The tribal people's demand for land rights in Kerala has been a cry in the wilderness. Not that attempts have not been made to provide land to ensure a decent livelihood to the tribes. It was the prime objective of the Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, 1975. But this has not happened even two and a half decades later. The reason — those who would have to return land to the tribals constituted a powerful vote bank. The political coalitions in Kerala led by the Congress and the CPI (M) have found it politically convenient not to implement the law. Wayanad has the highest concentration of Adivasis in the State — nearly 1.2 lakhs, according to the latest survey conducted by the Tribal Welfare Department. Last financial year alone, at least Rs 5.7 crores were spent under Plan and non-Plan programmes by the State Department of Tribal Welfare and to pay the salary of the Department employees in Wayanad. This was in addition to several other schemes meant to benefit the Adivasis.

Yet, it is evident to even casual visitors to tribal settlements in Wayanad that the Adivasis lead a precarious existence. But the main tribal communities, Kurichiars and Paniyars, once had a glorious past. The Kurichiars are known to have fought the British forces for nearly nine years from 1805 along with Pazhassi Raja. The Kurumars once owned large tracts of land. But all the glory has faded from Wayanad's tribal landscape. The Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restrictions on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act of 1975 came into effect from January 1982 in the State and it was included in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution making it non-justiciable. It made all transfer of property "possessed, enjoyed or owned" by tribals to non-tribal people between 1960 and January 1, 1982, invalid and ordered restoration of such land to Adivasis. But the law remained on paper. In 1993, Nalla Thampi Thera, a non-tribal in Wayanad, gave a fillip to the Adivasi struggle when the Kerala High Court passed an order on his public interest litigation directing the State Government to implement the 1975 Act. In 1996, the High Court set a deadline of September 30 to evict the non-tribals. The Government responded with an amendment to the 1975 legislation. By the 1990s, signs of discontent emerged from the tribal people especially in Wayanad where some extremist groups had been active.

Flexing their political muscle, the settlers forced the LDF and the UDF to amend the "impractical" provisions of the 1975 Act under which they should hand over land in their possession back to the Adivasis. The result was the Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Land and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Amendment Bill 1996 passed by the State Assembly almost unanimously (there was only one dissenting vote). But the President returned the Bill. Another Bill was passed in 1999 which said only alienated land in excess of two hectares possessed by encroachers would be returned to the tribals. The Kerala High Court however rejected the Bill. The State Government has gone in appeal to the Supreme Court and obtained a stay order. The Adivasis are no longer asking for restoration of alienated land. Instead, they want five acres for all landless families. There was a proposal to give 85 per cent of the forests taken over by the Government to the tribals. But the Centre's Forest Protection Act, 1980, made it difficult to implement. A demand has been made to interpret the law in such a way that settlement of Adivasis inside forests could be made a part of forest protection measures. This experiment has been tried with some success in the Sugandhagiri project in Wayanad where Adivasis have been provided decent wages and daily work in a cooperative society which grows cardamom.

UPDATE: More on the Wayanand issue here and here on land encroachment in Karknataka. Interestingly both Madhya Pradesh in the Land Registration Act of 1952 and Jharkhand in the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1948 (Amended) , as states with substantial adivasi minorities have strict regulations which place substantial obstacles in land transfers from adivasis to non-adivasis; yet none of these measures has been able to cehck the general trend of Land alienation that is taking place.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:32 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Serious Media Analysis:

Some rare critical US media analysis comes from the Worldlink site where on one of the programmes devoted to the Iraq issue host Peter Coyote and selected guests examine the Bush Administration’s “Iraq message”, and its particular mix of rational and emotional arguments to rally the American people behind its buildup to war. Using video clips from recent speeches by George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, the program focuses on the administration’s media strategies which appeal directly to human emotions, including:

THE POLITICS OF FEAR: What is Iraq’s real threat to the US and other countries of the middle east?

THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION: How can the world stand by and watch while the Iraqi people are subjected to rape, murder and torture?

THE POLITICS OF HOPE: Will the overthrow of Saddam Hussein lead to an open Western-style democracy or another strongman loyal to us in the short term who will be eventually overthrown?

A good breakdown of the usual justifications wheeled out by the Bush adminsitration for this war. Representative of the ways one needs to mobilise a democracy as opposed to other types of polities for war.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:07 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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A Blog from Iraq:

The following is an excerpt from "Where is Raed?" an intriguing blog apparently from someone based in Iraq that has caused some waves inside the Blogging World. I have decided to re-produce an excerpt on the Iraqi view of the war because it says better than I can much of what needs to be said. Be sure to visit and read Raed if you can:

give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying “come on bomb us” it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case.

I think that the coming war is not justified (and it is very near now, we hear the war drums loud and clear if you don’t then take those earplugs off!). The excuses for it have been stretched to their limits they will almost snap. A decision has been made sometime ago that “regime change” in Baghdad is needed and excuses for the forceful change have to be made. I do think war could have been avoided, not by running back and forth the last two months, that’s silly. But the whole issue of Iraq should have been dealt with differently since the first day after GW I.

The entities that call themselves “the international community” should have assumed their responsibilities a long time ago, should have thought about what the sanctions they have imposed really meant, should have looked at reports about weapons and human rights abuses a long time before having them thrown in their faces as excuses for war five minutes before midnight.

What is bringing on this rant is the question that has been bugging for days now: how could “support democracy in Iraq” become to mean “bomb the hell out of Iraq”? why did it end up that democracy won’t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.

The situation in Iraq could have been solved in other ways than what the world will be going thru the next couple of weeks. It can’t have been that impossible. Look at the northern parts of Iraq, that is a model that has worked quite well, why wasn’t anybody interested in doing that in the south. Just like the US/UK UN created a protected area there why couldn’t the model be tried in the south. It would have cut off the regimes arms and legs. And once the people see what they have been deprived off they will not be willing to go back, just ask any Iraqi from the Kurdish areas. Instead the world watched while after the war the Shias were crushed by Saddam’s army in a manner that really didn’t happen before the Gulf War. Does anyone else see the words (Iran/not in the US interest) floating or is it me hallucinating?

And there is the matter of Sanctions. Now that Iraq has been thru a decade of these sanctions I can only hope that their effects are clear enough for them not to be tried upon another nation. Sanctions which allegedly should have kept a potentially dangerous situation in Iraq in check brought a whole nation to its knees instead. And who ultimately benefited from the sanctions? Neither the international community nor the Iraqi people, he who was in power and control still is. These sanctions made the Iraqi people hostages in the hands of this regime, tightened an already tight noose around our necks. A whole nation, a proud and learned nation, was devastated not by the war but by sanctions. Our brightest and most creative minds fled the country not because of oppression alone but because no one inside Iraq could make a living, survive. And can anyone tell me what the sanctions really did about weapons? Get real, there are always willing nations who will help, there are always organizations which will find his money sweet. Oil-for-Food? Smart Sanctions? Get a clue. Who do you think is getting all those contracts to supply the people with “food”? who do you think is heaping money in bank accounts abroad? It is his people, his family and the people who play his game. Abroad and in Iraq, Iraqis and non-Iraqis.

What I mean to say is that things could have been different; I can’t help look at the Northern parts of Iraq with envy and wonder why.

Do support democracy in Iraq. But don’t equate it with war. What will happen is something that could/should have been avoided. Don’t expect me to wear a [I heart bush] t-shirt. Support democracy in Iraq not by bombing us to hell and then trying to build it up again (well that is going to happen any way) not by sending human shields (let’s be real the war is going to happen and Saddam will use you as hostages), but by keeping an eye on what will happen after the war.

To end this rant, a word about Islamic fundis/wahabisim/qaeda and all that.

Do you know when the sight of women veiled from top to bottom became common in cities in Iraq? Do you know when the question of segregation between boys and girls became red hot? When tribal law replaced THE LAW? When Wahabi became part of our vocabulary?

It only happened after the Gulf War. I think it was Cheney or Albright who said they will bomb Iraq back to the stone age, well you did. Iraqis have never accepted religious extremism in their lives. They still don’t. Wahabis in their short dishdasha are still looked upon as sheep who have strayed from the herd. But they are spreading. The combination of poverty/no work/low self esteem and the bitterness of seeing people who rose to riches and power without any real merit but having the right family name or connection shook the whole social fabric. Situations which would have been unacceptable in the past are being tolerated today.

They call it “al hamla al imania – the religious campaign” of course it was supported by the government, pumping them with words like “poor in this life, rich in heaven” kept the people quiet. Or the other side of the coin is getting paid by Wahabi organizations. Come pray and get paid, no joke, dead serious. If the government can’t give you a job run to the nearest mosque and they will pay and support you. This never happened before, it is outrageous. But what are people supposed to do? thir government is denied funds to pay proper wages and what they get is funneled into their pockets. So please stop telling me about the fundis, never knew what they are never would have seen them in my streets.
[/RANT]

:: Conrad Barwa 2:41 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Speed and the End of Politics:

In Pure War, Paul Virilio argues that democracy is based on time; time for consultation, reflection, and decison making. The accelerated speed of modern warfare announces the death of the political. Democracy gives way to Dromocracy. Virilio's argument has been confirmed this week by the words and deeds of George W. Bush. The justification for this war is the dubious claim that the imminent threat of the Iraqi regime requires the US to set aside discussion, debate, and diplomacy. In essence, the speed of war has ended the policy of deterrence.

Deterrence was premised on humanism. The ability to deter required an assumption that the aggressor would reconsider an aggressive action when faced with a credible second strike capability. The US has declared that the era of deterrence is over. No longer will the US rely on its bristling arsenal to persuade its enemies not to attack; no longer will the US defensive posture implicitly recognize the humanity and rationality of its opponent. The death of time is the death of humanism. The primacy of speed becomes the primacy of the military.

What is ironic is that Saddam Hussein is one of the most stable and predictable dictators in the world. His actions, even aggressive moves against neighboring regimes, are always rather deliberate and easy to predict, not to mention easy to monitor from satellite technology. Even Hussein's decision to use a chemical attack to prevent a rebellion in the border town of Halapja was quite predictable, particularly in the context of the use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. The characterization of Hussein as an irrational madman is perhaps one of the most glaring lies put forth by the US government to justify its decision to terminate diplomatic channels. If anything, the US has pre-emptively announced the death of politics by chosing to end its deterrent strategy against an actor who seems to understand the logic of deterrence quite well. If the US had not winked and nodded accidentally at the invasion of Kuwait, would Saddam ever have mounted such a reckless operation? No. And despite this historic blunder, the Hussein regime did not use chemical or biological weapons against the US or Israel in the first Gulf War. This is a regime which may not be trustworthy, but is certainly restrained, cautious, and capable to rational calculation.

Nevertheless, regardless of how the first target of the new US imperial aggression was selected, we can be assured that an era of Unending War has only just begun. The inevitable outcome of the death of politics is the arrival of total war.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:55 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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State Terrorism and the First Shot:

The war has begun as I write. Not too surprisingly, it has begun as an act of state terrorism by the United States; it is apparently an attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein and his chiefs of staff. It is almost as if the US military has bought into the personalization of the nation-state. It is almost as if we should believe that US ambition would be satiated by the death of one man.

On the "home-front," the media outlets in the US can barely contain their giddy joy and excitement. The television stations are running computer simulations of how the military arsenal works. The video game element which is intended to colonize the American imagination, is now in full swing. The weathermen are giving reports of the weather in Iraq as if this were a sporting event. There is voyeuristic camera showing downtown Iraq to the American population eager to see things blow-up and replayed monotonously (like some sort of NASCAR car crash)... This is depressing and sickening.

What is most galling of course is the raising of the terror alert, as if the Iraqi regime had any capability of carrying out an attack on the US. At the moment that we are terrorizing the population of Iraq, we portray ourselves as potential victims.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:12 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The War and The Oilfields

The Iraq campaign should have started now; if not some hours earlier. It is depressing that in this age of democratic governance and with all the available tools at our disposal we have had to fall back on this most crude and destructive ones: War. Many friends of mine have said "but isn't Saddam Hussein a bad man, won't a war get rid of a tyrannical government that oppresses its people"...What can I say some of this is indeed true. Nobody is denying that Saddam Hussein is not an ideal ruler; but as Vikash’s post below on the use of metaphors in war shows, such personalisation’s of an entire country, of an entire situation is really an ideological tool for mobilisation. I may support the removal of Saddam Hussein and his replacement by a democratic and pluralist regime in Baghdad but an American invasion without any real international, domestic or regional support is not the correct way to do this. Are we to commit as TS Eliot remarked the last and final sin, the most heinous one of all and do the right thing for the wrong reason? Never mind the real reasons for the Bush administration in invading Iraq: didn't the President make a key "Freudian slip" in his address to the nation on Monday when he warned the Iraqi regime not to set alight to the oilfields. Oil. This is what it comes down to in the end; amongst all the high-flying rhetoric about human rights and liberating the Iraqi people the real motivations behind the war escapes. Like the Lacanian Real, it resists the artificial symbolisation of a fairy-tale morality play between Good and Evil that supporters of this war have tried to make it into and slips out into the cold light of public scrutiny. Except nobody really noticed; the slip was not remarked on; it passed unnoticed, deemed not worthy of comment. The Emperor has no clothes, but tongues remain silent and those that speak are not heard.

So tanks will roll, troops will march and planes will bomb. One can only hope that they will accomplish their task with the minimum loss of life as possible.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:19 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Contending Views of the Sources for Pax Americana:

The following is a brief look at some of the theories and approaches behind analysis of current US drives for global dominance:

1) Demand-dependent conditions for Global Order:

Some realist American international relations theorists have argued that only the coercive power supplied by a hegemon maintains order within core capitalist states; without the Leviathan’s Pax Americana there will be a Hobbesian war each against all. The Pax is thus an American burden with the US supplying the public good of order and cop-operation to the system as a whole. The classic statement of this position was John Mearsheimer’s famous essay on Europe, entitled “Back to the Future”, arguing that only continued US dominance can prevent Europe from returning to pre-1914 style rivalries. Yet this interpretation, though having a grain of truth in the 1950s, had largely become redundant by the 1990s, due to the transformation of both European inter-state and transatlantic relations. By then, the real problem was that the collapse of the Soviet Bloc had removed the security undergirding of Europe’s protectorate status and the West European states were seriously banding together, overcoming radial core-based pattern of the Cold War security system. The fear that policymakers such as Paul Wolfowitz and other is that Western Europe was coming together dangerously and threatening to throw off the protectorate controls. The core capitalist state do indeed engage in constant rivalries to gain advantage in the struggle for greater shares in the process of capital accumulation. But they simultaneously engage in efforts to maintain co-operation to preserve arrangements that foster the accumulation interests of all. The idea that intra-core co-operation today depends principally upon protectorate structures policed by an intrusive Leviathan is propagandistic. A particular type of co-operation requires US hegemony, but there are other possible types as well.

2) American Political Culture:

This arguments identifies the source of US drive for global dominance in the peculiarities of American political culture – the messianic strain in it – suggesting that the US is somehow an exceptional state with a manifest destiny to transform the world: the naïve assumption that the Americans have the answers to all the world’s problems and that resistance to American solutions derives from evil sources. This strand certainly does exist in American political culture. But so do many other strands that contradict these impulses to global activism, and during the 1990s these other strands have evidently been predominant within the American polity. Since 1989, American voters have been extremely reluctant to endorse any global activist agenda to consolidate a new Pax Americana. This has been a source of constant sorrow and frustration amongst US state elites. Only sine the WTC attacks has the electorate swung over to support global activism and political assertiveness, and this has been based on the belief that the Bush administration is defending America. The American electorate is not aware that the Bush team is using their fear of terrorism to implement a quite different project for a new global Pax Americana.

3) State Establishment Actors as Rent-Seekers:

David Calleo suggests an interest group source for the Pax Americana drive: he argues that America’s large Cold War military, diplomatic, financial, industrial and academic establishments naturally favoured a new age of triumphant global hegemony. But the rest of the country was not necessarily for it. This fits in with conceptions of the military-industrial complex – industrial groups and the US military along with members of Congress whose constituencies benefit from their operations. This complex does of course exist. But so do a lot of other “complexes” whose maximands are not directly linked to the military budget. Such groups might be expected to favour a downsizing of Big Military Government and either allocating tax dollars to other fields or perhaps slashing taxes. At the very least such a direct interest group explanation would suggest a big battle within business over the Pax Americana project; such has not been the case. Consolidating Pax Americana has been a relatively bipartisan and consensual process except for small nationalist-isolationist circles around Buchanan. Calleo’s focus on the various establishments with a direct stake in the Pax Americana project does not seem sufficient enough to answer the question: Why have the very broadest coalitions of internationally orientated US business backed this grand strategy?

4) International Political Economy and Power Relations:

The generalised answer lies in the fact that the relationship between international economics and politics is not what is usually accepted to be. There is not in fact an autonomous and general set of norm-based market rules governing international economic exchanges. The legal and institutional arrangements governing international exchanges is extremely extensive but although it is legitimated as governed by clear liberal formulae such as “multilateralism” and “free trade”, such terms are pure ideological mystification and the rule networks are in reality thickets of policies saturated in power relations between states. And these power relations are not at all confined to relationships of economic power: all kinds of political forces are brought into play by states in the shaping and reshaping of international economic rules and regimes. The ideology of globalisation is, of course, geared to obliterating this fundamental fact. The consensus within the business classes and the state policymaking elites is that the currently existing structure of US capitalism depends on the preservation and extension of the Cold War protectorate systems in the post-cold War world. This structure includes:

(a) Dominance of the dollar linked to US military-political power. This dollar dominance favours US importers and US exporters. IT enables the US to open its markets to imports from the South almost without a trade deficit limit, thus ensuring that the US financial sector gains its debt repayments. The same opportunity for huge trade deficits (equivalent to over 1% of world GDP in 2000) gives the US great leverage over the economies of East and South East Asia to get them to reciprocally open their jurisdictions to US capital.

(b) The dominance of Wall Street in the financial sector also rests on both Dollar dominance and the fact that the US is the world’s dominant military power. This gives the US the benefit of huge flows of funds from all over the world into US financial markets and into the satellite London market dominated by American operators. In the year 2000 the IMF’s global accounts showed that the world had an export surplus with itself of over $180 billion dollars; this represents just one part of the huge capital flight mainly into the US financial market in a single year. This brings down US interest rates, helping the US economy.

(c) The IMF/World Bank strategy and the Un system operate within parameters laid down largely by the US because of the US’s role as the world’s dominant military power. These structures bring a whole host of great benefits to US capitalism, creating new proletarians for US capital, opening a whole range of markets and doing so very heavily through lending non-Americana money from other core states.

(d) The protectorate system with Western Europe and East Asia, gives the US leverage to protect American ascendancy in a whole range of potentially very important areas from the high-tech/capital goods to energy resources and prices. It would, in principle, be possible for other core states to launch a new high-tech set of sectors on a world scale focused on was, new energy conservation and environmental protection industries. Such a strategic move could produce new waves of capital accumulation across the global economy. But insofar as that kind of initiative does not fit with the current structure of US capitalism, US dominance over the security systems of other capitalist powers can help block such initiatives.

If we take all these features together we can see that their loss would transform social relations within the US. It would involve the US having to tackle its current account deficits, having to tackle its debt problems, and ending a situation where it relies for its own investment upon sucking in finance from the rest of the world. Tackling such problems would bring American capital face to face with its own working populations in a confrontation that would almost certainly result in American workers demanding the kinds of welfare protections and social rights that would make up for the impact of the downsizing of economic perks of US power. While interest groups, trends in political culture and transnational linkages between capitalist groups across the core all play some part, the current structural relationship between US capitalism and the rest of the World’s social systems is surely a critical causal factor behind the broad consensus among US elites for a revival and extension of the protectorate structures.

:: Conrad Barwa 2:52 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Framing War:



This is the most intelligent analysis of how war is sold to the public that I have read so far...

Metaphor and War, Again

By George Lakoff, AlterNet
March 18, 2003
Metaphors can kill.

That's how I began a piece on the first Gulf War back in 1990, just before the war began. Many of those metaphorical ideas are back, but within a very different and more dangerous context. Since Gulf War II is due to start any day, perhaps even tomorrow, it might be useful to take a look before the action begins at the metaphorical ideas being used to justify Gulf War II.

One of the most central metaphors in our foreign policy is that A Nation Is A Person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein. The war, we are told, is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but only against this one person. Ordinary American citizens are using this metaphor when they say things like, "Saddam is a tyrant. He must be stopped." What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the 3000 bombs to be dropped in the first two days will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of the people hidden by the metaphor, people that according to the metaphor we are not going to war against.

[Read more at Alternet]

:: Vikash Yadav 11:10 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Dissent in Pakistan:

Here is a telling little newsfeed from PTI...

NEW DELHI, March 17. — Paying a price for his alleged criticism of Army generals, Deputy Opposition leader of Pakistan's Punjab Assembly Mr Rana Sanaullah Khan was reportedly beaten “black and blue” by ISI and was left after his half of his head and moustache was shaved off.

Making light of the “true democracy mantra” of President Pervez Musharraf, a US-based Pakistani web magazine South Asia Tribune condemned the attack and said that last week ISI kidnapped Mr Khan, beat him shaved half of his head and half of his moustache and abandoned him on a deserted road, all for criticising the Army generals. “This is the kind of democracy General Musharraf wants in Pakistan and calls it the true democracy,” Shaheen Sehbai, editor of the weekly, who himself had to flee the country and take refuge in the USA, said.

He also criticised the Pakistani government for threatening Lahore-based newspaper Weekly Independent. The publisher of the newspaper was directly threatened by government officials, said “enough is enough”. The matter of harrassing the journalist has been condemned by the US-based Committee for Protection of Journalists, who, in their letter to Gen. Musharraf, have demanded holding an impartial enquiry into the matter. The CPJ letter alleged that Punjab home secretary Mr Ejaz Shah had telephoned the newspaper's publisher Illyas Mehraj and told him “enough is enough” and that the Punjab government had decided to proceed against his newspaper for “working against the national interest”. — PTI

:: Vikash Yadav 11:46 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Factoid:

An estimated 1.8 million Pakistanis live in Jordan, Syria and the Gulf. About three million Indians live in the Gulf.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:29 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The First Casualty - Collective Security

George W. Bush has crossed the Rubicon. War with Iraq now appears inevitable as efforts at international diplomacy have been abandoned. The US has failed to lead and work within the international institutions that it helped to forge. The US decision to enforce UN resolutions against the sentiment of the UN Security Council is not only contradictory, it may well be unlawful.

Of course, the decision to circumvent the UN is not terribly surprising. The US & its NATO allies worked outside of the UN framework in the recent Kosovo conflict. However, the current debacle appears to be the mortal blow to the principles on which the UN was founded. The UN represents the realization of Woodrow Wilson's dream of an institutionalized collective security apparatus to preserve world peace and stability. The decision to abandon the UN in favor of an amorphous and ill-defined unilateral global hegemony appears rather unwise.

The Bush administration has chosen a foreign policy path that will set the stage for the return of the spectre of balance of power politics. If the US believes that its military power is independent of the rest of the world it is wrong. The military might of the US depends critically on the confidence of the world in its economy and currency. If the US believes that the rest of the world will not eventually resist its new found penchant for pre-emptive strikes and preventive wars, it is dead wrong.

:: Vikash Yadav 1:57 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Saffronist Economics: A Closer Look at Swaminathan Aiyar

I am not a fan of the practise of “fisking” that seems to predominate the on the internet these days but this dubious piece of political propagandeering parading as a piece of serious economic analysis by Swaminthan Aiyar in the Times of India has provoked me to go half way. In my eyes it is really a typical neo-liberal, middle class, soft Saffronist plea for a certain policy stance rather than a credible strategy for growth. But since this view seems to predominate so much amongst the more vocal observers of Indian political economy these days it might be worth taking a closer look. I am heartened by the intelligent comments of one of the readers – Sharad Mishra, which provides a good incipient critique of.

1) “For three decades after independence, India so consistently averaged GDP growth of 3.5 per cent per year that it came to be called the Hindu rate” Actually this hides a deeper pattern; the problem for the Indian economy was not so much a uniformly poor macroeconomic rate of growth but rather sectoral imbalance and intra-sectoral misallocations of investment and demand. Industrial growth in the First two Five Year Plans from 1952 to 1964 was actually quite good being 7.7% per annum, though total GDP growth was much lower at only 3.4% due to slow agricultural growth rates. Within this heavy industry in capital goods grew rapidly but in the face of slow per capita incomes growing at only 1% per annum and the large share of the consumption basket devoted to foodgrains (66%) this was dependent on the twin enabling conditions of: per capita incomes rising and food prices and supply remaining stable. Unfortunately the Indo-China war of 1962, and Indo-Pak war of 1965 displaced government expenditure, as did the drought of 1966, and poorer monsoons leading to below average harvests coupled with as secular decline in agricultural productivity fell which caused a food crisis. All this sent the industrial sector into recession, which endured throughout the 1970s; however the implementation of the Green Revolution strategy lifted growth in the agricultural sector to above 4.5%-5.5% in the surplus regions and by the end of the 1970s India had achieved food security from a macro-economic point of view. The problem then, as economic historians such as Dietmar Rothermund have noted, is not so much the inability to generate growth but the inability to generate synergy between industrial and agricultural sectors and have both grow in tandem. This is a problem, which was temporarily overcome in the 1980s but despite the good monsoons, and bumper harvests recurred in the 1990s pointing towards deeper structural problems, which had not been addressed. However, in sum in the era of ‘high planning’ Indian growth performance does not look very bad at all, especially when compared to the 1% growth rate of the colonial economy that preceded it.

2) “Economic reform followed, and growth exceeded 7 per cent for three years in the mid-1990s” this is a little bit deceitful on Aiyar’s part. Such an inflated growth rate can only be obtained by excluding the Structural Adjustment Years of 1990-92 which would bring growth rate down; yet to argue that the economy had moved onto a higher growth path they must be included to measure the transition effect. The average growth rate in the 1990s as a whole was the same as the 1980s – 5.6% however in the last half of the 1990s the growth rate was 0.5% higher at around 6.1%; which is about the current growth rate. So after all these great reforms, the growth rate had increased by only 0.5%. Even more troubling as Ajit Mozoomdar, has pointed out the sectoral decomposition of this growth was surprising: agricultural growth remained stagnant at 3.4%. Industrial growth actually declined marginally from 6.9% to 6.75% while the service sector grew from 6.6% to 8.1%. Therefore what was driving growth was really an expansion in Services; not better agricultural or industrial performance and within the Tertiary sector it was transport and communications (9%) and real estate and financial services (7.5%), which grew the fastest. Again a far cry from the talking up that the pro-liberalisers did for the economy – of course deep inter-sectoral shifts did occur as overcapitalised capital goods industries were overtaken by the intermediate goods sector and increased production of consumer goods. The problem was that the increased production in the latter sectors was more than offset by the fall in production in the former.

3) “But then came populist acceptance of the Pay Commission award, and GDP growth slid back to 5-6 per cent.” Well, this is a slight exaggeration though there is some truth to it. The Pay Commission Award did impose a large cost of nearly 1% of GDP on the economy, yet this should have been a one-off cost and not something that can be used to explain poor subsequent performance across several years. The economy it should be remembered had weathered considerably more serious shocks of this kind the cancellation of farmers’ debts in the 1980s being one such example: this imposed a much larger cost (estimated at 2%-3% of GDP) to the economy and was also more damaging to the whole fabric of rural finance and agricultural banking network. Yet it did not seem to have the same influence in pushing the economy down to a lower growth path. As pointed out earlier, industrial and agricultural growth were already sluggish or in recession; the only growth that occurred came from the Service sector and given the demand linkages it is more than likely that the pay increase did have a positive effect in boosting aggregate demand in this sector.

4) “Unlike in the 1980s, this rate now looks sustainable. It represents a stable equilibrium between India’s huge economic potential and the ravages of political populism.” Again this is a piece of optimism that is unwarranted. The low agricultural growth rate points to an important bottleneck; as does the collapse in public investment and large fiscal deficits. Considering that currency weaknesses have meant that India has experienced a major Balance of Payments crisis every decade there is no reason to believe the this decade will see India change this trend. According to the projections of two economists who are in favour of liberalisation Vijay Joshi and IMD Little, unless India manages to reduce its revenue deficit to less than 1% of GDP and consolidate its primary deficit at the Central and State levels then there will be another crisis within 10 years as India will face an internal debt trap which will raise the spectre of default reminiscent of the 1991 crisis. It is surprising how Aiyar can claim this growth rate is “sustainable” in light of its weak foundations and his admission of its weaknesses later on in the article. This seems to be more wishful thinking than the hard-headed analysis, which he proffers to admire so much elsewhere.

5) “All political parties talk of the need to accelerate GDP growth to 7-8 per cent annually to eradicate poverty and catch up with China. But no party is interested in taking the tough measures needed for that. Only a party with high moral authority can impose tough measures in the absence of a crisis, and no Indian party has that. So parties compete in giveaways and subsidies.” Ah yes, it is amusing how poverty eradication concerns are immediately juxtaposed to the urgent need that most neo-liberal advocates within India feel to “catch up to China”; why exactly it is important to catch up to China is something we are not told but just seem to implied it is something to be accepted as a given goal. This is reminiscent of the more grandiose delusions amongst “hawks” within the Indian establishment who seek regional great power status for India and a possible superpower status – the real enemy in this geo-strategic view is China as the only possible state that approaches India in terms of size and command of resources as well as population. Of course such a goal will only appeal to a narrow middle class urban constituency hence the immediate preceding justification that “poverty alleviation” is the primary goal behind a high growth strategy. Unfortunately Aiyar betrays himself through his real desire for competing with China – this reminds me of the “growthmanship” competitions that analyst and policymakers used to indulge in G-7 countries in trying to outdo each others’ GDP growth rates to the neglect of other policy goals. This is a technocratic and rather narrow view of economic policy; especially in India with its structural problems. Also the reference to “high moral authority” is a most worrying gesture; this indicates a romanticist desire for a strong disciplined leadership to push through the changes for the nation – that we like spoilt children know are for our good really but are too weak-willed and myopic to implement ourselves. Longings like this can go down dangerous paths in to the suppressed desire for the eponymous Man on Horseback to come and lead us into a land of Milk and Honey. Needless to say such desire just obfuscates and conceals the contradictions, which generate it. Apart from anything else; I have a hard time in believing that the Chinese political leadership or that of many East Asian NICs for that matter are any more (or less) “moral” than their Indian counterparts.

6) “Second, we must keep subsidising everything in sight, and invent new subsidies wherever possible” This is really gratuitous and grossly inaccurate; subsidies have been reduced albeit not by much yet the cuts have fallen on those who can least afford to bear them. For example, in the food economy, the food subsidy really benefits not consumers below the poverty line but surplus farmers who are the producers – increases in the distribution price of PDS foodgrain has lead to declining consumption of these goods by the target groups. Social sector spending on health, education and public services have also suffered as these areas have come in for the heaviest cutbacks in government spending. Very few new subsides have been “invented” since liberalisation and the existing panoply have been pruned and reduced if not totally eliminated.

7) “Third, we must do nothing to get rid of armies of surplus labour”…By this I assume Aiyar can only mean labour in government PSEs; of course with agricultural growth low and underemployment already endemic in the rural sector and the industrial restructuring meaning that the elasticity of demand for labour within the organised industrial sector here is extremely low; one wonders where exactly Aiyyar expects these “armies of surplus labour” to go once they are ejected from the Public sector. Packing them into the informal urban sector is hardly a desirable solution given the already atrocious labour conditions and poor prospects of income generation that have characterised this sector of the economy historically.

8) “Fourth, we are no longer in the old era of raising taxes every budget to finance ever-larger Plans, we are in a new era when we keep cutting taxes to win a few more votes.” Er.. Aiyar seems to be labouring under the illusion that although marginal and average tax rates were high in India that they actually reflected revenue. As economists who look at the Black Economy within India have noted, increases in taxation reflect a parallel increase in the growth of black money and undeclared income as private corporations simply evaded or bribed their way out of paying the taxes. Agriculture of course was not taxed at all so the surplus farmers who were recipients of the Green Revolution package did not have to pay for the investment into the agricultural economy. Given that tax evasion, as the economist Rathin Roy notes, is so widespread it is a serious problem for the Indian state, as income lost from this is far greater than that wasted through corruption or dissipated through subsidies. Tellingly the reduction in tax rates throughout the 1990s has not really been accompanied by a reduction in the size of the black economy suggesting that tax evasion and the burden of taxation was not the primary cause behind low tax revenues and a refusal by propertied groups to pay their taxes.

9) “Some economists want a high fiscal deficit to finance public infrastructure. But everybody opposes a high revenue deficit, which implies borrowing for ordinary administrative expenses. The revenue deficit projected by Jaswant Singh is a whopping Rs 112,000 crore, or 4.1 per cent of GDP. This is overspending big time.” Er…so the new much touted growth path is not sustainable as Aiyar liked to think it was unless he believes such fiscal profligacy is sustainable in the medium term; never mind the long term.

10) “The consolidated fiscal deficit of the centre and states is now 10 per cent of GDP, the second highest in the world after Turkey. Now, Turkey survives by demanding a bribe of $30 billion for allowing the USA to station troops there for the Iraq war. India is in no position to demand similar bribes. So how does it sustain its huge overspending without going bust?”… Well yes, though it should be noted that relying on such subsidies from the US is counter-productive in the long-run as: (i) such transfers by their nature are transitory and will not be a reliable source of income and (ii) they are likely to distort the domestic economy, create interest groups that benefit from their perpetuation and delay the inevitable structural changes in the fiscal economy that are necessary making the eventual adjustment even more painful when it comes.

11) “The answer lies in the flood of remittances coming from Indian overseas. These, along with software exports and other items are called invisibles, since they earn dollars without any visible export of goods. The net inflow of invisibles was $2-3 billion in the late 1980s. That rose steadily to $11 billion in 2000-01, $14 billion in 2001-02, and looks likes touching $20 billion in 2002-03. This enormous inflow is almost 4 per cent of GDP, roughly equal to the government’s revenue deficit. So, Jaswant Singh’s overspending is offset by the bonanza from abroad. The dis-saving of the government is offset by the huge savings from abroad. Hence even a deficit of this size is sustainable, and causes no distress, let alone crisis. Forex reserves are high, inflation and interest rates are modest.”…hmmm I detect several problems here: most pressingly such overseas remittances themselves are of a liquid nature that can be withdrawn. The Resurgent India Bonds which raised $4.5 billion were meant to be devoted to infrastructure development which would allow their repayment after the ten-year investment period; of course they have instead gone towards financing current consumption creating the potential debt crisis for the future – again reminiscent of the NRI deposit schemes of the 1980s where NRIs were attracted by special schemes with high interest rates offered by the Government in order to tap overseas savings. The problem was of course that as the economic situation deteriorated such savings were quickly withdrawn, playing no small part in the ensuing foreign exchange crisis. There is no guarantee that this will not reoccur, as investors tend to put monetary returns above questions of nationality or patriotism. Moreover, the shortfall is also made up by two other components that Aiyar fails to mention – (i) Foreign institutional investment and (ii) overseas bank credits representing commercial borrowing by Indian companies and financial institutions. The former is also extremely volatile, moving in and out of the stock market and bond sector in response to small changes in price and return differentials over the short term and the latter are also highly sensitive to credit rating as well as exchange rate movements. Neither are a secure or reliable form of overseas borrowing, particularly as the uses they are being put to internally are more devoted towards non-productive consumption rather than production. This again will create the problems of taking out loans without taking any measures to make sure that one can repay them. Invisible earnings on the BoP account through software exports are a bright spot, but again they are heavily dependent of the state of the world economy and more specifically the US economy. It the latter slides into a deep depression then this will have repercussions on the Indian software sector as well which could see this source of invisibles forex earnings dry up. Not rally much a bonanza on closer inspection.

12) “And yet this equilibrium comes at a price. If the huge inflow from abroad was harnessed to productive investment instead of government overspending, our GDP growth could accelerate to 7 per cent annually. Eventually, we could match China’s 8 per cent growth rate.” Ahhhhh, again the hidden desire to compete with the Chinese as if this was some sort of mercantilist, zero-sum game; moreover there seems to be an implicit admission that such a growth rate is not really all that “sustainable” after all. The Indian economy’s problems are more structural in nature, having an investment injection will not solve its problems as a shortage of funds is not what is hampering industrial growth and agricultural growth is another matter completely. Even if this was the case, there is no need to fear government spending or even overspending if it boosted aggregate demand or was itself geared towards growth-generating projects.

“But we are not Chinese. Instead we have an unspoken political consensus that keeps government overspending high enough to soak up foreign inflows, yet not so high as to cause a crisis. It is a stable equilibrium, yielding the neo-Hindu growth rate of 5-6 per cent. Neither war in Iraq or anything else looks like shifting it.”,… now the Freudian slip comes out, Aiyar want us to be like the Chinese!!! I find these wistful glances at Chinese GDP rates rather irritating as there seems to be little appreciation of the other Chinese polices that ensure this as well as the rather different position of China in the world economy – not to say the different welfare assumptions for the respective populations. Aiyar seems eager to finish with a fantastic flourish, hence his assertion, contrary to the facts and general commonsense that the Indian economy is in an “equilibrium” giving the completely mis-leading impression that current growth rates are sustainable without needing further policy changes and a tackling of the structural problems that continue to league the economy. More worryingly, the war with Iraq given its consequences for the global and US economy and oil prices, as well as international investor confidence could have serious negative effects on the delicate unsustainable growth path India is currently on. Aiyyar should do well to remember that the last economic crisis was set off after the first Gulf War of 1991 and ominously most economic pundits had complacently not seen it coming then either.

:: Conrad Barwa 10:53 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Summary of a Conference on Islam in History and Politics: A South Asian Perspective

Exceelent volume in the South Asia periodical on Islam in South Asia, Special Issue, 1999. A brief summary of the issue follows lloking at some of the more interesting contributions:

From Thomas W. Arnold to Samuel Huntington the West’s relentless and curious fascination with Islam remains unabated. Underlying this general interest there has been a special demand –almost a craving in the West for a particular type of popular literature aimed at ‘decoding’ Islam and offering a thorough exposé of the religion and its believers. In recent times the influential Jamaican writer of Indian ancestry, V. S Naipaul, proved commercially very successful in feeding this Western appetite with his successive best sellers: An Islamic Journey (1982), and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998). In Paris, for example, Sonia Rykiel's fancy window displays on the Boulevard St Germain were, reportedly, ‘filled with copies of the French translation of Beyond Belief, intermixed with the scarves, belts and handbags.’ Both of Naipaul’s major works share his central theme – carefully and selectively constructed and illustrated with the help of a series of contrived interviews – that the problem of Islam in the modern world is:

the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation and a knowledge of a great new encircling (Western) civilisation. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

The flaw that ran through Islamic history, he affirms, is that: (Edward W.Said, ‘An intellectual catastrophe’, Al Ahram Weekly, Issue 389, 6-12 August 1998 [review of V. S. Naipaul’s Beyond Belief] ; “to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith. It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything – but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy.” To this pet theme of a Huntington-esque prognostication of an apocalyptic clash of civilisations between Islam and the West, Naipaul returns nearly two decades later to add a new and equally debatable postulation about the sources of modern Muslim predicament – a postulation that is relevant to the concerns of this volume. In Beyond Belief, Naipaul appears obsessed with the issue of authenticity in Islam. He attributes the problem posed by non-Arab Muslims to the fact of their ‘original sin’ of conversion, and their consequent predicament to their unauthenticity as converts.

This acquired religion for the converts, in Naipaul’s perception, cuts them off from their roots and makes them hollow, confused, imitative and incompetent. Such a reductive thesis, based on a misapprehension of Muslim history, culture, politics and geography, totally misses or denies the dynamics involved in the making of Islamic civilisation. Naipaul’s, however, is only a much exaggerated, and distorted projection of a conventional – though misconceived and mythical – view of a normative and monolithic Islam vigorously propagated in our own times not only in the West but also by the fundamentalists, Islamicists and the ‘mujahidin’ of political Islam. The conventional perception of Islam in its non-Arab settings is indeed grossly inadequate and misleading. Underlying the problem is a wider and vital question of perspective appropriate for studying a Muslim group in a regional setting. In the absence of much significant empirical research in the area of South Asian Islam, its study has very largely been dominated by the normative or macro vision of the traditional Islamists and the Orientalists, which is firmly rooted in the notion of a monolithic Islam or a world-Islam, defined essentially in textual terms of the Sunni orthodoxy. Proceeding from this a priori position, it is easy to view the empirical realities of regional Islam through the prism of this idealised and abstract norm and hence to discard them as ‘folk’ or ‘popular’ aberrations; their practitioners are likewise dumped as ‘half converts’ or ‘nominal’ or ‘statistical’ Muslims. The inescapable implication of this approach in terms of sifting ‘good’ from ‘bad’ Muslims, may be endorsed by some as a legitimate differentiation, but is likely to be treated by others as a pointless and narrow academic exercise. It is a patently restrictive approach that begins with a ‘definition’ of a religion and rejects everything that fails to measure up to this idealised standard. A much more meaningful exercise is of course to ‘find’ the religion in the life and world of the believer.

In its empirical development, no system of beliefs and practices could be divorced from its spatial-social context. The social and cultural mores of believers invest particular eanings and symbolism into those beliefs and practices as far as possible as a means of accommodating them to their weltanschauung. The rest of their previous cultural baggage is left to coexist, generally harmoniously, with their new acquisitions. A student of this phenomenon is more meaningfully challenged to unravel this complex interface between the old inheritance and the new acquisition. Islam's encounter with Bengal, for instance, has its own specific social and cultural contexts which proved seminal in recasting Islam into its distinctive regional syncretistic mould. In Bengal, Islam has not been a ‘primary’ but a secondary’ culture, that is, exogenous and not indigenous to the region. Moreover, Islam has not been a ‘single’ or the only ‘great tradition’ since it entered a land which was not culturally virgin, and encountered an already long-established indigenous great tradition.

These are vital considerations in the regional development of Islam.The disproportionate emphasis placed on the theme of unity, to the exclusion of the role and place of variety, in Islam has not only served to distort a remarkably protean historical process, but also reduced Islamic development to a flat and linear process. Islam and Islamic studies have been the poorer for this. A great civilisation is not made within the narrow and rigid frame of a monolithic belief and social system. Neither ideology nor life could work in disjunction and separation from each other. It is the infinitely complex and creative forms of continual interaction between the ideal and the actual that made Islam a rich, vital, living and great civilisation, and it is precisely this that constitutes the challenge for students of Islam to capture the breadth, elasticity, tolerance and creativity in the process of development of historical Islam.

Even the belated recognition of the intrusive presence of region, in the perception of the champions of monolithic Islam, has been commonly and conveniently accommodated within a notion of dichotomous Islam in South Asia – a cleavage popularly expressed in terms of ‘high’, ‘scriptural’ or orthodox’ Islam on the one hand, and ‘popular’, ‘living’ or ‘folk’ Islam on the other. The changing perception and understanding of this particular issue between the conventional orthodox position and its recent revisionist critique has received particular attention in the separate contribution of Asim Roy to this volume. The common perception of the dichotomous nature of Indian Islam is undisputed. It is, however, the explanations of the divergences –primarily offered at the academic level – that have been steadily emerging as dubious and deficient. The predominant attitude and approach seem to involve discarding everything that fails to measure up to the norms and prescriptions of ‘scriptural’ Islam, into the shadowy and bottomless pit of 'folk’ or ‘popular’ Islam. This again is, in its turn, traced to the logic of ‘incomplete conversion’, which we contest.

They have raised serious questions about the usefulness and academic merit of labelling certain Muslims, particularly in the context of South Asia, as ‘half converts’ or ‘nominal Muslims’. To call a Muslim something less than a Muslim, or even worse a counterfeit Muslim, is a value judgment and not a description or analysis of the meaning of being a Muslim from the point of view of those who call themselves Muslims and claim the religion as their own. Does genuine Islam exist only in some pristine Arabist form? Religious life is a complex whole – a baggage full of myriad and diverse objects, all drawn from their complex and heterogenous source itself, that is, life. And very much in the sense of ‘the web of life’, there is an underlying unity, coherence and purpose that, in the ultimate analysis, could only have been meaningful in the minds of the believing individuals. Further, for this particular academic school of thought the operative process of Islamisation has been rather simple, uniform, unilinear and unidirectional; that is to say, an unvarying and continuous process of transition and transformation fromheterodoxy’ to ‘orthodoxy’, or from ‘little’ to ‘great’ tradition. In the light of many recent studies such a position has now become untenable. The emerging revisionist perspective canvasses a more complex pattern of interrelationship between the so-called orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Islam, one that is both complementary rather than confronting, and complex rather than flat and uniform.

The revisionist perception uncovers the variety, subtlety, complexity, and dynamism of the highly protean process of Islamization in South Asia. It does this, as suggested above, primarily by pulling down the time-honoured notional barricade between the so-called ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ Islam, which has been raised and sustained uncritically by the academic orthodoxy on South Asian Islam. In its existential, historical and living ramifications, regional Islam commanded a great deal more elasticity, plurality, tolerance and accommodation than apprehended and allowed by its orthodox observers. The issue is clear: it is patently wrong to deny the validity of every development in Islam that is not easily accommodated within the framework of an ‘ideal monolithic orthodoxy,’ defined essentially in Sunni scriptural terms. The Islam as practised by millions of believers in South Asia clearly emerges in our collection of essays with much greater elasticity, flexibility, tolerance, accommodative spirit, richness and diversity than is catered for in the orthodox view. Paradoxically, the doctrinaire and idealised model of Islamization seeks to save Islam from what it sees as its principal weaknesses, by in fact turning away from where the real strengths of Islam lay – its dynamism and creativity at the empirical level.

This Special Issue of South Asia is the third in recent years in which the themes of Islamic identity and communal conflict have figured prominently. The sudden rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the dramatic storming and destruction of a Muslim mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992, led to a wide-ranging exploration of the import of these events in the 1994 Special Issue: ‘After Ayodhya: The BJP and the Indian Political System’. This was followed in 1995 by ‘North India: Partition and Independence’, which revisited, nearly fifty years on, the cataclysmic history of 1947, if from the hitherto neglected close-up angle of the massacres and upheaval that tragically accompanied the division of the sub-continent. Departing from the traditional focus of nationalist campaigns and high political negotiations which inform much of the historiography of independence, this volume addressed not only the human dimension of partition – what it meant to be a Hindu, Muslim or Sikh caught up at the ground level in the creation of India and Pakistan – but also the strong continuities which survived the traumas of violent separation. 1947 was not debated all over again, but the remembrances of its victims were brought into the story for practically the first time.

‘Islam in History and Politics: A South Asian Perspective’ canvasses the background dynamics which were variously involved and played out in 1992 and 1947 respectively. In a more direct and more expansive way it engages with the meaning of Muslim community and the changing nature of Muslim consciousness, from the colonial state to the contemporary states which replaced it, in a region which contains the largest concentration of Muslims in the world. For the very first time at a major Australian conference South Asian Islamic culture became the central and contested area of inquiry for the South Asia section of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Biennial Conference, which was held at La Trobe University, Melbourne, on 8-11 July 1996. Sponsored jointly by the Australia-India Council, the National Centre for South Asian Studies and the South Asian Studies Association, the conference brought together a number of the world’s leading scholars of Muslim history, society and/or the communal problem in South Asia – including Paul Brass, Javeed Alam, Mushirul Hasan, Zoya Hasan, Barbara Metcalf, Tom Metcalf, Gyan Pandey and Francis Robinson. They were joined by many Australian and New Zealand-based scholars who also work and publish in this field. In all, over fifteen panels and over fifty papers were committed to the symposium. Appropriately launching it, a round-table discussion on the phenomenon of Islamisation and the many challenges confronting Muslim societies in both yesterday’s and today’s world sketched the co-ordinates of the inquiry.

The papers, which are published in this volume, are a sample rather than a particular selection of those formally presented at the conference. Papers which were offered as very preliminary progress reports of projects just started, or had been committed to studies nearing completion were either not considered or left out as wished by their contributors. However, in some cases abstracts were provided and these have been included at the end of the Special Issue to give a fuller view of the ground covered in discussion. With South Asian Islam never in its history a replica of Arabist Islam, what did Islamisation amount to and what form has it taken in response to challenges which both tested and changed the way Muslims understood and practised their religion? As Francis Robinson points out in a key-note address, centuries, experienced religious change of revolutionary significance, in many ways not unlike that of the Reformation in Europe. In the sub-continent the process of change was not uniform and varied according to the inspiration and different prescriptions of the movements driving it: of the Mujahidin, the Faraizis, Deoband, the Ahl-i-Hadiths, and Aligarh in the nineteenth century; and of the Jamiyat-ul Ulama, the Tabligh-i Jamaat, the Jamaat-i Islami, and the modernists of the twentieth century. The resulting change involved a major shift in the emphasis in Islamic belief from an other-worldly to a this worldly Islam. In short, the focus of Muslim piety was transferred from the next world to this. Instead of waiting for God to intercede for mankind on earth, individual Muslims began to assume responsibility themselves for creating Islamic society on earth. This responsibility was to fall heaviest on women. Robinson’s exploration of this-worldly Islam reveals that a new emphasis was placed on finding the right way to salvation, individualism was stressed and the Ulama lost some of their monopoly of power. Reflecting on where all this could lead, Robinson moots the possibility of the door to unbelief opening and Islam, as Christianity before it, heading off down a secularising path. For Javeed Alam the development of this-worldly Islam had already led to the destruction of an older more tolerant Islam, which over time had accommodated and synthesised elements of Muslim and Hindu world views.

The unique genius of India had worked to evolve modes of thinking and living – a composite culture – which had survived as long as outside agencies had left it alone. They had not, which was the problem. This composite culture, which was of a pre-reflective kind experienced predominantly at the folk level, was essentially frail, and certainly never robust enough to withstand intervention from orthodox elements who felt threatened by it. Crystallising in the broad shapes of either Deoband or Aligarh, interventions began to dissolve the common features of syncretistic Islam. Un-Islamic practices were targeted by dominant élites invoking Quranic tradition as a means of acquiring and exercising new sources of power. Once politicisation occurred Muslims began drawing away from the rest of society – the creation of a Muslim ‘other’ being in this sense a two-way, not simply a Hindu generated, process. Putting this development into context Alam points to the triggering effect of British colonial rule and the Hindu reaction to it. To the notion of the sharpness of change and reformulation of Islam in colonial South Asia that underlies both Robinson’s and Alam’s contentions,

Asim Roy’s paper represents a more cautious, critical and qualified appraisal. From a revisionary perspective Roy examines the bases of syncretistic culture, the phenomenon of Islamisation and the creation of an exclusivist Muslim identity within the context of the nineteenth and twentieth century revivalist movements in Bengal. To the standard interpretation of the processes at work in Islamic revivalism and the direction taken by ensuing Islamisation, Roy supplies two correctives. First, he restores Islamic ideology to a position of salience within the revivalist program, by redeeming it from an analytical muddle which results from an uncritical assumption, in much of the current scholarship, of a secular-religious divide. While conceding that Muslims responded more readily to the social, economic and political, than to the religious, aspects of revivalism – the prevailing line of argument – he points to the Islamic relevance and justification for those apparent ‘secular’ concerns. Seeking ‘Islamic’ explanations for Islamic mobilisation, Roy restores the linkage between the spiritual and the temporal in Islam which had tended to become separated in scholarly treatments. Second, Roy suggests that the conventional narrative of Islamisation was seriously deficient. For it started with the false premise that pre-revivalist Islam was un-Islamic, and it ended with the dubious assumption that post-revivalist Islam was all scriptural and normative. This, he argues, essentially ignored both the authenticity and resilience of local custom-based syncretistic Islam – of Islam in its distinctive regional mould. It follows for Roy that the unfolding of Islamisation as a uniform, monolithic and linear movement, which transformed a folk or low, to a high, tradition and culminated in the triumphant seizure of a truncated Bengal in 1947, seriously masked a much more complex and diverse, much less romantic, and extremely uneven history. The difficulties associated with identifying the causative factors promoting separatist over syncretistic Islam are equally attested to in the four papers of Kate Brittlebank, Ian Catanach, Ian Copland and Dominique-Sila Khan and Zawahir Moir. In each a very different setting and set of circumstances are chosen for measuring the presence of Islamic consciousness and the impulses behind Islamic response.

Kate Brittlebank examines the British conquest of Mysore and Tipu Sultan’s unsuccessful if legendary resistance to it in the light of Chris Bayly’s poignant statement that no ‘identifiable’ Muslim, or indeed Sikh or Hindu identity existed prior to the mid-nineteenth century. There was a fragmented form of consciousness but the term mentalité better described this. While Tipu died in the defence of Mysore, and is remembered as a Muslim martyr, Brittlebank concludes that Bayly is basically right. Muslim solidarity could not be discounted altogether, but it was never sufficiently strong to overcome self-interest in this case. Muslims simply did not identify with Tipu as a Muslim leader in defence of an agreed or shared Muslim identify. Nor it seems did Muslims consciously coalesce as a united, homogeneous community a century later when challenged by the Plague of 1897/8 and British measures to counteract it. At the time the British, taking heed of a warning from Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, were quick to espy a distinctive, cohesive, anti-British ‘Muslim’ response to British attempts to control the outbreak.

In Catanach’s study this is not borne out by the evidence, little sign of a formidable Muslim front being found. Plague fears might have formed part of the background to the rise of the messianic Ahmadiyya movement in the Punjab. And some Muslims might have been conditioned by a traditional outlook to view the Plague as a ‘mercy’ sent by God, from which they therefore should not flee. Catanach confirms what the British Administration were to concede after the event, that there was no accepted chain of command amongst Muslims and consequently no single spiritual leader with the authority to make binding pronouncements. Some Ulama declared in favour of keeping the Plague at a remedial distance, others insisted that Muslims stay put. Catanach finds that when different Muslims responded differently this largely depended on where they resided and who they were. For the most part the religious reaction of Punjabi villages – whether Muslim or Hindu – was basically similar. Indeed, Catanach glimpses a degree of syncretism here, particularly at the medical level, although he declines to push, or to quantify, this. A common ‘Indic’ civilisation might have been shared, but so also and critically was a ‘pragmatic commonsense’. A great deal of ambiguity and inconsistency made it difficult to detect a distinctive Muslim response to the plague.

Ian Copland draws attention to the Meo revolt of 1932 as the ideal context in which to explore the motivating capacity of Islamic doctrine to inspire an agrarian insurgency along communal lines. On the face of it the Meo revolt was triggered by the Great Depression of 1929 and grounded in the discriminatory tax regime of the Hindu ruler of Alwar, Jey Singh. All the classic symptoms of an economic agitation by middle peasants were present. Yet, although their grievances were economically based the Meo’s began attacking Hindu shops and shrines. That they did so was despite the fact that theirs was a very syncretistic brand of Islam – they celebrated the Hindu festivals of Divali and Dasehra for instance and did not observe Purdah. Up to this point they had also lived in communal harmony. For Copland part of the explanation for the revolt taking a communal form resides in the Meo’s communal solidarity and their status as Muslims. But he suggests that it is probably better explained by the intervention of outside Muslim and Hindu forces for a range of motives. Where the moral community of the Alwar Meo villages was destroyed – with tragic consequences in 1947 – Copland surmises that it was engineered not from within but from without, precisely the scenario Javeed Alam highlights.

Outside agency is unmistakably operative in the next paper by Dominique-Sila Khan and Zawahir Moir. In an intriguing case study they bring the study of composite culture and its demise up to the present by investigating what appears to be a very peculiar communal struggle over the survival or transformation of a long-standing syncretistic tradition. The tradition in question features the Satpanth – a sect of Nizari Ismailism founded by Imam Shah in the fifteenth century – which centres its faith on a shrine at Pirana, near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. Consisting mainly of converted Hindu Patels, a major agricultural community, the Imamshahis avoided persecution from their Sunni overlords by retaining outwardly some of their Hindu customs and practices. In almost chameleon-like fashion they were enabled through the Shia practice of taqiyya to conceal or disguise their newly acquired identity; or identities where subsequent schisms occurred. Likewise, the founders of the sect and their descendants, the Sayyids, took on the appearance of Sufis. In this way the Satpanthis were able to share and preserve a sacred place to the end of the nineteenth century without detection or interference. However, after that, and particularly in the post-independence period, it became increasingly difficult for them to profess openly a religion which appeared neither Muslim nor Hindu. In response especially to the strictures of the Hindu fundamentalist movement some Patels sought to re-Hinduise the Satpanth, while the Sayyids, backed by other Patels, strove to re-assert their Muslim origins and credentials. In researching what looks like a straight-forward Hindu versus Muslim conflict, Khan and Moir uncover a far more complex trail of power, money and changing identity. Central to any discussion of crystallising Muslim identity is Pakistan and what it represented for those Muslims who were persuaded to join it as citizens, and those who rejected it by remaining in India. Was religious culture the key determinant fuelling intense communal hostilities at the time of partition? In his paper Hew McLeod looks to answer this question from the Sikh perspective. Despite a considerable background of commonality – both Sikhs and Muslims were Punjabi, monotheistic, joined by common castes, and members of the multi-communal Unionist Party prior to partition – Tara Singh, the Sikh leader in 1947, had no hesitation in opting decisively for India and proclaiming ‘Death to Pakistan’. McLeod discovers that the stand taken by Tara Singh on behalf of his community reflected a deep-seated Sikh enmity towards Muslims, the roots of which could be traced back to the eighteenth century and the period of the later Gurus. Evidenced in the Sikh rahit namas, or codes of belief and conduct, this anti-Muslim feeling is held in check until the events of 1946/7 re-expose and ferociously unleash it.

Taking his cue from Ayesha Jalal in her revisionary study of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the politics of partition, Adeel Khan advances a highly critical assessment of the role of Islam in first the creation of Pakistan and second later, belated attempts to construct a national identity. Just as Islam failed to establish the basis of the state in 1947, so successive waves of Islamisation failed to unite its constituent ethnic and regional cultures behind a coherent inclusive ideology. Jinnah’s instrumental appropriation of Islam had something to do with this, bequeathing a Pakistan which was neither secular nor Islamic, but was, as Rafiq Zakaria poignantly describes it, a totally ‘ambivalent’ state. When Later rulers – whether military or civilian – also invoked Islam to legitimise their respective regimes, they were no more successful in clarifying Pakistan’s Islamic status or in constructing an integrative Muslim identity as the basis of nationhood. The breaking away of the eastern Bengali wing in 1971 to form Bangladesh was a striking warning that went unheeded. The Islamisation that followed continued to privilege a Muhajir-Punjabi majority at the expense of all other ethnic, regional minorities. In Adeel Khan’s reckoning what this has created has been a ‘fierce’ or discriminatory nation, rather than a fraternal or democratic nation of equal composite parts. The political Islam of the élites, no matter which face it presented, took scant note of, and bore little resemblance to, cultural Islam, the Islam lived at the popular level.

Samina Yasmeen also examines the process of Islamisation in Pakistan, but with respect to the 1990s and its impact on both religious minorities And women. She argues that despite the ‘tokenism’ associated with General Ziaul-Haq’s push to strengthen the Islamic credentials of his government, a major shift in Pakistan’s orientation occurred. For the first time since independence Pakistan moved into a ‘traditionalist’ orbit and away from the ‘modernist’ conception of a secular, Muslim polity. Having been distance from the process, a number of Islamic political groups and parties – among them Mawdudi’s Jamaat-i Islami which was especially courted – came to play an interesting role in shaping, or rather reshaping, national identity. Acquiring a life and impetus of its own at the societal level, the late twentieth century Islamic revivalism decidedly narrowed the ambivalences of 1947, but seriously widened the bounds of discrimination. As Pakistan moved from being a state for Muslims to becoming an Islamic state, different criteria of citizenship began to emerge. Citizens were no longer considered equal. A hierarchy based on religion, race, and gender influenced by notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, practising or non-practising Muslims started to form. In Yasmeen’s view these changes have demonstrated serious implications for the stability of the state. Sectarianism has taken off, lawlessness has become rife, and religious minorities are being relegated to a position of ‘non-citizens’. For women the signs are particularly ominous, with their rights, responsibilities and position in society under increasing review. The prospect of women being treated as ‘lesser citizens’, if nothing is done to reverse the trend, appears imminent.

Rounding off the collection are the papers of Charles Borges and Hedayetul Huq, which in their different ways touch on the issue of Muslim- Christian relations in South Asia. Borges suggests that with Indian Islam confronted by the rising power of Hindutva, the time is ripe for the Muslim community to enter into a Christian-Muslim dialogue as a means of mediating its situation. While historically Christian-Muslim encounters have been sparse, the most notable exchange taking place in the sixteenth century between Akbar and Clement VIII, the two religions share much theological common ground. Borges thus sees the possibility for a more tolerant understanding and less antagonistic identities being negotiated. A similar need for dialogue is demonstrated in Hedayetul Huq’s study, although for very different reasons. Huq analyses the delicate and increasingly strained relations between foreign, predominantly Christian, voluntary organisations and Muslim communities in Bangladesh over the last thirty years. For their part, the NGOs seldom communicate with the Muslim peoples they set out to help, and never consult them when the projects they decide to fund are determined. These are invariably selected according to Christian, rather than Muslim understandings of development. On the Muslim side, no non-Christian has been appointed to head any NGO, the lines of authority tending to exclude Muslims altogether. Muslim suspicions linger about the cultural intentions of NGOs who routinely devote the bulk of their resources to the younger generation and to minority groups. This impression is not helped by the fact that the Ulama – a potent force in rural Bangladesh – are kept at arms length as the prospective e