Over the top

By Chhetria Patrakar

While the republic of Nepal is struggling to agree on new federal lines and meet the thrice -extended deadline for drafting its new constitution, last Thursday a lawmaker in the Constituent Assembly proposed that the country first change its name – to ‘Sagarmatha’ (!). Unfortunately for Sarita Giri, her demand was met with chagrin by some and with mirth by others. Fellow lawmakers labelled Giri’s act ‘irresponsible’, ‘objectionable’ and ‘unconstitutional’; The Kathmandu Post daily qualified it as ‘extreme’; bloggers gleefully ridiculed the proposal, finding ‘Sagarmatha’ wanting and proposing alternatives such as Nepal 6.1 Beta, Momoland (after momo, the popular snack) and Bandhapur (after bandhas, Nepal’s frequent nation-wide strikes). Although Giri’s credentials are a bit sketchy – suspended from the Nepal Sadbhawana Party (Anandidevi) in 2010, reportedly for anti-Tarai values, and sacked for ‘malpractice’ from her ministerial post last March – Chhetria Patrakar thinks Giri deserves to be heard. Intraparty politics and playfulness aside, though, why name the country after Mount Everest?

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Photo: Joeks, himalmag.com

This 20-24 May, Bhutanese book and art lovers will celebrate their third annual festival of literature, art and culture. With internationally renowned figures such as Vikram Seth, Patrick French and William Dalrymple invited to speak, the celebration – dubbed ‘Mountain Echoes’ – is set to become an extravaganza. All very exciting, but CP does rue the fact that apart from token speakers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, the Southasian presence is limited to Indian and Bhutanese artists.

What really rouses curiosity is the roundtable discussion on media and democracy, currently the last session on the schedule. Although Reporters Without Borders ranked Bhutan top among Southasian nations – and 70th out of 179 countries globally – in the Press Freedom Index 2012, the country’s Infocomm and Media Authority is notoriously oppressive. At the discussion, CP wonders, will journalists feel free to discuss the Authority’s unequivocal right to ban books? Or its decisive power over what languages, other than Dzongkha and English, are permitted mediums of media communication? CP fears that Mountain Echoes will be full of sound and (stifled) fury, while the Authority will remain the dragon at the festival.

For the past 8 months Baba Jan Hunzai and four fellow activists have languished in various jails of Gilgit. Twice in this period he has been removed from jail and tortured by military and police agents. He and his colleagues have been charged under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Ordinance. Baba Jan, however, is not a terrorist. He is a respected political activist of Gilgit-Baltistan (the mountainous north of Pakistan). He is being held due to his activism in support of the oppressed of the region and must be released immediately.

In January 2010, a mountain collapsed into Hunza River and created what is now termed the Attabad Lake. As the lake formed, village after village was submerged. In total, over 1000 were displaced and over 25,000 were cut off from the rest of the country (the lake had destroyed the one road that connects the area to Pakistan). The plight of Gilgit-Baltistanis was ignored. Baba Jan, an activist of Labour Party of Pakistan, toured the country lobbying for the government to drain the lake and create transport facilities for the affected. The Pakistan Peoples Party government acted too late. The lake is now a permanent feature of the area. To off-set the protests of the displaced, the government promised compensation.

For some, compensation never arrived. An official list of those who were to receive compensation named 457 families. However, over a hundred of these families did not receive their compensation. Allegedly, the compensation, instead, went to families who were sympathizers of the Pakistan Peoples Party.

On 11th August around 200 people protested for the rights of those families who had not received compensation as the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, Mehdi Shah, was visiting the town of Aliabad. The police, instructed to remove the protesters by any means, started with a baton-charge, then used tear gas before opening fire with live ammunition. Their first victim was Afzal Baig, a 22 year old student. Then, when Baig’s father tried to retrieve the body of his son, he too was shot. Both died. The valley erupted and a police station was burnt down by the protesters.

Baba Jan arrived 6 hours later. He organised the protesters and they were promised an investigation and firm action against the police officers responsible for the killing. The protesters waited for the government to act.

It acted a week later. Arrest warrants were issued for numerous protesters including Baba Jan. While most of those arrested have been released on bail, Baba Jan and 4 activists remain behind bars. Twice they have been picked up from jail and tortured. First, starting on the 12th of September 2011, for three nights for three to four hours at a time, he was beaten with sticks and had his feet crushed under boots, while, another activist (Iftikhar) had candle wax dropped on his genitals. Again on the 28th of April 2012, Baba Jan was tortured. Police and Pakistani Rangers (a paramilitary force) entered his jail cell and beat him up. They then whisked him to an unknown location where he was again brutally beaten, and to humiliate him, had his head shaved. He has fractured fingers and is being denied medical treatment. Further, he has been moved to Zulfiqarabad Jail, Gilgit, and put in a cell with hardened criminals. There is reason to believe that he may be killed ‘accidentally’ while in this cell.

Meanwhile, a judicial inquiry into the killing of Afzal Baig and his father was conducted. Its findings have not been made public but journalists who have seen it claim it lays the blame on the police force and local bureaucracy for the incident.

We, the undersigned, call on the Government of Pakistan to publish the findings of the judicial inquiry into the killing of Afzal Baig and Sher Ullah Baig. We call on the Government of Pakistan to treat Baba Jan and fellow activists as political prisoners and kept in separate cells from other prisoners. Further, we ask the Government of Pakistan to drop the charge it has manufactured against Baba Jan and fellow activists. We also demand compensation for the families affected by the Attabad landslide.

Tariq Ali, Writer

Noam Chomsky, MIT

Qalandar Bux Memon, FC College

Pervaiz Vandal, Architect

Amanullah Kariapper, Activist

R C Young, New York University

Vijay Prashad, Trinity College

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Birkbeck, University Of London

David Barsamian, Journalist

Magid Shihade, Birzeit University

Saadi Toor, Writer

Farooq Tariq, Labour Party of Pakistan

Simon Crithcley, New School, New York

Please sign the petition here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/free-baba-jan

By Meher Ali

“There is no reason to tell anyone you are a Muslim,” he promptly declared and added, “I drink but I don’t tell people I drink.”

City of Ahmedabad, Gujarat

The first broker we met, Samir*, lived in Muslim Society in Navrangpura, a locality that falls in what is called ‘new’ Ahmedabad, or the newly developed part of the city. New Ahmedabad is connected to ‘old’ Ahmedabad by a series of nine bridges; the Sabarmati River runs beneath. The old part is predominantly Muslim, although with several neighbourhoods where Hindus and Muslims live together. It is also more crammed, with residents facing difficulty in accessing basic civic amenities such as water. New Ahmedabad has wider roads, is generally cleaner and is largely occupied by Hindus and Jains. But even in new Ahmedabad you will find pockets of Muslim neighbourhoods – Muslim Society in Navrangpura, certain areas in Paldi, and of course Juhapura, an all-Muslim settlement in Sarkhej, although ‘new’ Ahmedabad residents may disagree.

Well-built and athletic, at one time, Samir used to play professional cricket but after a sport injury he started working as a broker. His area of influence is Muslim Society where his family owns an entire building. When Samir found out that we were an interreligious couple, he told us that he himself had once been in love with a Hindu girl. Her family was against their relationship and soon cadres of the right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh started to follow him. After the anti-Muslim riots in 2002, he said that there was no way he could continue his relationship with her. She left Ahmedabad and he got married to someone else a couple of months later. When the riots broke out, the only place that was spared was Muslim Society. “They surrounded it but didn’t come in,” he told us. This is because high-level police officers, lawyers and other powerful families live in this area. It is for this reason that we thought that Muslim Society would be our best bet.

The apartment we finalised in the Society was over our budget and had matchbox-size rooms, but it was a new building with a swanky interior and in a locality that seemed safer than most. We tried negotiating with the landlord who had acquired this apartment in a deal where he made a considerable amount of loss. Predictably then, he did not budge. When we tried to give him a token amount to seal the deal, he refused saying that he would collect all the money when we signed the lease. The touch-ups to the apartment started but before it was ready, Samir called us asking us to sign the lease and hand in the deposit. We said we wanted everything to be done on the actual lease date that was there in the contract but Samir wanted the deposit beforehand, although he said we could sign the lease when we gave him the deposit. When we insisted that the payment, signing of the lease and handing over of the keys be done on the actual lease date, he discussed the matter with the landlord who then decided to cancel the deal. Admittedly, people did inform us that this is a normal process wherein the landlord takes the deposit and signs the lease beforehand, when he is still renovating the house, and the tenants get possession of the keys once the renovation work is over. But in the case of this apartment there were no major renovation works to be done – the landlord would have only had to wait three days for the actual lease date, and the deposit.

After this incident, we ventured into non-Muslim areas and called up other brokers. One of them was my former landlord’s son. (I had lived in Ahmedabad in 2007. But back then I had lucked out with a great broker and a great landlord who did not care about my diet or religion.) The landlord’s son and his friend showed us a couple of apartments in Ambawadi, again in new Ahmedabad.

There is one thing one notices all over Ahmedabad. Most buildings that are community-owned as opposed to being privately- (family) owned are plain old ugly. The paint is usually pealing or the exterior has not been painted to begin with and years of leakage have left lines of black muck on the buildings. Surprisingly, however, if you were to enter any one of these homes, you would find it in an impeccable condition with fine marble flooring, crisply painted walls and swanky furniture. We decided against this apartment, though. The next building was far better maintained and we took a liking to it. But it was in a Jain area. The broker said that we couldn’t cook meat here, but could always go out and eat it.

We decided to look further afield. That was when we met the palmist who claimed to be a close aide to the Gandhi family. We had gotten his contact through a friend. While we waited for his broker-friend to show up, he studied my husband’s palm. The broker showed up and we recounted our priorities: Landlord should be open to having a Muslim tenant, should not have a problem with us eating meat and the apartment should be in a safe area. “There is no reason to tell anyone you are a Muslim,” he promptly declared and added, “I drink but I don’t tell people I drink.” It was meant to be an analogy – drink but don’t tell anyone you drink; identify as a Muslim but don’t tell anyone you are one. He took us to an area where the only apartment available was on the ground floor and smelt like a urinal. He said it could be renovated but the good news was that we could cook meat there. Across from this building was another well maintained and newly painted one. We inquired about it and he claimed that it was owned by a high-ranking official in a well-known university. But, he said, they would not rent it out to a Muslim. That was probably the first time I wondered whether it would be better to hide my religious identity.

We then took the decision not to go through any Hindu brokers. We went back to Muslim Society. A friend of ours had already been scouting the area, asking people on our behalf. In fact, many people helped us through this ordeal; my husband’s students (he is a teacher) would ask their parents whether they knew of any vacant apartments; his colleagues would ask their friends and family and so on. One such person found another apartment in Muslim Society but it was considerably over our budget. Then, my husband’s employers offered to help pay some of the rent towards the apartment. That made things easier. We went ahead and met the landlord who lives in a bungalow with sprawling green lawns. He offered us sweet banana milkshakes and we wondered whether he would decrease the rent which, even with the financial assistance, was over our budget. During our conversation he revealed that he himself had an interreligious marriage. Then he turned to my husband and asked, “So do you allow her to follow her religion?”

We agreed to take the apartment and through our friend requested that the landlord consider lowering the rent. He said he had to talk to his wife. Our friend called him several times but he was always busy. A few days later he informed us that the rent would in fact increase from what it had been earlier.

Meanwhile, my husband had spoken to another broker about a possible flat near his school but the landlord declined on the grounds that he, like many others before him, did not want a Muslim tenant. We were back to square one.

A month into our search, we had made it a habit of mentioning at least once to anyone we met that we were searching for an apartment. Consequently, every time someone met us the first question they asked was: “Have you found a place yet?” It had become somewhat of a joke. One day my husband casually mentioned that we were looking for an apartment to someone. That person said that there was indeed an apartment for rent. My husband thought he was a tenant vacating. We agreed to see it. It turned out that this man, a Punjabi, was the owner. Him and his wife, also a Punjabi, ran a construction company. They were a young couple. When my husband told them about my religion, which he did in a very sensitive manner, which is to say when I was not present, the man said he did not care about such things and they just wanted to find good people to rent out their apartment to.

We haven’t signed the lease just yet but hope to do so very soon.

Ignorance and denial
What saddened me through this whole ordeal was people’s responses that ranged from complete ignorance, or perhaps feigned ignorance, about such discrimination – “Really? This happens? I didn’t know” – to advising me to hide my religious identity. Some went even further and declared that I was a Hindu, the palmist’s broker for example. His logic was, personal choice notwithstanding, because I had married a Hindu I ‘automatically’ became one.

The former way of thinking for me is more problematic than the latter two. If there is complete denial that such discrimination takes place, then there is no way people will even start talking about it, and therefore start dealing with this problem. Someone said to us, “I thought Muslims lived separately because they liked to live together.” While it is true that after the 2002 riots, there has been further ghettoisation of Muslims, predictably so, further denial to give Muslims housing anywhere but in specific areas is also adding to this process.

I was also a little shocked by the casual manner in which people spoke about the condition of being a Muslim. It seemed like a paradox where on the one hand there was a complete rejection of this identity, while on the other hand, when it was talked about, it was done so in black and white terms – “No, we do not rent out to Muslims” or “You are not a Muslim, you are a Hindu now.”

I wonder whether new colonies that are mushrooming in satellite areas around Ahmedabad will continue with such discriminatory policies that have become so commonplace. A journalist friend who pitched this as a story idea was met with his editor’s cynicism: “So what’s new?” For now it seems that ghettoization of Muslims – rich and poor, voluntarily or involuntarily – will continue. The only chance of breaking this pattern is when and if there is an influx of non-Gujaratis and, at least in Ahmedabad, the migrants become the majority.

Meher Ali is a freelance journalist based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

*Name changed.

By Chhetria Patrakar

Image: Paul Aitchison

On the third of May, in what the media dubbed a ‘historic movement‘, 10 tonnes of newsprint crossed from India to Pakistan at Attari on the Punjab-Haryana border. Its destination: the Dawn and the Jang group of newspaper houses in Karachi. Although this was a trial consignment, the Amritsar-based Khanna Paper Mills, which already exports newsprint and paper products to the rest of Southasia, is confident that orders from Pakistan will be steady and regular. The reasons for such continuity, Chhetria Patrakar hopes, are as much economic as they are about Southasian connectivity. Previously, Pakistan imported newsprint rolls circuitously from India through Dubai, hiking up newspaper prices to around PKR 25 per issue, as opposed to roughly INR 3 in India and NPR 8 in Nepal. Now with significantly cheaper newsprint, CP hopes Pakistanis will write more, print more, exchange more ideas, and soon strike off more than newsprint and buffaloes from the negative trade list with Southasia  … What a way to celebrate the World Press Freedom Day!

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On Wednesday, two big-shot columnists, A K Bhattacharya from the Business Standard and Soutik Biswas from the BBC, embarrassed themselves by spewing articles based on mixed-up data. It all started when Bhattacharya published an analysis of economic growth rates in six Indian states, including Gujarat, over the last seven years. Bhattacharya could not believe that despite a stable government, Gujarat only grew by 6.3% annually. Neither could Biswas, who went on to say that Gujarat’s growth was a myth. Fortunately for the Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Gujaratis, and the rest of us readers, a twitterer stood tall to separate myth from fact, tweeting that the 6.3% growth rate actually belongs to the state of Jharkhand. With this new information, the modified – oops, mortified – columnists had no choice but to revise their columns, with Bhattacharya correcting the data and deleting the paragraph about his bewilderment. Biswas rationalised his mistake by, more or less, blaming it on Bhattacharya. Anyway, all is sorted out, Gujarat is indeed marching forward at double-digit pace at 10.08% (!), but CP does wonder how this mistake could have occurred; Jharkhand is nowhere near Gujarat in the list of Indian states, whether sorted alphabetically or by growth rate. Plain old napping fact-checker?

Change in Southasia [Region]
In late-April, KPMG International, an audit and tax advisory firm, in collaboration with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a British think tank on international development and humanitarian issues, released a Change Readiness Index, the first of its kind. According to the Index, conceived as a way of understanding a country’s ability to adapt to change, Sri Lanka ranks first in Southasia (22nd out of 60 developing countries), followed closely by India (23rd), Bangladesh (45th), Nepal (50th) and Pakistan (54th). Other nations in the region were not included in the research. The Index, with three sub-indices on governance, economy and society, is aimed at helping policy makers, aid donors and investors make decisions regarding individual ‘emerging’ countries. Soon after the KPMG published the results on its website, various other sites carried news reports on the rankings of Southasian countries. Detailed analysis on the Index’s implications, however, is yet to come.

Milk tea, anyone? Photo: lorises, flickr

Tea versus milk [India]
Next April, at the 212th birth anniversary of Maniram Dewan, the first Indian tea cultivator and 1857 Sepoy Mutiny leader, India will declare tea its national drink. The announcement came in late-April during platinum jubilee celebrations for the Assam Tea Planters Association, the oldest organisation of indigenous tea planters in the country. With that proclamation, India will join Bhutan and Myanmar as the only countries in the Subcontinent with tea as their national drink.

According to the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India, tea deserves such status because India is the fourth biggest exporter (and second biggest producer) of tea in the world, and the tea industry is the largest employer in the country’s organised sector, with more than half of employees being women.

As soon as news of this plan broke out, the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation responded by saying that milk is the unofficial national drink of India because the country is the world’s largest producer of milk – a position it seems set to retain with the recent launch of the National Dairy Development Board’s ‘Mission Milk’ programme. In retaliation, the North East Tea Association pointed out that a cup of Amul milk costs twice as much as a cup of tea.

Sri Lanka, on the other hand, despite being the world’s second largest exporter of tea, has no intention of joining India in the tea-as-the-national-drink club.