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A Kathmandu-ite might barely register the seemingly random presence of police in riot gear appearing at the mere rumour of some political rally or strike. So the extra presence in various places around the valley today – near the UN’s central headquarters, near the two Chinese diplomatic enclaves, at major cross-streets – might easily pass without notice. But 10 March marks the 51st anniversary of the Tibetan uprising (now commonly referred to as Uprising Day for its annual marking) against the Chinese military presence, which led to the exile of the Dalai Lama – and the refugee population that now maintains a community in Nepal and elsewhere. The UN House and other Kathmandu markers have frequently been sites of peaceful protest that, on occasion, has lead to inordinate and violent police retaliation, most recently in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

That year, of course, also marked the massive demonstrations that swept through Tibet itself and elsewhere around the world – including in Kathmandu, where protesters demonstrated daily for months in the aftermath of the Spring 2008 anti-government show of force. Eventually, those daily demonstrations became a significant bugbear in relations between the Nepali and Chinese governments, infuriating Beijing and embarrassing Kathmandu. Nepal’s various governments have since consistently reiterated their commitment to China’s policy towards Tibet, backing their statements with firm action on protesters. But a letter dated 8 March from the Tibetan Refugee Welfare Committee of Kathmandu, currently making its rounds in the community, makes the ominous allegation that the Nepali police have been going so far as to threaten some extremely dire consequences to the kinds of protests Kathmandu has seen in the past. In a stark warning to the community, the letter states that, in the areas deemed off limits to demonstrators, “the police may even resort to shoot[ing].” As news of arrests of Tibetan activists continue to trickle in, the accompanying photographs taken today around the valley indicate that the Nepali government will continue to channel the paranoia of Beijing.

It has been leaked to General Public that the Nepali Dada Party was preparing to mobilize its elite youth force, the Fundamentally Upset Commoners  Klan of Energetic Revolutionaries, whose acronym cannot be spelled out   for fear of censorship by the Chinese authorities who continue to classify the Nepali Dada Party as Tibetan Nationalistic Unitary Communists.

The Nepali Dada Party firmly denies this claim. Our Revolutionaries are Upset at this unwanted accusation. It demands that General Public make his sources public immediately on all national daily and weekly newspapers so that General Public can rest assured that we as a party are a responsible bunch of bloks. We play cricket and sip tea in Nepal’s Tribhuvan. Honest!

Those broken windows were because our Fundamentally Upset Commoners  Klan of Energetic Revolutionaries are working hard to produce the next Sackin Tenderkarke. Then the imperlialistic and capitalistic powers of South Asian cricket and the IPL beware! The true legends of cricket like Bratman, War-ni, and Potluck.

Viva la Revolution!

- Dada without title, Central Committee Member of the Nepali Dada Party

–Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi

Kancha Iiliah, writer of “Why I am not a Hindu,” talks about how Dalits are not just outcastes, they are “outwriters.” Their literature is not seen to be valid, people are not interested to read what they write. People ask and say: Can there be such a thing as Dalit literature? If there can be Vedic literature, and Bhakti literature, and Marxist literature, and Gandhian literature, why can’t there be Dalit literature, asks Iiliah.

Om Prakash Valmiki also picks up on the same thread: “We are not Hindus, we are Dalits.” The violence still faced by the majority of Dalits in India and other parts of the subcontinent is directly caused by Hindu thought. God cannot be touched by the untouchables in Hinduism, and this, says Kancha Iiliah, is spiritual fascism.

From the Current issue: L. Brueck on Dalit Literature

Art by Rumen Dragostinov

P.Sivakami, a Dalit female writer who shook up her community with her critiques of patriarchy within the Dalit community in her book The Grip of Change, talked about one incident in which she was in charge of distributing bicycles to Dalit schoolgirls. The girls chosen, the government bureaucrats exclaimed, couldn’t be Dalits—because they were too beautiful. What they meant, explained P. Sivakami, is that they expected girls who were poor, malnourished and ill-dressed.

Iiliah couldn’t resist taking a dig at S Anand, the khadi-dressed organizer of the panel—and a Brahmin. “Look at him, he’s still wearing Hindu clothes while we wear these suits that Ambedkar told us to,” he joked. “Give me your coat!” responded S Anand, pulling at Iliah’s coat in mock dismay. Illiah also points out that caste has a distinct racial history. “Why do you think he looks like this, and we look like this?” he asks. After a bit of discussion, the panel agrees that caste has become pretty mixed up and there is no longer any racial purity left–however, discrimination is still deeply entrenched. “A group of Dalits changed their names and started to use Sharma,” said Valmiki. “And now the Brahmins in that area no longer use Sharma.”

“How can you people be so backward,” exclaimed one foreign-returned Indian, who cited South Africa and his puzzlement that Indians were apparently the only people in the world still practicing such racial apartheid. Of course, this enlightened gentleman’s observation immediately brought to the room the sense that the Dalit case was not unique–indeed, racial and religious discrimination still existed all over the world still.

Next out in the front lawn, Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize winning author from Nigeria, gave a beautiful rendering of a praise song. “Praise songs are meant to be hypnotic and mesmerizing,” he said. “Sometimes people who return from foreign countries and hear praise songs of their lineages and they become dizzy. You feel your head expanding.” I for one had to press down on the top of my head for a few seconds to make sure nothing was exploding out of there after that mesmerizing moment. Wole explained that he had staged a play with a praise song and certain suggestible actors had to be asked to leave since the drumming, the incantation and all the other powerful forces was getting too much for them and they were getting into a trance. It was better, he explained, that they be off the stage. The oral storytelling power that Wole brought to his reading, the sense of a griot out on the podium hypnotizing the crowd with metaphors of the road, the search, the constant dissatisfaction…It was almost as if, like a line in his poetry, that “strange voices were guiding my feet” and the horseman galloped on to a new sense of being as I listened to him read.

Wole Soyinka, asked about the religious conflicts in his country, said: “This is a virus.And it has spread all over the world.” Two hundred people died recently, he said, in one of these incidents. He grew up, he said, listening to church bells next to the muezzin’s call for prayer. Muslims sent over meat to their neighbors on Ramadan, and the Christians sent over rice and other gifts on Christmas. “I’m right, you’re wrong has now become I’m right, you’re dead,” he said dryly. He sounded bewildered, a little bit, that those tolerant times seem to be past.

Soyinka then talked about his year of solitary confinement, and how he used bones to make pens, and coffee as ink, to write poetry in the margins of books people brought in for him and then smuggled out. “I believe in forgiveness and reconciliation,” he said. “But sometimes you have to be careful since these people are incorrigible, and you can’t be too forgiving. But most of all, I believe in restitution.”

An audience member, responding to his beautiful rendition of a poem in Yoruba, asked him: How do you maintain your Yoruba identity in this age of contamination?  “You must maintain a core identity even in a contaminated world,” said Soyinka.

In the Mughal Tent, Isabel Hilton and Tenzing Tsundue debated another fragment of the global story on how to hold on to an identity in another kind of pulverizing force—a nation state intent on wiping out the identity of a people. Hilton talks about Tibetan nomads who are being resettled in barracks in the middle of the desert, with no work. They are given some compensation which they finish within the year. Then they are stuck there, with no work. Herding has been made illegal, and not just a way of life could be gone. Tibetan nomads are to be “settled” within the next two years. “It could be too late very soon,” she says. There is silence in the audience as we digest this.

“How can Obama dare to give our country away?” Asks Tsundue, who has just been asked by William Dalrymple, moderator, about that famous President’s statement that Tibet will always be part of the Republic of China. “What right does he have?”

Hilton had different views. Since China will never give up Tibet due to its strategic location, its water resources, and the sense of it being a part of larger China, she said, it may be more practical to think about ways in which Tibetans can have an easier life, and how their way of life can survive, in this reality [See The new relationship in Himal December 2009 for the evolving political relationship to Tibet in the region]. This is what we should be negotiating about, she said. “The Chinese government is not a monolith,” she said. “As somebody said, government is often a big issue run by little people.”

Tsundue, with the undying hope of the exile, didn’t agree. “Freedom cannot be given: it has to be taken,” he said simply. “It has to be worked at. It is not what China will give or not give. They will leave when their interests are exhausted.”

“It is very dangerous for Tibet,” Isabel Hilton said, “To see the Dalai Lama as the embodiment of Tibet. After his death, there will be a big void. We need more secular voices. Where is the cultural Tibet–the writers, artists and thinkers? We need to work to create a new cultural idea of Tibet.”

And this, perhaps may have been the food for thought for today—that all the discrimination faced by Dalits, all the religious terror wrought on minorities in Nigeria, all the persecution faced by Tibetans–all of this could perhaps be moderated, perhaps even shifted to another level, by bringing down the religious volume and putting more secular voices on the dias. And by creating new cultural identities of what it means to be a Dalit or a Bhramin, a Nigerian Christian or Nigerian Muslim, or a Chinese or a Tibetan of the twenty-first century.

Sushma’s previous posts from the Jaipur Literature Festival is here and an archive of all our bloggers’ post to the event is here.

photo credit: SFTHQ

“For more than a year and a half”, Himal noted in September 2009, the Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen “has languished in prison … awaiting trial on charges of ‘inciting separatism’.” Now, that wrong has been ‘righted’.

Wangchen fell afoul of the Chinese authorities in March 2008. He had shot some 35 hours of frank interviews with ethnic Tibetans across the high plateau, in which they discussed their feelings regarding the continued Chinese presence in Tibet and well as the then-upcoming Beijing Olympic Games, slated for the following August. Although Wangchen and his collaborator, Jigme Gyatso, were subsequently arrested, the tapes themselves were shipped out to Wangchen’s cousin, who was living in exile in Switzerland; the material was eventually made into a 25-minute film, Jigdrel (Leaving Fear Behind). It is unclear whether the subsequent international acclaim that the film received – having been filmed in more than 30 countries over the past two years, including at a secret showing in Beijing during the Olympics – helped or hindered Wangchen’s subsequent fate. Either way, in late December, the Chinese authorities put an end to their dithering over how to deal with the 36-year-old filmmaker, and sentenced him to six years of imprisonment for ‘subversion’. (Jigme Gyatso, meanwhile, was released after being held for seven months, during which time he was allegedly tortured.)

It is also unclear whether the international outcry that had continued to rise in recent months over Wangchen’s imprisonment helped or hurt that court ruling. While six years is clearly an unacceptable prison sentence for having been involved in producing what is by any standard a laudably even-handed, un-sensationalistic bit of filmmaking (particularly for such a notoriously explosive subject), it is also clear that far more draconian means were available to the Chinese authorities, should they have wished to use them. Wangchen’s chosen court representation was officially disallowed from involvement, after all, and observers had long been clear that there was no reason to assume that the eventual court action would be either transparent or fair. In the event, Wangchen’s family – including those in Xining, Qinghai, where the case was heard – were not even alerted to the fact that the hearing was finally going forward.

In this context, a six-year sentence might strike some as better than many of the alternatives. Almost simultaneous with Wangchen’s ruling, after all, the Chinese authorities sentenced five more ethnic Uyghurs to death for their involvement in the July 2009 demonstrations in Urumqi, in Xinjiang; that brought the total number of death sentences for the Xinjiang violence to 22 since September alone, while at least a dozen more have been given life sentences for their participation in the separatism-inspired violence. Yet given the continued rumours of Wangchen’s ill health – he is reported to have contracted Hepatitis B while in prison, and not to be receiving adequate medical care – it is possible to read the ruling as a relatively ‘lenient’ reaction arrived at in response to the international spotlight that has been shone on the case – but one that will nonetheless put Wangchen permanently out of commission.

The work, meanwhile, remains for all to see. “It is those who agreed to speak boldly on camera who have left their fear behind,” Himal wrote in September. “As can be seen from the aftermath, it is perhaps the Chinese authorities who have not.” Unfortunately, this most recent action again underscores the fact that fear-based reactions are oftentimes the most dangerous of all. Yet at this point, it is important to recall that Wangchen, despite his relative inexperience as a filmmaker, did not stumble blindly into his current situation. Prior to beginning his interviewing, he moved his wife and children out of Tibet, to India, where they remain today. Indeed, that type of courage is imbued in each of the more than 100 Tibetans who agreed to speak with Wangchen (around 20 are featured), particularly those whose faces remained notably uncovered. “They were willing to be filmed,” Wangchen explains in the film. “I also asked clearly about filming and explained that they didn’t have to show their faces. Some said that we absolutely had to show their faces, otherwise it wasn’t worth speaking to them.” Read a full transcript of what they had to say here. For more info http://www.leavingfearbehind.com/

– Carey L Biron

Stills from 'Jigdrel, Leaving Fear Behind'