The Right to Information; and a follow-up on Human Rights/Terrorism in Punjab

[Incidentally, I wanted to express my ongoing concern about the humanitarian situation in northeast Pakistan/Kashmir. I might suggest donating to the Oxfam Global Emergencies Fund. While there are sometimes doubts about the effectiveness of certain relief agencies, it is clear from things like this that Oxfam is playing an active part in the current relief efforts in Pakistan.]

The Indian Parliament recently passed a law guaranteeing citizens access to a broad array of information about both local and national government. The new law is designed to increase transparency and give citizens a tool to combat government corruption.

It's a heartening event, though it may not help in one of the areas where India has historically been weakest, and that is its criminal justice system. The lack of police accountability for its treatment of prisoners is an ongoing national disgrace. Moreover, the widespread use of torture (illegal under Indian law) severely weakens the government's credibility in fighting its internal terrorism problems.

Somewhat relatedly, the human rights group ENSAAF has recently released a report detailing human rights violations in the Punjab Police's arrests' of alleged Babbar Khalsa International members this past summer. Members of ENSAAF went around Punjab and interviewed family members of people (men and women) who were arrested, and came away with some pretty disturbing accounts of torture, indiscriminate arrests, and intimidation by Punjab police.

It's a compelling report, carefully written and documented, with lots of references (links) to media coverage of the recent arrests. (See the footnotes in the PDF file.) One article they cite that stands out to me is this piece from the Chandigarh Tribune on September 2:

Sixteen persons are to be excluded from the list of those who have been booked by the Punjab police for allegedly harbouring or helping terrorist Jagtar Singh Hawara. Sources in the Punjab police said 60 persons had been booked during the past three months after Hawara was nabbed by the Delhi police in Patiala in June.

The Punjab police had alleged that several persons were linked to Hawara’s network and rounded them up. RDX was recovered from some while others just happened to know Hawara. Some of those to be let off knew Hawara but had not helped him.

In the last week of July, the Punjab Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, hauled up police officers for creating an unnecessary scare among people through hype regarding terrorist-related cases, "human bombs" and recoveries.

Recently, the police withdrew its case against Mrs Manjot Kaur in court allowing her to walk free. She had been booked for serious offences like possessing RDX. The police claimed she was arrested in Punjab. Her 10-year-old son claimed his mother was picked from their home in Sector 34 here. He had then called up the Chandigarh police control room in this connection.

The sources said the Chief Minister was aware that certain persons had been detained under the garb of "investigating cases against terrorists." He had cautioned police officers "not to harass and intimidate anybody." Following the dressing down from the Chief Minister, the SSPs were forced to change their investigating tactics. They started investigations before registering cases related to terrorist activity.

This article directly supports the claim made by ENSAAF that the arrests this past summer were at times indiscriminate. It also raises the worrying question of the possible police fabrication of charges relating to RDX possession. If some people were charged with having possessed explosive material that they did not in fact have, could it be true in other cases?

On the other hand, the critical response to the investigations by the Punjab Chief Minister suggests there is beginning to be some limited element of accountability within the Punjab Police itself. The last sentence would be funny, if it weren't so serious: "They started investigations before registering cases..."

My one criticism is that the ENSAAF report, with its exclusive emphasis on human rights, does not really recognize the potential danger the guilty individuals might have posed to society. For instance, there is nothing in the ENSAAF report that makes me doubt the widespread sense that Jagtar Singh Hawara in particular is a hardened terrorist, who actively attempted to revive the BKI organization in India in the year. I see no reason to doubt his involvement in a murder of a Sikh granthi at the age of 15, his conspiring to assasinate the Punjab Chief of Police Minister Beant Singh, his attempted assasination of Pari Singh Baniarewala, or his distribution of RDX, plastique, and weapons to a number of associates.

It could well be said in response that ENSAAF's mission is human rights, and it would be inappropriate to speculate on matters of jurisprudence. That may be true, and the need to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners remains pressing (both in India and in U.S. detention centers around the world). But a concern for human rights needs to be balanced by a concern for the greater common good, which in this case requires aggressively rooting out terrorist networks and capturing bomb-making material. I see no reason to doubt that these folks were in possession of enough material to kill many innocent people.

Finally, I should say that this post is a kind of addendum to my Sepia Mutiny post on Hawara and the Babbar Khalsa from the summer. While things look a little different now that some of the people in the summer's large-scale roundup have been released without being charged, I stand by my take on Hawara and the BKI.

Rumpelstiltskin and the Realm of Fiction

I want to thank Ray Davis for picking up on my Toy/Story idea from a couple of months ago. Following his recent post on The Valve, I went and read Hans Christian Anderson's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (which was nasty but damn good, I thought). My own earlier reading of Toy Story was driven by the story's Fairy Tale qualities, so here is another literary reading of a fairy tale, only a little less heavy on "theory" this time around.

* * *

Everyone knows the story of Rumpelstiltskin, yes? If you're hazy, here's a nano-summary of the standard, Brothers Grimm version:

1. Peasant girl; her dad promises the King she'll weave straw into gold, leaving her stuck. 2. Troll/Gnome/Manikin/demon feller sells her the secret but requires that she learn his secret name. 3. She does ("Rumpelstiltskin"), and wins.

(And here is the Grimm version in translation, more or less intact; scroll down links to the German)

This story, to state the obvious, is about the power of a secret name, the knowledge of which gives you have essentially infinite power over your enemy. If we look a little deeper, though, we notice that it's not one but two secrets, which are paired but asymmetrical: the peasant girl/princess learns the secret of making gold, while the gnome (I prefer "gnome" over "manikin") holds the secret of his name, until he stupidly gives it away. The secret she's interested in is linked to the value of labor, whereas the secret the gnome keeps to himself is in language. Lingua-philes and Derrida fans should find this story to be congenial: the power of language trumps the material and labor-oriented power of the spinning-wheel.

Also congenial: in fairy tales, the editors of the Norton The Great Fairy Tale Tradition tell us, gnomes are usually assigned names that are never given to humans. That might seem small, but there's a lot in it, if you consider that 1) the names inevitably expose a gnome's gnomy-ness, and that 2) human beings can always learn, and utter, a gnome's name. The gnome is a terrifying Other -- defined by his often irrational (or non-selfish) malevolence. But he can always be beaten in language.

Back to Rumpelstiltskin. A little digging reveals much, much more behind the basic story. For one thing, there are dozens of versions of this tale outside of the German tradition. In England, Scotland, and Wales, the gnome was alternately known as Trit-a-Trot, Terrytip, Whuppity Stoorie, and Tom Tit-Tot. Of the batch, none of them have quite the same ring as Rumpelstiltskin, though "Whuppity Stoorie" is pretty memorable. "Rumpelstiltskin" works so well in English because it seems to conjoin three existing English words: "rumple," "stilts," and "kin," making it relatively easy to pronounce -- but still utterly anomalous. (And no, I can't make anything meaningful of the combination of these particular three; I tend to think "Rumpelstiltskin" is a purely phonetic pleasure, that happens to derive from the German "Rumpelstiltzchen.")

Most importantly for my purposes, there is a very juicy French version of "Rumpelstiltskin". Here, his name is Ricdin-Ricdon, and the same Norton Great Fairly Tale Tradition volume mentioned above includes a long version of the story, by Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier. It was first published in 1696 (well before both the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson), in a volume of stories called Ouvres meslées.

"Ricdin-Ricdon" unlocks many of the elements of the Brothers Grimm Rumpelstiltskin narrative that seem a bit pat. First, the power granted to the peasant girl Rosanie by Ricdin-Ricdon is attached to a magic wand that enables her to spin raw flax and hemp into fine yarn without effort, and also, at a second wave, to weave the yarn into fabulous and intricate tapestries. It's not gold, but fine fabric, that is her ticket to the Queen's (in this case) good graces. This tells you something about the role of fabric and weaving in Europe's history: it was potentially a powerful tool for social advancement, and central to social positioning in a way that might seem quite strange today. What you wore literally and immediately revealed your social caste.

There are also a number of other features in "Ricdin-Ricdon" that are quite different (and better) than "Rumpelstiltskin." Short of actually giving you the story to read, it's difficult to explain it, so let me try a list:

--Labor. It's not just that Rosanie's poor. She's also clearly marked by Lhéritier as lazy; she knows how to weave well, but doesn't want to work. She could in theory satisfy the Queen's demands for fabric, but she would have to weave night and day to do it.

Also, the good King and Queen who take Rosanie under their wing are known as prudent and productive rulers (I think this was published in during the time of Louis XIV, so perhaps there is a bit of court flattery going on). Lhéritier underscores monarchical goodness by naming them "King Prud'homme" and "Queen Laborieuse," respectively. They admire Rosanie partly for her beauty, but really because of her reputation as a weaver (which is, as we know, based on an illusion).

--No confusing motherhood angle. When she's adopted by the Queen, she doesn't get to marry the Prince right away. In the Grimm version she has a child that Rumpelstiltskin threatens to steal, which doesn't quite fit the social advancement/wealth acquisition theme of the story. Here the Prince is in love with Rosanie, but the class barrier makes any thought of a marriage impossible, that is, until it's revealed at the end of the story that Rosanie is actually of royal birth from another kingdom. Then a marriage can be properly arranged by the two royal families. (It's only via an arranged marriage that the couple will really get to do the all-expenses paid, "happily ever after" honeymoon.)

--Storytelling reflexivity. Rosanie's real parents are named "Lord Longuevue" and "Queen Riant-image," and her father-figure guardian (who had seemingly abandoned her earlier in her life without telling her the secret of her birth) is named "Disantpeu." They are -- I'm not making this up -- the Rulers of the "Realm of Fiction."

The parallels between storytelling and weaving are pretty obvious -- one weaves a yarn, etc. -- but in the case of "Ricdin-Ricdon" they are doubled and even tripled. Much of the structure of this story is actually narrated indirectly, as characters recount events to each other (much of Rosanie's own story is narrated in dialogue to Ricdin-Ricdon). After hearing of Rosanie's woes, Ricdin-Ricdon offers her his wand, and actually tells her his name.

And literacy and writing plays a part in this. It's only after she's ensconced in the court of Queen Laborieuse that Rosanie starts to learn to read but, as with weaving, she finds to be a bit too hard to make it a habit. Still, she uses the tool when she's struggling to remember Ricdin-Ricdon's name:

Even though Rosanie still had difficulty in forming the letters of the alphabet, she wanted to see whether these letters could help her recall the name she passionately sought. She went through great pain and applied herself as best she could until she wrote down Racdon, then Ricordon, and finally Ringaudon. In some instances, she was on the verge of joy because she thought she was about to find the name. But then she would fall into despair, convinced that the names her memory recalled were nowhere near the right and proper name.

Writing is, historically, the essential tool for remembering language, though usually one uses something previously written as an aid to memory. It send Rosanie down the right track, but she hasn't quite mastered it. (When she does, Lhéritier hints, she will be able to expose every Gnome who comes her way with the light of her Logos.)

There's a whole essay on Of Grammatology lurking here, but I'll save it (and I'm sure you'll thank me).

--Ricdin-Ricdon's interiority. In this version, the gnome actually has a motive of a kind, which is revealed in the scene at the end where gives his name away. The song tells you part of the story:

If a young and tender female,
Loving only childish pleasures,
Had fixed it in her mind
That my name is Ricdin-Ricdon,
She would not fall into my trap.
But the beautiful lass will soon be mine,
For my name has slipped her mind.

The editors of the Norton volume suggest that "spinner" folktales like Rumpelstiltskin/Ricdin-Ricdon might have been told by groups of women weavers working together. This is one moment where that really seems to click: there is a distinctly feminist warning here -- to women who don't know how to earn your keep, or who aren't smart enough to look after yourselves, watch out!

He follows it up with a rant about, well, the Courtly Gaze:

"Since men are educated and more cultivated than women, we ordinarily have more trouble in seducing them than we have in duping the gullible sex unless we make use of this sex to get men to fall into our traps. On the other hand, men often cause women to fall into our snares. I myself have acquired more young girls by exploiting their desire to appear beautiful and to groom themselves than twenty of my comrades who have tried one hundred other means to capture them. And this powerful passion that makes them want to acquire beauty and elegance with such fury stems from their boundless desire to captivate men."

The grammar here is a little tricky. Keep in mind that the Prince is overhearing Ricdin-Ricdon talking to an evil sorceress (who I haven't mentioned... there is a whole 'mirror' plot where sorceress attempts to trick the Prince...).

The first part of the passage above seems to be straightforward enough: this is how you trick men, and that is how you trick women. But even as Ricdin-Ricon explains his method, in the final sentence of the passage quote above he hints that it's not just gnomes and sorceresses who play the game of ensnarement: it's inherent in the fabric of (non-supernatural) human desire and attraction. And I think that Ricdin-Ricdon is suggesting that it goes both ways.

* * *
So, yeah, go read "Ricdin-Ricdon," if you can get hold of a copy. (I didn't see any versions of the Lhéritier story on the internet, but I didn't try very hard. If anyone can track down a link, it would be appreciated.)

But more than that, I'm curious to see if people have ideas about other classic fairy tales that they want to revisit. Everyone has probably considered (and hopefully rejected) the deep sexism of something like Snow White (women as pure/virginal pedestalized 'statues' until released by the desire of men). But maybe there are other tricks in these old stories that might take us in fresh directions.

[Cross-posted to The Valve]

Some Notes on the Conference on South Asia 2005

I missed the two keynote addresses, and I missed most of the first day of papers as well as the two ‘pre-conference’ meetings held on Thursday. But I still saw a lot of interesting papers.

[Note: I'm going to be a bit circumspect in describing the talks I saw. For one thing, work presented in a talk, while ‘public,’ is often still in progress. And I wouldn’t want to give anyone’s major conclusions away if they haven’t been published. Incidentally, abstracts from the conference are available as a PDF here. Still, it might be interesting to some readers to see a thin slice of the work South Asian Area Studies scholars are doing these days...]

* * *
Let's start with the ‘Delhi’ panel on Saturday, with Vasudha Dalmia, Lawrence Cohen, Rashmi Sadana, and Veena Das. Given all the attention given to Bombay recently, it seems apropos to think about urbanism in ‘swinging’ Delhi. Of the four papers, Dalmia’s and Cohen’s really seemed to focus in on urbanism and cosmopolitanism. The other two papers were ‘set’ in Delhi, but had other concerns.

Vasudha Dalmia spoke about a Hindi novel by Krishna Sobti called Samay Sargam (2000). Given Delhi's turn to suburbanization in the past 15-20 years, there is a special value attached to some of the gardens in ‘old-New Delhi’; these are the setting of many of the events in the novel. (A review of the novel is here).

Rashmi Sadana spoke about the debates over translation, focusing specifically on the Hindi and Bengali translations of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Apparently, the Hindi translator of the novel, Gopal Gandhi, excised a number of sections dealing with Chamar (low-caste) leather-workers, which he thought might offend his ‘vegetarian’ (read: high caste) Hindi readers. But Seth praised the translation nevertheless (the characters in Seth’s novel are understood to be Hindi speakers, though Seth renders their voices in English).

Lawrence Cohen spoke about some of the recent multimedia-triggered scandals that have rocked the Indian media recently. His primary concern was with the murder of two gay men in a posh south Delhi apartment last summer: Pushkin Chandra and Kuldeep. In the Indian media, the double-murder prompted some discussion of why it might be time to finally try and decriminalize homosexuality in India (Cohen didn't address this issue). But it also provoked a rather offensive and troubling column by Sapan Dasgupta ("The Problem Is Not Homosexuality")>

Along the way, Cohen also alluded to other media scandals, including the MMS sex-video scandal involving two Delhi students, as well as the Tehelka videotaping of BJP officials discussing their flagrant bribes of Zaheera, the chief survivor/witness in the Best Bakery case coming out of the Gujurat riots of 2002.

Veena Das's paper was the product of fresh interviews she and a team of researchers have been doing with working-class Delhi women on their relationship to sexuality. She's making a kind of rejoinder to the psychoanalytic generalizations of Sudhir Kakar, but it sounded to me that the work might be in an early stage.

* * *
Kumkum Sangari’s paper was on Gandhi’s later writings, where he seemed to be going in a new direction philosophically. Written just before his death (and with the tragedy of the Partition fresh in mind), he came to accept a number of propositions that he had earlier rejected -– including the need for separation of "religion" from "culture" (and possibly, by extension, of church and state). (I tried to Google some of the writings from 1947-1948 that Sangari mentioned, but couldn't find reference to them on the internet)

On the same panel, Abha Sur spoke about Meghnad Saha, a famous astrophysicist from Presidency College, Calcutta. Saha is especially notable because he was from a lower caste at a time when most scholars at elite institutions like Presidency College were from higher caste backgrounds. Sur sees an alignment between Saha’s use of social metaphors in his scientific writing with his critique of caste hierarchies at the College.

As an aside (this was not in Sur's talk), Presidency College in general seems to be an important site for many Indian social scientists and humanists in American universities. Many famous people -– including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- went there. And while Presidency College is not quite as central as it once was to intellectual life in India, it’s still surprising how many of the people one meets at the Madison conference are Presidency College graduates. (Also worth noting that quite a high proportion of their graduates end up in the U.S. and U.K.)

* * *
My co-panelist Arnab Chakladar gave a detailed paper on two Shashi Deshpande novels, That Long Silence and A Matter of Time. The part that caught my eye was the connection Arnab made between the emphasis on women and property in Deshpande’s novel and the vexed relationship that women have historically had to property – where their rights of inheritance are still not quite equal to men. This is even after the reforms instituted by the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. Things might be finally equalized with the Amended act (see this).

* * *
My friend Monika Mehta gave a talk in a bollywood-oriented panel on the Indian government’s role in sponsoring the ‘family films’ of the 1990s. One thing I didn’t know was that films considered especially wholesome are sometimes exempted from the ‘Entertainment Tax’ that applies to most commercial films released in India. (I knew that patriotic and war films are exempt from the tax, but I hadn’t known about the ‘wholesomeness’ exemption). DDLJ is an example of a 1990s film that was exempted from the Entertainment tax.

Anupama Kapse also gave a very interesting talk on the same panel, on the transformation of melodrama in the 1940s. The authors of The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema have considered melodrama to be a genre quite separate from early silent film genres like the ‘mythological’ and the ‘historical’. But Kapse shows otherwise (and again, I won’t say too much about her argument here). Her two examples were a 1939 film called Aadmi (directed by V. Shantaram) and a 1950 film called Aurat (which was the original model for Nargis’ Mother India). I found the clip from Aadmi to be pretty brilliant -– a self-reflexive satire of the melodrama genre.

* * *
I attended part of a Sikh studies panel, and was favorably impressed by papers by Sunit Singh and Arvind Mandair. Sunit Singh is working on an essay by Bhai Khan Singh Nabla called "Hum Hindu Nahin" (We Are Not Hindus). Though earlier scholars in Sikh studies had situated this text as a response to certain court cases involving the British colonial administration's understanding of the relationship between the Sikh and Hindu communities, one of Sunit Singh's goals is to see the essay as more autonomous and theological. In other words, it's part of a conversation occurring amongst the different religious communities of India; the attempt to sort out the meaning of Sikh identity is not necessarily determined by the policies of the Raj.

Hum Hindu Nahin is probably not an easy text to track down, but it looks like some folks on the internet have been doing a bit of translating on their own: here, and here. The pages translated are messy and the English is non-grammatical, but you can sort of get an idea.

And Arvind Mandair had some interesting insights on the theological work of Bhai Vir Singh. It’s quite a bit more sophisticated than one might imagine, and very non-Indic in many ways: in at least some of his tracts, Vir Singh's approach to philosophy seems to have been ‘onto-theological’ -- in the vein of Pascal, rather than the Singh Sabha movement (or Bhakti, for that matter). Certainly there isn’t anything even remotely similar to it in the Sikh tradition.

* * *
My own paper on the new creative nonfiction genre in Indian writing in English seemed to be received pretty well, even though it’s at a relatively early phase of development. Most of what I was talking about related to defining the genre of Maximum City, but I argued that Arundhati Roy’s literary/political essays as well as Amitava Kumar’s three genre-crossing books are part of what might be a new form of Indian writing.

* * *
As Sepoy mentions, our conference coincided with the annual meeting of the World Dairy Expo. Fittingly, on the first leg of the flight home, I found myself sitting next to a chatty woman who is a family dairy farmer from Vermont, and who was only too happy to school me on the ins and outs of American dairy farming. (For instance, did you know they get up at 2:30 in the morning to milk the cows?) I expected some complaints about big farms and agribusiness, but actually, her biggest complaints were about the 'hippie-types' in the Organic dairy movement. As this farmer (who runs a modern-type family farm) describes it, the whole organic dairy thing is kind of a sham...

Huge Earthquake in Pakistan

I've been following the eyewitness testimonies at BBC -- people have written from all over northern Pakistan to describe the quake. There are also folks there from Delhi and Chandigarh who say they felt severe shaking. (A guy in Gurgaon, near Delhi, says his 21-story office building developed large cracks after the quake. If that's happening in Delhi, it makes me shudder to think of what must have happened in Islamabad...)

This seems to be the worst earthquake in South Asia since quake in Gujurat in January 2001.

Off to Madison

I'm leaving for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow. It's this conference, and I'm on at this ungodly hour.

Highlights from the program might include Kumkum Sangari, Veena Das, and Vivek Bald (the documentary filmmaker behind Mutiny).

Also, I should get to meet Sepoy. That should be fun.

If the conference is fun, you won't hear anything from this site until Monday. If it's a drag, I may just sneak off to blog... (I know, the suspense is killing you.)

The Paisley Politicos of New York: Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta's latest, in the New York Times Magazine. It's primarily a profile of a Desi politico in New York named Alex Martins.

He's interested in Martins because he's made it his business to develop contacts in high places in city government, while traditionally South Asian immigrants in New York have been quite slow to enter politics. Here is what might be the thesis paragraph of Mehta's article:

Historically, every immigrant group that has come to New York has relied on people like Martins: a man of connections, a man you call when your son is caught shoplifting or your cousin needs a visa or your nephew needs a city job. He is not a politician -- not yet, at least -- but he is a political creature. He is the representative who helps new immigrants reach their elected representatives.

For the politicians whom Martins deals with, the benefits of helping a new immigrant are often not immediately apparent, because most of the immigrants are not citizens and can't vote. But some of these immigrants have money, and many of them will, eventually, become citizens and remember who came to their assistance when they were new to the country. The politicians are also keenly aware that New York's demographics are changing. This year, for the first time in history, non-Hispanic whites make up a minority of the city's voters. Which means that every New York politician seeking citywide office now has to form a coalition: no one can win on the basis of appealing to a single voting bloc, whether it's whites, blacks or Hispanics. Politicians will need the support of the Jains, the Catholics from Goa, the Sikhs - all the people who turn to Martins to get things fixed.

And there was one other bit that caught my eye:

The Democratic state senator John Sabini was recently walking along the street in Jackson Heights when he saw a Pakistani cabby driving a taxi that was clearly from New Orleans. Sabini flagged down the driver and discovered that the cabby was an evacuee and had his wife and 20-month-old baby with him in the car. Sabini found the cabby hotel accommodations through the city's marketing agency and a job through the owner of a taxi fleet. The taxi-fleet owner has since offered a job to any driver from the Gulf Coast. Shams Tarek, a Bangladeshi immigrant and top aide to Sabini, explains that Sabini's office will actively seek out Martins and ask him "if he knows any Sikh cabbies, or anybody from the South who's impacted by the hurricane."

I hadn't thought about the New Orleans taxi drivers. Has anyone seen NO taxis operating in New York lately?

Uma on Rethinking Secularism

Congratulations to Uma Dasgupta of Indian Writing for winning third prize in the Indian Express essay competition. She's posted an edited version of her essay at her blog, and I would encourage people to go check it out.

(Note: I looked for the winning essay at the Indian Express website, but couldn't find it. If anyone has the link, I would be grateful for it.)

Uma's essay is a literary and ethical approach to India's experience with secularism, with quotes from Saadat Hasan Manto, Amitav Ghosh, and yes, Aamir Khan (!) along the way.

The part that really stands out to me as worth underlining in triplicate are the following proposals for strengthening Indian secularism:

(a) Punish the guilty. Whether or not the victims seek revenge is not relevant; they have a right to seek justice, and the State has a responsibility to see that those who are guilty must be punished.

(b) We all know that the Babri Masjid was systematically broken down on 6 December 1992. Is it entirely appropriate for the State, if it is truly the secular guardian of its people's interests, to leave the matter to the courts? The ethical thing for a secular State to have done would have been to rebuild a structure that has been pulled down during its tenure; if, on the other hand, the time for rebuilding the mosque is long past and the matter now pending court settlement, the answer is in not letting the wounds fester as they have been festering for so long, but in working towards a firm and fair closure.

(c) Follow the rule of law in every case. Under the present legislations, there are more than sufficient provisions to suppress the incitement of hatred. The State should invoke these provisions swiftly in every case, until such activity subsides altogether.

(a) and (c) should be obvious, no-brainers. But in India, with its troubled judicial system, they are not.

Rebuilding the Babri Masjid -- point (b) -- is a more questionable proposition practically speaking, as I think Uma knows. But her emphasis on the necessity of pursuing some final alternative ("firm and fair closure") has not been widely considered even by secularists. Thus far, it seems even the Congress government is mainly dedicated to maintaining the status quo, so that the problem of Ayodhya (among many other problems in Indian secularism) lingers on like a hot coal at the bottom of the stack.

Explainer: India, Iran, and the IAEA

I've been trying to understand how India's vote against Iran at the IAEA on September 25 led the Indian left to call a general strike in India four days later. I supported India's vote against Iran, and I was shocked to see the Left parties calling a strike as a response. What could the justification possibly be?

The issues are complicated and interlocking, so let's break them into three parts.

1. Iran and the IAEA

As I read it, the IAEA's September 25 vote was a kind of warning to Iran from the UN. Here is Fox News:

The watchdog agency's 35-nation board approved the resolution, which could lead to Iran's referral to the Security Council for violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty unless Tehran eases suspicions about its atomic program.

The Security Council could impose sanctions if it determines that Iran violated the treaty, but that is unlikely since China and Russia, which wield Security Council vetoes, oppose those efforts.

The vote was 22 in favor of the resolution, 12 abstaining, and one opposed. So India's vote wasn't, strictly speaking, essential for the success of the resolution (Pakistan, China, and Russia were among the abstainers). A second resolution will likely be floored in November, at which time Iran -- unless it does something dramatic about its nuclear energy program -- is probably going to be "referred" to the UN Security Council.

That said, it seems pretty clear that no sanctions (or, for that matter, military action) will be imposed on Iran by the Security Council because of opposition from veto-wielding powers. So in some sense this vote is symbolic, though I can imagine how in Iran this might look like the beginning stages of the next U.S. invasion in the middle east. (Seymour Hersh notwithstanding, I don't think anyone is seriously talking about that now.)

One could legitimately question whether the UN should be in the business of stopping sovereign nations from developing civilian nuclear energy, which is what Iran says it is doing. But that question leads to two obvious responses. One is, if that is indeed all Iran is doing, why not invite UN inspectors in to see? Secondly, given that Iran is a net energy exporter and an oil-rich nation, why is it in fact so determined to develop nuclear energy? It seems fishy; you don't have to be Paul Wolfowitz to doubt Iran's motives here.

2. The Congress Party and the Bush Administration

Before the September 25 vote, the U.S. exerted a fair amount of pressure on India to vote against Iran on the matter of the UN Security Council referral. Early on, the government indicated that it would not vote against Iran, but at the last minute changed its mind.

There is even some talk that India allowed its vote to be bought in a quid pro quo arrangement with the U.S. It may be true -- certainly some Indian newspapers are reporting it that way (see Kuldip Nayer in the Deccan Herald) -- though at this point I haven't seen any direct reference to what specifically India hoped to gain by voting against Iran. A new arms deal? An economic package? It's not been made clear. There is some indication that the U.S. Congress is going to go forward with a bill soon (see this blog), but the contents of the bill haven't been specified yet.

One could argue that Iran might be even more important than the U.S. to India, because Iran is one of India's principal suppliers of oil and natural gas. By voting against Iran, India jeopardized that strategic relationship (fortunately, Iran has signaled that it has no intention to cut off energy supplies following India's vote.)

3. The Indian Left

I find it odd that Indian Communist leaders have registered their disappointment with the government's vote with references to the Non-Aligned Movement. Here is Gurudeb Dasgupta, a Secretary for the CPI, in an interview with the Hindustan Times:

It was the previous Congress government’s endeavour to brand India a non-aligned country. By voting at the IAEA on the Iran issue, the same Congress has now abandoned its foreign policy and had diluted its faith in NAM. In fact, all this has happened under US pressure. Like Iraq, the US wants to grab Iran’s oil wells. If China, Russia and Pakistan could abstain from voting, why could India not follow suit. We would continue with our protest on the issue.

Isn't it odd that the left is still talking about the non-aligned movement fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union? It seems to me they are using very old rhetoric, and to some extent reacting in a knee-jerk way: one shouldn't agree with the U.S., just because they are the U.S. and we don't like them. People like Dasgupta aren't considering the possibility that India's vote might have actually been a principled one: it's in everyone's best interests to discourage Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The Left parties in the UPA government are currently very powerful, but the most strident criticism of the Manmohan Singh government has come from Communist factions that did not join the current coalition. As I understand it, it was those parties outside the government who called a successful general strike to protest the anti-Iran vote on September 29. The strike shut down airports as well as many public sector industries, and hit especially hard in West Bengal (where the Communists are especially powerful). Here is the Hindustan Times article:

Industrial and commercial activities as also air services were affected in large parts of the country on Thursday as the day-long strike by Left trade unions crippled work in public sector banks and insurance companies and government undertakings to protest the UPA government's economic policies. The impact of the strike was the maximum in the Left-ruled West Bengal where life almost came to a standstill with public transport, including train services, remaining paralysed.

Only two flights - one each from Delhi and Mumbai - landed at Netaji Subhaschandra Bose international airport which was the worst-hit by the Airport Authority of India employees' protest against privatisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports.

Not a pretty picture: such events are bad for India's economy, as well as its image abroad.

The governing UPA coalition is still holding together, but with rising oil prices and extremely limited economic reforms, I think both sides are pretty frustrated with the arrangement.

We'll see whether this internal pressure will be enough to cause India to change its vote on the Iran/nuclear vote in November. I have a feeling it will.

Born to Kvetch

Busy, busy, busy; tired, tired, tired. Grading, writing conference papers, trying to publish stuff, teaching, commuting... Oy vey.

Yeah, I know -- no one wants to hear it. But it's my blog, and I reserve the right to kvetch when necessary.

* * *
Speaking of which, I've been reading a book called Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, by Michael Wex. It's a mixture of cultural history and light sociolinguistics, with some reference to Jewish theology as well as migration patterns in the Jewish diaspora thrown in for good measure. I'm interested in this stuff partly because it's part of my interest in dialects and slangs (see several recent posts, including this one).

I would review the book more properly, but I am, as previously mentioned, too busy and tired (and the second half of the Sox vs. the other Sox beckons). So here is Michael Wex explaining the Yiddish word "kvetch" -- complete with some surprising, er, digestive connotations:

Yet the entry for kvetshn (the verbal form) in Uriel Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish Dictionary reads simply: "press, squeeze, pince; strain." There is no mention of grumbling or complaint. You can kvetch an orange to get juice, kvetch a buzzer for service, or kvetch mit di pleytses, shrug your shoulders, when no one responds to the buzzer you kvetched. All perfectly good, perfectly commong uses of the verb kvetshn, none of which appears to have the remotest connection with the idea of whining or complaining. The link is found in Weinreich's "strain," which he uses to define kvetshn zikh, to press or squeeze oneself, the reflexive form of the verb. Alexander Harkavy's 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary helps make Weinreich's meaning clearer. It isn't simply to strain, but "to strain," as Harkavy has it, "at stool," to have trouble doing what, if you'd eaten your prunes the way you were supposed to, you wouldn't have any trouble with at all. . . . A really good kvetch has a visceral quality, a snese that the kvetcher won't be completely comfortable, completely satisfied, until it's all come out.

All rightie then: something slightly wicked to dwell on next time you're stuck listening to someone kvetching about all their non-problems!

First Take on Harriet Miers

For those who missed it somehow, the President has nominated someone named Harriet Miers to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The item on Harriet Miers' resumé that caught my eye was her work for the Texas Lottery Commission, between 1995 and 2000. Here's the New York Times profile:

In 1995, Mr. Bush, then in his first months as governor of Texas, appointed Ms. Miers to a six-year term as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Ms. Miers unexpectedly resigned after five years that were marked by controversy and the dismissal of two executive directors of the commission. The first executive director, Nora Linares, was fired in 1997 when it became public that her boyfriend had worked for the company that held the contract to operate the lottery. Ms. Linares's successor was dismissed after only five months when he began reviewing campaign contributions of state legislators without the commission's knowledge. Despite the problems, as well as the lottery's declining sales, The Dallas Morning News praised Ms. Miers when she resigned in 2000 for ''preserving the operations' integrity.'

It looks like she came out of her work with the lottery untouched by the scandals. The Houston Chronicle has more details on the Texas Lottery Commission scandals, and ends with this interesting nugget:

Miers resigned as lottery commission chairman in 2000. She said her resignation had nothing to do with lagging sales in its biggest game, Lotto Texas.

Miers resigned from the Texas Lottery Commission, in short, because she managed it poorly. She joined Bush's staff in 2001, and held such luminous positions as "White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy" (2003-2004) before winding up as White House Counsel last November.

She's a notch less embarrassing than Michael Brown, in the sense that she does have some experience in politics. But it's still pretty underwhelming.

Gunner Palace

We finally saw the Gunner Palace documentary on DVD over the weekend.

It's every bit as good as Chuck Tryon's review from several months ago suggested. Many readers will probably know what this documentary is about: filmmaker Mike Tucker was unofficially embedded with a U.S. artillery division (known as the "Gunners") in Uday Hussain's bombed-out palace in Baghdad in September and October of 2003.

There are a number of interesting things about the way Gunner Palace is filmed and narrated as well as some mild combat sequences, but for me it is the unfiltered look at what Americans soldiers are doing and feeling when they're at leisure that makes this film worth seeing. It's American pop culture -- Burger King, rap music, and video games -- mixed up with a dangerous, poorly planned military occupation. The guys joke around in the daytime, doing freestyle raps and messing with (Uday's?) electric guitars. But at night they go out on raids and kill -- and are themselves injured and killed.

(Watching this film after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, one is a little less sympathetic to all the clowning around: it seems like that same cocky attitude was in play in the thoughtless humiliation of captives. Perhaps an update from the post-Abu Ghraib moment might have been in order...)

I agree with Chuck that this film is deeply ambivalent about the war/occupation of Iraq. While Gunner Palace is at times quite critical of Donald Rumsfeld, it is so invested in getting the 'grunt's eye view' right that it's not really asking the question of whether these young men and women should be in Iraq to begin with. I tend to think it's a smart approach to take, and I don't really know what the point of making a decisively "anti-war" documentary might be at this point in time, especially given that this will be a long-term occupation no matter who is in the White House: there's no point mimicking Michael Moore.

Other links:

The directors of the film have a kind of blog/diary up at the film's website, with many stills from the film here.

The military blogger Blackfive talks about the film here.

And A.O. Scott's review positive of Gunner Palace is here (not 100% sure if that link will work; if not, try it via Rotten Tomatoes).

Aishwarya Rai Holds Book, Poses For Photo

(Via Beth Loves Bollywood.)

It's part of the Celebrity READ poster series, which also includes everyone from (the incomparable) Bernie Mac (holding Armed and Dangerous) to Britney Spears (holding Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone). My favorite in the series has to be Coolio, who poses with Frankenstein. I'm thinking of ordering one to put up in my office at school...

So why is Aish holding a deeply annoying book like The Alchemist? It really doesn't say much about her taste in literature.

Well, at least she didn't pose while holding The Mistress of Spices, which would be both annoying and crass -- as she's starring in the as-yet unreleased film adaptation of it.

Even DeLay's Replacement is Questionable

Let me just echo Unfogged, and say that I hope Texas Attorney General Ronnie Earle really has the goods on Tom DeLay. From the charges that have been filed, and the arcane structure of campaign finance law, I'm not really convinced that there's a very strong case there. They have to prove not just that money changed hands, but that DeLay knew the diversion of corporate campaign contributions to the RNC was designed to circumvent state law. Tall order.

Meanwhile, I'm surprised that the person chosen to replace DeLay as Majority Leader in the House, Roy Blunt, is being investigated for ethics charges himself.

As he worked to unite the party and turn its attention back to the legislative agenda, Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, DeLay's successor as majority leader, faced ethics questions himself.

Records on file with the Federal Election Commission show that since 2003, Blunt's political action committee has paid $94,000 in salary to the consulting firm of Jim Ellis, a longtime associate of DeLay. Ellis has been indicted in the same case as DeLay, for allegedly conspiring to illegally influence the outcome of Texas legislative elections by channeling corporate money to Republican candidates.

Congressional watchdog groups and Democrats pointed to Blunt's employment of Ellis' firm, J.W. Ellis Co., as evidence of what they said is an atmosphere of corruption on Capitol Hill.

It's not even a separate case! What, exactly, are the Republicans thinking?

(Another sign of life in autumn: the start of a juicy new political cycle.)

55 Word Fiction

Anna's call for 55 word 'nanofiction.'

My stab at it:

Vikas soon learned how to size up the customers. The couple in the corner booth were whispering about their check, louder than they thought: "Could you take it? I promise I'll pay you back. Niles has my card; he's coming back on Friday."

Her voice broke. "I think." Was it, or wasn't it, a date?

The Solution

Of all the posts I've written for this blog, the most popular with Google is a little thing I did about the mystery numbers for the American TV show Lost, back in March.

4 8 15 16 23 42

So much for literary criticism, South Asian literature, Bollywood, Bhangra, or the politics of multiculturalism. Apparently more people would rather read about TV.

Not that I'm complaining too loudly. Successive waves of web-surfers come to visit every Wednesday night and Thursday after the show airs, trying (I suppose) to see if anyone has cracked the code. Last Thursday, the spike was about 500 additional visitors (and that's on top of the 100-200 people who visit the site looking for those numbers every single day).

Lost stubbornly refuses to reveal the meaning of the six numbers on the hatch, or how they might be connected to "Hurley's" lottery experience, or the mysterious radio beacon, or the "Others," or the evil black smoke, or the "Black Rock," or virtually anything at all on the island (ad infinitum). Last night, though much was promised, nothing much was delivered: the crazy "Desmond" simply showed us that the numbers add up to 108 on his computer -- woohoo.

Many people have commented on my Lost post over the past few months, but today I think someone might actually have solved it (or at least one aspect of it), with a creative longtitude/latitude reading: 4.815 X 162.342. It points to a spot in the middle of the open ocean near Papua New Guinea (see the Mapquest location here.

Now, as to why those particular numbers have a magical quality associated with them, who knows? The same could be asked about the French chick, or the crazy guy holed up in an underground quarantine for 15 years, listening to the same Mama Cass record again and again ("Make Your Own Kind Of Music").

Can Lost offer a coherent explanation that will satisfy the 20 million or so people who have been waiting for one for more than a year? I doubt it, but I have to admit I'm enjoying being teased thus far.