The End of Imagination

  See Bharat Desai, “Will Vajpayee See through All the Window Dressing?” Economic Times, April 5, 2002.

  Agence France-Press, “Singapore, India to Explore Closer Economic Ties,” April 8, 2002.

  See “Medha Files Charges against BJP Leaders,” Economic Times, April 13, 2002.

  HRW Report, 30. See also Burhan Wazir, “Militants Seek Muslim-Free India,” Observer (London), July 21, 2002, 20.

  See Mishra, “Holy Lies,” 24.

  The Home Minister, L. K Advani, made a public statement claiming that the burning of the train was a plot by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Months later, the police have not found a shred of evidence to support that claim. The Gujarat government’s forensic report says that sixty liters of petrol were poured onto the floor by someone who was inside the carriage. The doors were locked, possibly from the inside. The burned bodies of the passengers were found in a heap in the middle of the carriage. So far, nobody knows who started the fire. There are theories to suit every political position: It was a Pakistani plot. It was Muslim extremists who managed to get into the train. It was the angry mob. It was a VHP / Bajrang Dal plot staged to set off the horror that followed. No one really knows. See HRW Report, 13–14; Siddharth Srivastava, “No Proof Yet on ISI Link with Sabarmati Attack: Officials,” Times of India, March 6, 2002; “ISI behind Godhra Killings, Says BJP,” Times of India, March 18, 2002; Uday Mahurkar, “Gujarat: Fuelling the Fire,” India Today, July 22, 2002, 38; “Bloodstained Memories,” Indian Express, April 12, 2002; and Celia W. Dugger, “After Deadly Firestorm, India Officials Ask Why,” New York Times, March 6, 2002, A3.

  “Blame It on Newton’s Law: Modi,” Times of India, March 3, 2002. See also Fernandes, “Gujarat Violence Backed by State,” 12.

  “RSS Cautions Muslims,” Press Trust of India, March 17, 2002. See also Sanghamitra Chakraborty, “Minority Guide to Good Behaviour,” Times of India, March 25, 2002.

  P. R. Ramesh, “Modi Offers to Quit as Gujarat CM,” Economic Times, April 13, 2002; “Modi Asked to Seek Mandate,” Statesman (India), April 13, 2002.

  See M. S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat, 1939); Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva (New Delhi: Bharti Sadan, 1989). See also “Saffron Is Thicker Than . . . ,” editorial, Hindu, October 22, 2000; David Gardner, “Hindu Revivalists Raise the Question of Who Governs India,” Financial Times (London), July 13, 2000, 12.

  See Arundhati Roy, Power Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 57 and notes (p. 159).

  See Noam Chomsky, “Militarizing Space ‘to Protect U.S. Interests and Investment,’” International Socialist Review 19 (July–August 2001), www.isreview.org/issues/19/NoamChomsky.shtml.

  Pankaj Mishra, “A Mediocre Goddess,” New Statesman, April 9, 2001, a review of Katherine Frank, Indira: A Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London: HarperCollins, 2001).

  William Claiborne, “Gandhi Urges Indians to Strengthen Union,” Washington Post, November 20, 1984, A9. See also Tavleen Singh, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” India Today, March 30, 1998, 24.

  HRW Report, 39–44.

  President George W. Bush, “September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks on the United States,” address to Joint Session of Congress, Federal News Service, September 20, 2001.

  John Pilger, “Pakistan and India on Brink,” Mirror (London), May 27, 2002, 4.

  Alison Leigh Cowan, Kurt Eichenwald, and Michael Moss, “Bin Laden Family, with Deep Western Ties, Strives to Re-establish a Name,” New York Times, October 28, 2001, 1, 9.

  Sanjeev Miglani, “Opposition Keeps Up Heat on Government over Riots,” Reuters, April 16, 2002.

  “Either Govern or Just Go,” Indian Express, April 1, 2002. Parekh is CEO of HDFC, the Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited.

  “It’s War in Drawing Rooms,” Indian Express, May 19, 2002.

  Ranjit Devraj, “Pro-Hindu Ruling Party Back to

  Hardline Politics,” Inter Press Service, July 1, 2002; “An Unholy Alliance,” Indian Express, May 6, 2002.

  Nilanjana Bhaduri Jha, “Congress [Party] Begins Oust-Modi Campaign,” Economic Times, April 12, 2002.

  Richard Benedetto, “Confidence in War on Terror Wanes,” USA Today, June 25, 2002, 19A; David Lamb, “Israel’s Invasions, 20 Years Apart, Look Eerily Alike,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2002, A5.

  See “The End of Imagination,” above.

  “I would say it is a weapon of peace guarantee, a peace guarantor,” said Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. See Imtiaz Gul, “Father of Pakistani Bomb Says Nuclear Weapons Guarantee Peace,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, May 29, 1998. See also Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India’s Quest to Be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2000).

  The 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan claimed hundreds of lives. See Edward Luce, “Fernandes Hit by India’s Coffin Scandal,” Financial Times (London), December 13, 2001, 12.

  See “Arrested Growth,” Times of India, February 2, 2000.

  Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,” A1.

  Edna Fernandes, “EU Tells India of Concern over Violence in Gujarat,” Financial Times (London), May 3, 2002, 12; Alex Spillius, “‘Please Don’t Say This Was a Riot. It Was Genocide, Pure and Simple,’” Daily Telegraph (London), June 18, 2002, 13.

  “Gujarat is an internal matter and the situation is under control,” said Jaswant Singh, India’s foreign affairs minister. See Shishir Gupta, “The Foreign Hand,” India Today, May 6, 2002, 42 and sidebar.

  “Laloo Wants Use of POTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] against VHP, RSS,” Times of India, March 7, 2002.

  3. When the Saints Go Marching Out:

  The Strange Fate of Martin, Mohandas, and Mandela

  See “Democracy: Who Is She When She’s at Home?” in War Talk, 65–79, above.

  “Cong[ress Party] Ploy Fails, Modi Steals the Show in Pain,” Indian Express, August 16, 2003.

  Agence France-Presse, “Indian Activists Urge Mandela to Snub Gujarat Government Invite,” August 4, 2003; “Guj[arat]–Mandela,” Press Trust of India, August 5, 2003; and “Battle for Gujarat’s Image Now on Foreign Soil,” Times of India, August 7, 2003.

  Agence France-Presse, “Relax, Mandela Isn’t Coming, He’s Working on a Book,” August 5, 2003.

  Michael Dynes, “Mbeki Can Seize White Farms under New Law,” Times (London), January 31, 2004, 26.

  Ibid.

  Patrick Laurence, “South Africa Fights to Put the Past to Rest,” Irish Times, December 28, 2000, 57.

  Anthony Stoppard, “South Africa: Water, Electricity Cutoffs Affect 10 Million,” Inter Press Service, March 21, 2002.

  Henri E. Cauvin, “Hunger in Southern Africa Imperils Lives of Millions,” New York Times, April 26, 2002, A8; James Lamont, “Nobody Says ‘No’ to Mandela,” Financial Times (London), December 10, 2002, 4; and Patrick Laurence, “South Africans Sceptical of Official Data,” Irish Times, June 6, 2003, 30.

  See Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).

  South African Press Association, “Gauteng Municipalities to Target Service Defaulters,” May 4, 1999; Alison Maitland, “Combining to Harness the Power of Private Enterprise,” Financial Times (London), August 23, 2002, survey: “Sustainable Business,” 2.

  Nicol Degli Innocenti and John Reed, “SA Govt Opposes Reparations Lawsuit,” Financial Times (London), May 19, 2003, 15.

  South African Press Association, “SAfrica Asks US Court to Dismiss Apartheid Reparations Cases,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, July 30, 2003.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Jame
s M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 233.

  Ibid., 233.

  “Men of Vietnam,” New York Times, April 9, 1967, Week in Review, 2E. Quoted in Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 1999), 217.

  King, Testament of Hope, 245.

  David M. Halbfinger and Steven A. Holmes, “Military Mirrors a Working-Class America,” New York Times, March 30, 2003, A1; Darryl Fears, “Draft Bill Stirs Debate over the Military, Race and Equity,” Washington Post, February 4, 2003, A3.

  David Cole, “Denying Felons Vote Hurts Them, Society,” USA Today, February 3, 2000, 17A; “From Prison to the Polls,” editorial, Christian Science Monitor, May 24, 2001, 10.

  King, Testament of Hope, 239.

  Quoted in Marqusee, Redemption Song, 218.

  King, Testament of Hope, 250.

  Marqusee, Redemption Song, 1–4, 292.

  4. In Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi

  Human Rights Watch, “India: Human Rights Developments,” Human Rights Watch World Report 1993, www.hrw.org/reports/1993/WR93/Asw-06.htm.

  5. How Deep Shall We Dig?

  Hina Kausar Alam and P. Balu, “J&K [Jammu and Kashmir] Fudges DNA Samples to Cover Up Killings,” Times of India, March 7, 2002.

  See “Democracy: Who Is She When She’s at Home?” 65–79, above.

  Somit Sen, “Shooting Turns Spotlight on Encounter Cops,” Times of India, August 23, 2003.

  W. Chandrakanth, “Crackdown on Civil Liberties Activists

  in the Offing?” Hindu, October 4, 2003: “Several activists have gone underground fearing police reprisals. Their fears are not unfounded, as the State police have been staging encounters at will. While the police frequently release the statistics on naxalite violence, they avoid mentioning the victims of their own violence. The Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), which is keeping track of the police killings, has listed more than 4,000 deaths, 2,000 of them in the last eight years alone.” See also K. T. Sangameswaran, “Rights Activists Allege Ganglord-Cop Nexus,” Hindu, October 22, 2003.

  David Rohde, “India and Kashmir Separatists Begin Talks on Ending Strife,” New York Times, January 23, 2004, A8; Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Thousands Missing, Unmarked Graves Tell Kashmir Story,” October 7, 2003.

  Unpublished reports from the Association of Parents of Disappeared People (APDP), Srinagar.

  See also Edward Luce, “Kashmir’s New Leader Promises ‘Healing Touch,’” Financial Times (London), October 28, 2002, 12.

  Ray Marcelo, “Anti-terrorism Law Backed by India’s Supreme Court,” Financial Times (London), December 17, 2003, 2.

  People’s Union for Civil Liberties, “In Jharkhand All the Laws of the Land Are Replaced by POTA,” Delhi, India, May 2, 2003, www.pucl.org/Topics/Law/2003/poto-jharkhand.htm.

  “People’s Tribunal Highlights Misuse of POTA,” Hindu, March 18, 2004.

  “People’s Tribunal.” See also “Human Rights Watch Ask Centre to Repeal POTA,” Press Trust of India, September 8, 2002.

  Leena Misra, “240 POTA Cases, All against Minorities,” Times of India, September 15, 2003; “People’s Tribunal.” The Times of India misreported the testimony presented. As the Press Trust of India article notes, in Gujarat “the only non-Muslim in the list is a Sikh, Liversingh Tej Singh Sikligar, who figured in it for an attempt on the life of Surat lawyer Hasmukh Lalwala, and allegedly hung himself in a police lock-up in Surat in April [2003].” On Gujarat, see “Democracy: Who Is She,” above.

  “A Pro-Police Report,” Hindu, March 20, 2004; Amnesty International, “India: Report of the Malimath Committee on Reforms of the Criminal Justice System: Some Comments,” September 19, 2003 (ASA 20/025/2003).

  “J&K [Jammu and Kashmir] Panel Wants Draconian Laws Withdrawn,” Hindu, March 23, 2003. See also South Asian Human Rights Documentation Center, “Armed Forces Special Powers Act: A Study in National Security Tyranny,” November 1995.

  “Growth of a Demon: Genesis of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958” and related documents in Manipur Update, December 1999.

  On the lack of any convictions for the massacres in Gujarat, see Edward Luce, “Master of Ambiguity,” Financial Times (London), April 3–4, 2004, 16. On the March 31, 1997, murder of Chandrashekhar Prasad, see Andrew Nash, “An Election at JNU,” Himāl, December 2003. For more information on the additional crimes listed here, see 313–15, above.

  N. A. Mujumdar, “Eliminate Hunger Now, Poverty Later,” Business Line, January 8, 2003.

  “Foodgrain Exports May Slow Down This Fiscal [Year],” India Business Insight, June 2, 2003; “India—Agriculture Sector: Paradox of Plenty,” Business Line, June 26, 2001; and Ranjit Devraj, “Farmers Protest against Globalization,” Inter Press Service, January 25, 2001.

  Utsa Patnaik, “Falling Per Capita Availability of Foodgrains for Human Consumption in the Reform Period in India,” Akhbar 2 (October 2001); P. Sainath, “Have Tornado, Will Travel,” Hindu Magazine, August 18, 2002; Sylvia Nasar, “Profile: The Conscience of the Dismal Science,” New York Times, January 9, 1994, 8; and Maria Misra, “Heart of Smugness: Unlike Belgium, Britain Is Still Complacently Ignoring the Gory Cruelties of Its Empire,” Guardian (London), July 23, 2002, 15. See also Utsa Patnaik, “On Measuring ‘Famine’ Deaths: Different Criteria for Socialism and Capitalism?” Akhbar 6 (November–December 1999), www.indowindow.com/akhbar/article.php?article=74&category=8&issue=9.

  Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

  “The Wasted India,” Statesman (India), February 17, 2001; “Child-Blain,” Statesman (India), November 24, 2001.

  Utsa Patnaik, “The Republic of Hunger,” lecture, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, April 10, 2004, macroscan.com/fet/apr04/fet210404Republic

  _Hunger.htm.

  Praful Bidwai, “India amidst Serious Agrarian Crisis,” Central Chronicle (Bhopal), April 9, 2004.

  See “Power Politics,” 151–76, above.

  See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2002).

  Among other sources, see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Three Rivers, 2003).

  “For India Inc., Silence Protects the Bottom Line,” Times of India, February 17, 2003; “CII Apologises to Modi,” Hindu, March 7, 2003.

  In May 2004, the right-wing BJP-led coalition was not just voted out of power, it was humiliated by the Indian electorate. None of the political pundits had predicted this decisive vote against communalism and neoliberalism’s economic “reforms.” Yet even as we celebrate, we know that on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism—nuclear bombs, Big Dams, privatization—the newly elected Congress Party and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We know that it was the legacy of the Congress that led us to the horror of the BJP. Still we celebrated, because surely a darkness has passed. Or has it? Even before it formed a government, the Congress made overt reassurances that “reforms” would continue. Exactly what kind of reforms, we’ll have to wait and see. Fortunately the Congress will be hobbled by the fact that it needs the support of left parties—the only parties to be overtly (if ineffectively) critical of the reforms—to make up a majority in order to form a government. The Left parties have been given an unprecedented mandate. Hopefully, things will change. A little. It’s been a pretty hellish six years.

  India was the only country to abstain on December 22, 2003, from UN General Assembly Resolution, “Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism,” A/RES/58/187, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/58/187&Area=UNDOC. Quoted in Amnesty International India, “Security L
egislation and State Accountability: A Presentation for the POTA People’s Hearing, March 13–14, New Delhi.”

  6. The Greater Common Good

  Jawaharlal Nehru, Modern Temples of India: Selected Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru at Irrigation and Power Projects, ed. C. V. J. Sharma (Delhi: Central Board of Irrigation and Power, 1989), 40–49.

  Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998), 80.

  From (uncut) film footage of Bargi dam oustees, Anurag Singh and Jharana Jhaveri, Jan Madhyam, New Delhi, 1995.

  J. Nehru, Modern Temples, 52–56. In a speech given before the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Central Board of Irrigation and Power (November 17, 1958) Nehru said, “For some time past, however, I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call ‘the disease of gigantism.’ We want to show that we can build big dams and do big things. This is a dangerous outlook developing in India . . . the idea of big—having big undertakings and doing big things for the sake of showing that we can do big things—is not a good outlook at all.” And “it is . . . the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power, which will change the face of the country far more than half a dozen big projects in half a dozen places.”

  Centre for Science and Environment, Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (New Delhi: CSE, 1997), 399; Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1995), 39.

  Indian Water Resources Society, Five Decades of Water, Resources Development in India (1998), 7.

  World Resource Institute, World Resources 1998–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 251.

  McCully, Silenced Rivers, 26–29. See also The Ecologist Asia 6, no. 5 (September–October 1998): 50–51 for excerpts of speech by Bruce Babbitt, US interior secretary, in August 1998.