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By M J Aslam

History is recorded in writing for enabling people know their past & the events that took place in the past. Sometimes, however, need is felt to rewrite it, also, but strictly subject to revelation of new “evidence” about the recorded events coming to the knowledge of a rewriter during his “objective investigation” of the historical events. “Genuine” revisionist, as he is called, re-interprets, thus, the given historical facts when there is “strong evidence” against them. But the relativism, subjective perspectives, long cherished beliefs and “subjective investigation” dictated by lusty goals of “palengenetic nationalism” & “cultural myths” render revisionism mere attempting at concocting & fabricating the already received & admitted authentic historical facts. Politically motivated revisionist, if at all, every Tom, Dick and Harry, like BJP-RSS ideologues, could be paraphased, is accorded with the “epithet” of historian, will, obviously, be interpreting it according to his own ulterior purposes that cause more potential threat to the well recorded accounts of history, then. George Orwell in 1949, in his masterpiece novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four, saw this “insidious danger” of destroying recorded historical facts by inventing & spreading lies about them that ultimately obliterate people’s understanding of their own history by the totalitarian and repressive regimes.

History, rewritten with political motives, just serves the desires of a politically controlled centralized party. It is incitement to ignorance. It is indoctrination of children when history text books are sanitized & a highly communal view of history is implanted there in place of recorded historical truths, whether bitter or sweet, to the taste of the reader. This is done by “deleting chapters or passages from public school textbooks that contradicted their ideology, while adding their own make-believe versions of the past”. I In the present day ever-changing world, such incitement & indoctrination should not be allowed to the detriment of a nation itself. II

The people & parties in power can re-name places, markets & roads to re-write history to their personal-gratification. Allahabad to Prayagraj, Gurgaon to Gurugram, Bangalore to Bengaluru, Madras to Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkotta, Aurangzeb Road to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road are few examples III & there was also a proposal initiated by the ring-wing organisations of India and vociferously supported by a BJP Parlimentarian & ex-Army Chief of India, Gen Rtd VK Singh, to change famous Akbar Road of Delhi to the name of “great son of India”, Maharana Pratap, IV who had purportedly defeated in the battle of Haldighati (Mewar) , the Muslim Mughal Emperor , Akbar the great, a title conferred upon him by all historians of India & beyond. The authentic history, nevertheless, is that in 1568 Akbar had conquered entire Rajasthan, present day Pakistan, Punjab, Haryana, HP, Bihar, UP upto Bengal. Some Rajputs in Mewar area had not accepted suzerainty of Akbar & preferred putting resistance to his rule. But Mewar , Haldighati was ultimately lost by Maharana Pratap after some days war-tricks & camouflages . He didn’t surrender to the Mughal Army is equally a historical fact & but why is altogether a different question. It is an unequivocal fact that the Maharana Pratap lost the battle of Haldighati to Mughal Army hat was led by another Rajput Man Singh. And, to suggest otherwise is sheer revisionism. V A BJP leader also wanted Modi government to change the name of one of the oldest markets of Delhi, Khan Market, to Valmikhi Market. VI

A step further towards revisionism, Yogi Aditiyanath, a “well known” extremist Hindu Sadhu who is presently CM of UP, has been openly denigrating all 900 years old Muslim symbols of India & damning Muslim Rulers as simply “invaders & foreigners”. Then, by the same logic, one is within one’s rights to ask, what Indian-rulers are to JK Muslims? 70 years “rule” by India over JK is comparatively nothing before 900 years rule of India by Muslims. In pre-Medieval times, people without strict demarcations of geographical boundaries or territories used to travel from one place to another & most of the times settle in the “foreign” lands where they found chances of their habitation & survival much better. The Aryans who were Central Asians had migrated from Central Asian States & settled in Indian subcontinent on banks of Indus River wherefrom spread Indus Valley Civilization which is present day entire North & West of India, Pakistan & Afghanistan. The Aryans invaded Dravidian parts of (South) India & settled there. These migrations, wars, invasions & above all settlements in different lands were not confined to India alone. It happened everywhere in the world. But no one after thousands of years is chest beating like pan-Hindu ideologues. “The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home”. VII

This was also case with kings in the past. Wars were fought across geographical territories & the kingdoms established in so called foreign lands. And, over centuries, those kings & their successors became part of the soil they had conquered. They resided and lived there till their death.

Right-wing-hate does not end here. World famous Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan on a Shiva Temple, Aditiyatanath-RSS claim, has been rebuffed by Archeological Survey of India by deposing before Agra Court recently in August 2017 that there is no proof to prove right wing claim. VIII

It is a reality that the men in political power can demolish old statutes & monuments to pave a way for their own political ideologies. This has happened during former USSR rule when the Communist Rulers endeavoured hard to twist & turn the history of hundreds of years of provinces to suit their Marxist political theory. The official version of history was to be accepted as authentic one & any deviation from it was harshly punishable under Communist Laws of the country. The antebellum slavery & war against it are undeniable facts of the American history. There are statues, monuments & flags of Confederate in seven American States that held African-American-slaves & that, however, represent the American national leaders & constitution-givers who themselves owned slaves including George Washington. Some left-parties are attempting now to demolish those statues, monuments & flags of Confederacy to get rid of American Slave-history which is simply impossible to obliterate from the recorded annals of the American history. And, there is a generally accepted notion in American society that history is recorded version of facts, so, by demolishing or rewriting it, the underlying reality never gets displaced nor changed.

The people in power can demean the historical contributions of leaders & rulers of the past. They can re-write text books of children to disconnect them to real & connect them to an artificial past. BJP-RSS ruled States of India like Rajasthan, MP, Maharashtra & Gujarat in recent past are instances at hand where references to Muslim rulers who ruled India for 900 years & who were invariably born, lived & buried sons of Indian soil, in school text books are scantly, one or two lines, negligible while Hindu Kings like Maharana Pratap are shown as heroes in chapters merely because they were Hindus. IX Indeed, all this is climax of religious bigotry & just desperate attempts of the rewriters of Indian history that debunk the very reality of their religious-political thought since in modern era of technology & science people cannot be disconnected with their past by ill-intent of politically & religiously controlled & motivated groups like Sangh Parivar . After all, it is not Joseph Goebbels time to hold and say that a lie repeatedly spoken becomes truth. It could be reversed by saying that if a lie is repeated million times, still it is a lie.

The right-wing groups that presently & overwhelmingly rule & control Indian political landscape forget certain facts: First, nationalism is a newest concept in the history of mankind that came in prominence post-colonial rules of many parts of the world during twentieth century just to maintain hegemony of more powerful nations or countries on small provinces & communities of the world. India was no exception to this world scene. At the time of partition, India including Pakistan & Bangladesh was divided into hundreds of small entities or provinces. No particular nationalism, nothing like that, was followed by those erstwhile provinces of undivided India. Each province had a ruler or a king who was named differently & many among them were interlocked into mutual battles & infighting since years. Each province had different traditions, customs, values, religious practices, ethnicity & language. Second, during & before Muslim rule of India, nothing like Indian Nationalism existed. Thirdly, it was during early part of twentieth century when some Hindu ultra- nationalists like V D Savarkar in 1923 tried to find “revival” of so called lost-Hindu Nationalism which they termed Hindutva —-lost to foreign rule not of the British but Muslims. British were not bad people like Muslims and it was for this reason that RSS did not choose to fight them. According to this RSS ideology, Hitler too was not a bad guy as he simply wanted to preserve his culture & race from the influence of other-bad Semitic races like Jews. “Admiration for Nazism—– often reframed with a genocidal hatred for Muslims—- is rampant in the Hindu nationalist camp, which has never been as mainstream as it is now”. X M S Golwalkar in his book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, gives a vent to this racist ideology in these recorded words: “Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”. ” XI He then vents his spleen to Muslims in these harshest words: “Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening. The lion was not dead, only sleeping. He is rousing himself up again and the world has to see the might of the regenerated Hindu Nation strike down the enemy’s hosts with its mighty arm’. XII

This Hindutva ideology has been adopted by BJP in 1989 as its official political ideology & other Ultra Hindu Nationalist parties VHP, HMS, SS, etc. It has to be noted here that expression “Hindutva “ was first time in 1925 coined & propagated by three-times-banned right-wing-Hindu Organisation called RSS. Though it had very little role in Indian Freedom Struggle for its open “communal” policies, since demolition of 464- years old Babri Masjid on 6th December, 1992, its rise with gloomy forebodings for future of India’s secular democracy became clearly noticeable. XIII Landslide win in Parliamentary elections of 2019 for BJP which is undoubtedly political face of all right wing Hindu organisations of India has emboldened the right wing groups to openly intimidate, threaten & even physically assault & sometimes kill or lynch minority members especially Indian Muslims, though governments in power “disown their actions” but without bringing culprits to book. The Parliamentary election sweep of BJP-RSS has been viewed by world media as “bad for India & world”, XIV India’s soul “lost to dark politics” XV and as re-election won on “tide of violence, fake news & resentment”. XVI

As its avowed policy is to “officially” declare India a Hindu Rashtra, BJP-RSS ruling elite are also investing on re-writing Indian history, as mentioned above, as it believes that by re-writing history of India by saffron pen & ink, it can pursue its political agenda of Hindu Rashtra conveniently. Hundreds of years recorded history cannot be replaced by blizzard of lies & concoctions. Fabricating history saffron-way is bound to boomerang because Indian history is not recorded in India only. All historical facts of Indian subcontinent are preserved in history books of the world. And, so, re-writing Indian history to simply hindunise or saffronise it, to augment political agenda of Sangh Parivar, is not-so-easy as it is erroneously presumed to be. The difference between history & myth is & shall always be there. Muslims including now those living in Pakistan & Bangladesh, 600 million odd, their rule, their contribution to Indian culture, art & its development cannot be lost sight of while reading & writing history of India. For conventional & convincing defeats of Hindu Rajas by Mughals & other Muslim Rulers of the past, the present day Muslims of India cannot be put to collective punishment, socially, psychologically, politically & financially. Present scenario of India adequately highlights the agonies the Indian Muslims are facing at the hands of right wing Hindu organisations of India continuously.

References:

I. The New York Times dated 17-05-2019 , They Peddle Myths & Call it History by Historian Romila Thapar;

II. Website thehill.com: blog “Rewriting history & the pursuit of ignorance” dated 26-02-2015 by Michael Rosenbaum;

III. See Indian Express dated 16-10-2018 : 20 Cities that changed their names;

IV. The Indian Express dated 09-05-2018 & 10-05-2018;

V. daily O dated 28-07-2017: Akbar v/s Maharana Pratap by Sudharshan R Garg;

VI. India Today Megazine, online, dated 27-05-2019[No proposal received from Delhi Government to change name];

VII. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind (Pocket Books, New York, 1954), page 20;

VIII. Hindustan Times dated 25-08-2017 [Taj Mahal is a tomb , not a temple]; see also Financial Times dated27-03-2015; India Today dated 20-04-2018 [Agra Court imposes fine] ; the Times of India dated 10-07-2018 [Only local Muslims & not non-local Muslims of Agra can offer Nimaz in Taj Mahal Masjid, SC];

IX. The New York Times dated 17-05-2019, They Peddle Myths & Call it History by Historian Romila Thapar;

X. Haaretz ( Israeli Newspaper) dated 14-12-2017 [Hitler’s Hindus , article by Shrenik Rao];

XI. M S Golwalkar, WE or Our Nationhood Defined (Bharat Publications Nagpur, 1939, pdf) pages 87-88;

XII. Ibid at pages 51-52; see also The Hindu, Business Line, dated 27-11-2015 [Golwalkar drew lessons from history]; The Dawn dated 02-08-2016[From Golwalkar to Trump];

XIII. India After Gandhi, Ramchandra Guha, (Picador India, 2008) page 658; Sayed Naqvi, Being the other: Muslim in India (Aleph Book Company, Daryagunj, New Delhi 2016) pages 116[Babri Masjid demolition left a permanent scar on Indian Muslim’s psyche destroying their confidence in the Indian political system].

XIV. The Guardian editorial dated 23-05-2019[Guardian view on Narendra Modi’s landslide];

XV. Scroll.in dated 24-05-2019 [Modi’s win will see];

XVI. The New York Times dated 23-05-2019 [How Narendra Modi seduced India, opinion by Pankaj Mishra].

M J Aslam is Author, academic, story-teller & freelance columnist.

1 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Vltchek

Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault.

North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that things are not going well”. If everything else fails, they simply try to get some second or third job, and just survive, somehow.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris.In these nations, there is suddenly no appetite for sacrificing their own people on the altar of well-being of Western citizens. Several countries, including Venezuela and Syria, are even willing to fight for their independence.

Despite insane and sadistic embargos and sanctions imposed on them by the West; China, Russia and Iran are now flourishing, in many fields doing much better than Europe and North America.

If they are really pushed any further, China, Russia and their allies combined, could easily collapse the economy of the United States; an economy which is built on clay and unserviceable debt. It is also becoming clear that militarily, the Pentagon could never defeat Beijing, Moscow, even Teheran.

After terrorizing the world for ages, the West is now almost finished: morally, economically, socially, and even militarily. It still plunders, but it has no plan to improve the state of the world. It cannot even think in such terms.

It hates China, and every other country that does have progressive, internationalist plans. It smears President Xi Jinping and his brainchild, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but there is nothing new and exciting that the West is able to offer to the world. Yes, of course, those regime changes, coups, military interventions and theft of natural resources,but anything else? No, silence!

*

During my two weeks long working visit to Europe, in the Czech Republic (now renamed to Czechia), a country that enjoys a higher HDI (Human Development Index defined by UNDP) than Italy or Spain, I saw several young, decently dressed men, picking through garbage bins, right in front of my hotel, looking for food.

I saw young Europeans kneeling and begging in Stuttgart, the second richest city in Germany (where both Mercedes and Porsche car are produced).

What I observed in all seven countries of the EU that I visited, was confusion, but also indifference, extreme selfishness and almost grotesque idleness. In great contrast to Asia, everybody in Europe was obsessed with their ‘rights’ and privileges, while no one gave a slightest damn about responsibilities.

When my plane from Copenhagen landed in Stuttgart, it began to rain. It was not heavy rain; just rain. The Canad air jet operated by SAS is a small aircraft, and it did not get a gate. It parked a few meters from the terminal and the captain announced that ground staff refused to bring a bus, due to lightning and the downpour. And so, we stayed inside the plane, for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. The lightning ended. The drizzle continued. 40 minutes, no bus. One hour later, a bus appeared. A man from the ground staff emerged leisurely, totally wrapped in plastic, protected hermetically from rain. Passengers, on the other hand, were not even offered umbrellas.

“I love myself”, I later read graffiti in the center of the city.

The graffiti was not far from the central train station, which is being refurbished at the cost of several billion euros, and against the will of the citizens. The monstrous project is marching on at an insanely lazy pace, with only 5-6 construction workers detectable at a time, down in the tremendous excavations.

Stuttgart is unbelievably filthy. Escalators often do not work, drunkards are all over, and so are beggars. It is as if for decades, no one did any face-lift to the city. Once free museums are charging hefty entrance fees, and most of the public benches have disappeared from parks and avenues.

The decay is omnipresent. The German rail system (DB) has virtually collapsed. Almost all trains are late, from the ‘regional’; to the once glorified ICE (these German ‘bullet trains’ are actually moving slower, on average, even in comparison to some Indonesian inter-city expresses).

The services provided everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Italy, are grotesquely bad. Convenience stores, cafes, hotels – all are understaffed, badly run and mostly arrogant. Humans are often replaced by dysfunctional machines. Tension is everywhere,the bad mood omnipresent. Demanding anything is unthinkable; one risks being snapped at, insulted, sent to hell.

I still remember how Western propaganda used to glorify services in the capitalist countries, when we were growing up in the Communist East: “The customer is always treated like a god”. Yes, right! How laughable.

For centuries, “European workers” were ‘subsidized’ by colonialist and neo-colonialist plunder, perpetrated in all non-white corners of the world. They ended up being spoiled, showered with benefits, and unproductive. That was fine for the elites: as long as the masses kept voting for the imperialist regime of the West.

“The Proletariat” eventually became right-wing, imperialist, even hedonistic.

I saw a lot this time, and soon I will write much more about it.

What I did not witness, was hope,or enthusiasm. There was no optimism. No healthy and productive exchange of ideas, or profound debate; something I am so used to in China, Russia or Venezuela,just confusion, apathy and decay everywhere.

And hate for those countries that are better, more human, more advanced, and full of socialist enthusiasm.

*

Italy felt slightly different. Again, I met great left-wing thinkers there; philosophers, professors, filmmakers, journalists. I spoke at Sapienza University, the biggest university in Europe.I lectured about Venezuela and Western imperialism. I worked with the Venezuelan embassy in Rome. All of that was fantastic and enlightening, but was this really Italy?

A day after I left Rome for Beirut, Italians went to the polls. And they withdrew their supports from my friends of the 5-Star-Movement, leaving them with just over 17%, while doubling the backing for the extreme right-wing Northern League.

This virtually happened all over Europe. UK Labor lost, while right-wing Brexit forces gained significantly. Extreme right-wing, even near-fascist parties, reached unexpected heights.

It was all “me, me, me” politics. An orgy of “political selfies”. Me had enough of immigrants. Me wants better benefits. Me wants better medical care, shorter working hours. And so on.

Who pays for it, no one in Europe seems to care. Not once did I hear any European politicians lamenting about the plundering of West Papua or Borneo, about Amazonia or the Middle East, let alone Africa.

And immigration? Did we hear anything about that nuisance of European refugees, millions of them, many illegal, that have descended in the last decades on Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, and even Sub Continent? They are escaping, in hordes, from meaninglessness, depressions, existential emptiness. In the process, they are stripping the locals of land, real estate, beaches, everything.

“Immigrants out”? Fine; then European immigrants out from the rest of the world, too! Enough of the one-sidedness!

The recent EU elections clearly showed that Europe has not evolved. For countless dark centuries, it used to live only for its pleasure, murdering millions in order to support its high life.

Right now, it is trying to reshuffle its political and administrative system, so it can continue doing the same.More efficiently!

On top of it, absurdly, the world is expected to pity that overpaid and badly performing, mainly right-wing and lethargic European proletariat, and sacrifice further tens of millions of people, just in order to further increase its standard of living.

All this should not be allowed to happen. Never again! It has to be stopped.

What Europe has achieved so far, at the expense of billions of lives of “the others”, is definitely not worthy of dying for.

Beware of Europe and its people! Study its history. Study imperialism, colonialism and the genocides it has been spreading all over the world.

Let them vote in their fascists. But keep them away. Prevent them from spreading their poison all over the world.

They want to put the interests of their countries first? Wonderful! Let us do exactly the same: The people of Russia first, too! China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!

*

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist.

1 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jafar M Ramini

This is the Arabic name for the holiest of cities, the most sacred of cities, the most beautiful yet tragic of cities in the world. Jerusalem.

I have known Jerusalem all my life. I travelled to Jerusalem most weekends when I was young and walked through the cobbled streets and the alleyways of the ancient city. I ventured into each and every church and mosque and stood in awe within the Church of The Holy Sepulchre and in the great piazza of Al Haram Al Sharif. Al Aqsa Mosque, The Dome of the Rock, these magnificent edifices dating back hundreds of years have an aura all of their own that can’t be replicated or replaced. I remember climbing the Mount of Olives and the surrounding hills and filling my lungs with the mingled aromas of the olive trees, the jasmine and the almonds along with the thyme growing beneath my feet.

Now at this ripe age, when I look at this unique city I wonder what has befallen my beloved Jerusalem and what woes do the Zionist settlers have in mind for the future of Al Quds?

These are not rhetorical questions. What I am doing is airing my fears and my sense foreboding when I see or read what the Israeli occupation is doing to our beloved city and our brothers and sisters living there, the Jerusalemites. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been going on for the last 71 years. The ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem has intensified since Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. More Israelis are moving into East Jerusalem, more property has been confiscated or bought by deceitful proxies and Jerusalem has been defaced beyond recognition. The assault on our ancient city does not stop at the harassment of the Jerusalemites and the revoking of their residency permits. It does not stop at a few deceitful Palestinians and Arabs and others selling Jerusalem by the square metre to the feral Israeli settlers. The assault continues and it culminated a year ago when Mr Trump, declaring Jerusalem, a city he does not own nor have any connection or title to, as the United Capital of Israel. As I am writing these words a further tender has been issued for the construction of over four hundred housing units for Israelis in Arab East Jerusalem. In the meantime, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Mr Trump and his special Middle East envoy is touring the area, twisting the arm of King Abdullah II of Jordan to accept ‘the deal of the century’ and to attend the ‘forthcoming workshop’ in Manama, Bahrain to complete the total abrogation of Palestinian rights and aspirations and the end of Jerusalem as a Palestinian city.

What is Palestine without Jerusalem at its heart?

Today is the final Friday of the holy month of Ramadan. A day that was designated internationally “Al Quds” Day. Jerusalem Day. It was started by Iran forty years ago and I have just seen live footage of hundreds of thousands of Iranians commemorating the day by marching through the streets of Teheran and other Iranian cities waving banners saying “ No to the Deal Of The Century”.

With all that is going on in the Middle East, the amassing of American fire power, the ratcheting up of the rhetoric, propaganda and lies against Iran will we live to see another Al Quds Day?

Will the international community take note of what is happening to the city that is holy to all the people of the book, Jews, Christians and Muslims or will the world continue to look the other way and allow Israel to continue the Judaisation of the Holy City?

Jafar M Ramini is a Palestinian writer and political analyst, based in London, presently in Perth, Western Australia.

31 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sandeep Banerjee

Dr Kamel Eddine Fekhar was arrested on March 31 by the authority in the de facto military rule that is continuing in Algeria. He started hunger strike and became very weak. His health was already fragile and he undertook several hunger strikes in the past when he was arrested protesting government injustices. Rightly he was honoured there not only as a practising doctor but also, or more, as a human right activist. Sadly, he when his health was much deteriorated the military jail sent him to hospital and he died on May 28 at an age of 55 only; and what an irony, the hospital where he died is named after that great Dr (Psychiatrist) and Algerian Revolutionary Franz Fanon.

Louisa Hanoune, the Secretary General of Workers Party (PT, Parti des travailleurs, a party known to be Trotskyite communist) is also under military custody since May 9. And she is not alone. Nobody knows exactly how many or how many hundreds of activists and protestors are under arrest. But arresting Madame Hanoune is a signifier, it shows that the authority is not ready to spare anyone. Louisa Hanoune is the first woman in the Arab world to contest in a presidential election, that was in 2004, and in 2009 presidential election she got 4.22% vote to be the runners up, where Saïd Abdelaziz Bouteflika won for his third term with 90.24% votes, an election which many called fraudulent. PT is one of the major parties in Algeria. She is now under arrest, the military court accused her for plotting conspiracy against the military and the state. Many political parties together demanded immediate release of Louisa Hanoune.

Protests in Algeria started in second half of February this year when the president Saïd Bouteflika announced that he would run again for presidency for his fifth term in the ensuing vote. He is already 82, he suffered serious heart disease and spent several times in hospital, lost ability of speech at least for some time and etc. – people believe he cannot manage affairs. Moreover, people are disgruntled with clientele-nepotism, coteries and corruption. And the big wasteful spending he made – to build the largest mosque of Africa (or the world?) spending allegedly $4 billion (a French doctor satirically said that the president could have built 200 hospitals with this money)! With protests exacerbating Bouteflika purportedly retreated. Practically the Army generalissimo and bureaucrats are running the country as a country under military rule.

Every time such a protest happens the media talks about ‘youth protest’, ‘leaderless protest’, and so on, like “Youth lead the movement for change” reported BBC News in mid-April. The same way they did not highlight the Egyptian and Tunisian workers’ movement during 2011 like those in Gazl Al Mahalah and Alexandria in Egypt or Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. We shall look into some news here. But before that a general picture: Each Friday hundreds of thousands protested. Last Friday, May 24, was the fourteenth Friday of protests, and police and military were over working to diffuse perhaps the largest protest yet happened. Police even was not allowing people to have their Iftar that evening in the GPO stairs, a very usual place for many people for their fast breaking in this month of Ramjan. Hundreds of thousands are protesting, Fridays being the biggest protest days. People are chanting angry slogans against army general Ahmed Gaid Salah. Army is keen for an early president election possibly on July first week. But main political forces and people too want an interim process and interim civilian government that will also review the constitution and look after the election.

UGTA (Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens) is the biggest Trade Union in Algeria. It is informally controlled by the ruling party FLN, that is the party of Saïd Abdelaziz Bouteflika. This party is in the continuity of the force that once took a big role in the Algerian revolution. And also it was one of the forces (and the other main force was the military loyal to it) that fought against Islamist forces when the later tried to capture state after almost poised to winning ‘democratically’ a national election – the elections were not held after the first phase in fear that the very popular FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) would win the elections. (FIS won 54% votes in local body elections in 1990.) A hard-core Islamist armed group emerged in reaction to banning FIS. And civil war followed for years after years. Ultimately FLN and army became victorious and when Bouteflika assumed presidency in 1999 after president post was managed by pro-army persons, the civil war almost stopped.

UGTA is ‘under’ FLN control. But UGTA is composed of ‘people’, in this case ordinary workers, and they were also full of dissent like their fellow toiling countrymen. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of France released a material, “Algérie: de la contestation dans l’UGTA et les grèves” on April 17, 2019 written by Hocine Guernane. There were general strikes in between march 10 and 14, there were marches. There were calls included ‘the departure of the system’, ‘reorganisation of UGTA’. This was started by the provincial union of Bejaia. Provincial UGTA bodies of Bejaïa, Tizi-Ouzou, Saïda, Tlemcen met in Algiers and signed a communiqué through which they reaffirmed their involvement in the popular movement “to the satisfaction of its demands” and “the building of a new republic” and they demanded the departure of UGTA chief Sidi Said and his national secretariat. In response Sidi Said and the leadership ordered expulsion of these local leaders. This only fuelled the movement. On April 10, members of the CEN (Central Executive Committee), supreme body between two congresses, the Provinces of Algiers, Blida, Tipaza, Médéa, Brouira, Tizi-Ouzou, total 32 out of 47 members, wrote a statement in which they declared to support the popular movement and denounce secretary general Sidi Said. Afterwards Federation of Metallurgy and Federation of Electronics formally joined the workers’ protests. On April 11 at Bejaia, under a heavy rain, thousands of workers assembled and shouted slogans – Sidi Said get Out – UGTA is not your property it is ours. Later UGTA local bodies decided to make a show in front of the UGTA headquarters.

It remains to be seen what happens in Algeria in near future, and how toiling people protest in the coming Fridays. Recently in the NPA website we saw a FB post of Mahmoud Rechidi which tells (in easy translation) ‘In Algeria 70% of the working population earns less than 100 € a month. Minimum wage at Algeria is lowest in the region. But there are mad people who say this is not the time to talk social issues’. Hundreds of migrants fleeing to Europe die of boat capsize. Algeria cannot continue like this. [First edition of this was written on 29th May and was published in Frontier Weekly online on 30-5-2019; this updated version, with photographs and their twitter sources, is dated 31-5-2019.]

The author is an activist who writes on political and socioeconomic issues and also on environmental issues. Some of his articles are published in Frontier Weekly. He lives in West Bengal, India. Presently he is a research worker. He can be reached at sandeepbanerjee00@gmail.com

31 May 2019

Soure: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Team

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now imprisoned in the UK, has been moved to the hospital wing of the Belmarsh prison in the UK, prompting concerns about his health pending the hearing on his extradition to the US.

“The decision of prison authorities to move him to the health ward speaks for itself,” said WikiLeaks.

It said Assange has lost a lot of weight and was barely able to speak to his Swedish lawyer last week.

Media reports said:

Assange’s health had already “significantly deteriorated” during the nearly seven years he spent inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and has continued to get worse over the seven weeks he has spent in Belmarsh, WikiLeaks said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Assange’s health situation on Friday was such that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him,” his lawyer Per Samuelson told reporters after visiting Belmarsh, but the quote was barely reported in Sweden, let alone elsewhere.

WikiLeaks statement said:

WikiLeaks has grave concerns about the state of health of our publisher, Julian Assange, who has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison. Mr Assange´s health had already significantly deteriorated after seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy, under conditions that were incompatible with basic human rights. The United Nations twice found him to have been arbitrarily detained and called on the United Kingdom to honor its commitments under international law and free him. The UK’s refusal to abide by UN rulings, and its subsequent treatment of Mr. Assange since his arrest, presents serious questions about the UK’s standing as a human rights-abiding nation.

In his last year in the embassy, as the US finalized its extraditions plans, Julian Assange was, at the bequest of US authourities, totally isolated and gagged – a situation designed to make his life as hard as possible.

During the seven weeks in Belmarsh his health has continued to deteriorate and he has dramatically lost weight. The decision of prison authorities to move him to the health ward speaks for itself.

We strongly condemn the refusal by the Swedish court to postpone a hearing on 3rd June on the basis of Mr Assange’s health condition. Defense lawyer for Assange, Per Samuelson said that Julian Assange’s health state last Friday was such “that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him”.

Tomorrow, May 30, there is a formal hearing in Westminster Court on the Extradition request by the Trump administration. The initial U.S. warrant has been expanded to include a life sentence or potential death penalty under the Espionage Act, announced last week in the the superseding indictment which disclosed 17 additional charges, bringing the potential sentence to 175 years in prison. The indictments have been widely condemned by free press organizations as the most serious attack against publishing activities in modern times — the Trump administration in essence criminalizes the very act of journalism. The indictment utilises the archaic Espionage Act of 1917 to indict a publisher for the first time in history–in an unprecedented escalation of the Trump administration’s war on the free press.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief:

“Julian’s case is of major historic significance. It will be remembered as the worst attack on press freedom in our lifetime. The People need to voice their condemnation; it is their politicians, their courts, their police and their prisons that are being abused in order to leave this black stain on history. Please act now to avert this shame”.

Sweden has rejected Samuelson’s motion to delay Assange’s extradition hearing, though he was never charged with anything.

Swedish investigators never interviewed Assange about claims of “sexual assault” that seem to have been trumped-up as a pretext to extradite him to the US in 2012, and prompted him to seek asylum in Ecuador.

The preliminary hearing on Washington’s extradition request is still scheduled for today, May 30.

The US has charged Assange with 18 counts under the Espionage Act, which carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.

“Julian’s case is of major historic significance. It will be remembered as the worst attack on press freedom in our time,” said Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief.

Kristinn Hrafnsson urged people everywhere to oppose their politicians, courts, police and prisons from being abused to “leave this black stain on history.”

The Wikileaks statement also called attention to pressure by the United States on the Ecuadorean government to deny Assange during his last year in the embassy any communication rights in a bid to have the asylum seeker “isolated and gagged.

Belmarsh prison is a high-security prison located in Thamesmead southeast London and holds hardened murders, rapists and other violent offenders.

Everyone else must take my place: Assange in letter from British prison

An earlier report datelined May 24, 2019 said:

In a handwritten letter from Belmarsh prison, Julian Assange says he is being denied a chance to defend himself and that elements in the US that “hate truth, liberty and justice” want him extradited and dead.

The letter was sent to independent British journalist Gordon Dimmack. It was dated May 13 – ten days before the US announced 17 additional charges under the Espionage Act against the jailed whistleblower.

In light of the new indictment, Dimmack read out the letter in a YouTube video. A photo of the handwritten note was soon posted online as well.

“I have been isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself: no laptop, no internet, ever, no computer, no library, so far, but even if I get access it will just be for a half an hour, with everyone else, once a week,” Assange wrote.

He wrote: “The other side? A superpower that has been preparing for 9 years, with hundreds of people and untold millions spent on the case.”

I am defenseless, he wrote.

“I am unbroken, albeit literally surrounded by murderers, but, the days where I could read and speak and organize to defend myself, my ideals, and my people are over until I am free! Everyone else must take my place,” Assange wrote in the letter.

“The US government, or rather, those regrettable elements in it that hate truth, liberty and justice, want to cheat their way into my extradition and death, rather than letting the public hear the truth, for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated 7 times for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Assange wrote.

Truth, ultimately, is all we have, Assange said in the letter.

The new charges against Assange have alarmed even the mainstream media outlets that have spent years pouring vitriol on WikiLeaks, as they began to realize his prosecution along those lines would essentially criminalize all journalism.

30 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.”

That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade – or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.

At the weekend, a Guardian editorial – the paper’s official voice and probably the segment most scrutinised by senior staff – made just such a false claim:

Then there is the rape charge that Mr Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place.

The fact that the Guardian, supposedly the British media’s chief defender of liberal values, can make this error-strewn statement after nearly a decade of Assange-related coverage is simply astounding. And that it can make such a statement days after the US finally admitted that it wants to lock up Assange for 175 years on bogus “espionage” charges – a hand anyone who wasn’t being wilfully blind always knew the US was preparing to play – is still more shocking.

Assange faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone “rape charges”. As former UK ambassador Craig Murray recently explained, the Guardian has been misleading readers by falsely claiming that an attempt by a Swedish prosecutor to extradite Assange – even though the move has not received the Swedish judiciary’s approval – is the same as his arrest on rape charges. It isn’t.

Also, Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassay to evade the Swedish investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted on political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange’s concerns that the US would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest of his life.

Assange, of course, has been proven – yet again – decisively right by recent developments.

Trapped in herd-think

The fact that so many ordinary people keep making these basic errors has a very obvious explanation. It is because the corporate media keep making these errors.

These are is not the kind of mistakes that can be explained away as an example of what one journalist has termed the problem of “churnalism”: the fact that journalists, chasing breaking news in offices depleted of staff by budget cuts, are too overworked to cover stories properly.

British journalists have had many years to get the facts straight. In an era of social media, journalists at the Guardian and the BBC have been bombarded by readers and activists with messages telling them how they are getting basic facts wrong in the Assange case. But the journalists keep doing it anyway. They are trapped in a herd-think entirely divorced from reality.

Rather than listen to experts, or common sense, these “journalists” keep regurgitating the talking points of the British security state, which are as good as identical to the talking points of the US security state.

What is so striking in the Assange coverage is the sheer number of legal anomalies in his case – and these have been accumulating relentlessly from the very start. Almost nothing in his case has gone according to the normal rules of legal procedure. And yet that very revealing fact is never noticed or commented on by the corporate media. You need to have a blind spot the size of Langley, Virginia, not to notice it.

If Assange wasn’t the head of Wikileaks, if he hadn’t embarrassed the most important western states and their leaders by divulging their secrets and crimes, if he hadn’t created a platform that allows whistleblowers to reveal the outrages committed by the western power establishment, if he hadn’t undermined that establishment’s control over information dissemination, none of the last 10 years would have followed the course it did.

If Assange had not provided us with an information revolution that undermines the narrative matrix created to serve the US security state, two Swedish women – unhappy with Assange’s sexual etiquette – would have gotten exactly what they said in their witness statements they wanted: pressure from the Swedish authorites to make him take an HIV test to give them peace of mind.

He would have been allowed back to the UK (as he in fact was allowed to do by the Swedish prosecutor) and would have gotten on with developing and refining the Wikileaks project. That would have helped all of us to become more critically aware of how we are being manipulated – not only by our security services but also by the corporate media that so often act as their mouthpiece.

Which is precisely why that did not happen and why Assange has been under some form of detention since 2010. Since then, his ability to perform his role as exposer of serial high-level state crimes has been ever more impeded – to the point now that he may never be able to oversee and direct Wikileaks ever again.

His current situation – locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison, in solitary confinement and deprived of access to a computer and all meaningful contact with the outside world – is so far based solely on the fact that he committed a minor infraction, breaching his police bail. Such a violation, committed by anyone else, almost never incurs prosecution, let alone a lengthy jail sentence.

So here is a far from complete list – aided by the research of John Pilger, Craig Murray and Caitlin Johnstone – of some of the most glaring anomalies in Assange’s legal troubles. There are 17 of them below. Each might conceivably have been possible in isolation. But taken together they are overwhelming evidence that this was never about enforcing the law. From the start, Assange faced political persecution.

No judicial authority

• In late summer 2010, neither of the two Swedish women alleged Assange had raped them when they made police statements. They went together to the police station after finding out that Assange had slept with them both only a matter of days apart and wanted him to be forced to take an HIV test. One of the women, SW, refused to sign the police statement when she understood the police were seeking an indictment for rape. The investigation relating to the second woman, AA, was for a sexual assault specific to Sweden. A condom produced by AA that she says Assange tore during sex was found to have neither her nor Assange’s DNA on it, undermining her credibility.

 

• Sweden’s strict laws protecting suspects during preliminary investigations were violated by the Swedish media to smear Assange as a rapist. In response, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took charge and quickly cancelled the investigation: “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” She later concluded: “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”

 

• The case was revived by another prosecutor, Marianne Ny, during which time Assange was questioned and spent more than a month in Sweden waiting for developments in the case. He was then told by prosecutors that he was free to leave for the UK, suggesting that any offence they believed he had committed was not considered serious enough to detain him in Sweden. Nonetheless, shortly afterwards, Interpol issued a Red Notice for Assange, usually reserved for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

 

• The UK supreme court approved an extradition to Sweden based on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) in 2010, despite the fact that it was not signed by a “judicial authority”, only by the Swedish prosecutor. The terms of the EAW agreement were amended by the UK government shortly after the Assange ruling to make sure such an abuse of legal procedure never occurred again.

 

• The UK supreme court also approved Assange’s extradition even though Swedish authorities refused to offer an assurance that he would not be extradited onwards to the US, where a grand jury was already formulating draconian charges in secret against him under the Espionage Act. The US similarly refused to give an assurance they would not seek his extradition.

 

• In these circumstances, Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London in summer 2012, seeking political asylum. That was after the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, blocked Assange’s chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

 

• Australia not only refused Assange, a citizen, any help during his long ordeal, but prime minister Julia Gillard even threatened to strip Assange of his citizenship, until it was pointed out that it would be illegal for Australia to do so.

 

• Britain, meanwhile, not only surrounded the embassy with a large police force at great public expense, but William Hague, the foreign secretary, threatened to tear up the Vienna Convention, violating Ecuador’s diplomatic territory by sending UK police into the embassy to arrest Assange.

Six years of heel-dragging

• Although Assange was still formally under investigation, Ny refused to come to London to interview him, despite similar interviews having been conducted by Swedish prosecutors 44 times in the UK in the period Assange was denied that right.

 

• In 2016, international legal experts in the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which adjudicates on whether governments have complied with human rights obligations, ruled that Assange was being detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. Although both countries participated in the UN investigation, and had given the tribunal vocal support when other countries were found guilty of human rights violations, they steadfastly ignored its ruling in favour of Assange. UK Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond, flat-out lied in claiming the UN panel was “made up of lay people and not lawyers”. The tribunal comprises leading experts in international law, as is clear from their CVs. Nonetheless, the lie became Britain’s official response to the UN ruling. The British media performed no better. A Guardian editorial dismissed the verdict as nothing more than a “publicity stunt”.

 

• Ny finally relented on interviewing Assange in November 2016, coming to London after six years of heel-dragging. However, she barred Assange’s lawyer from being present. That was a gross irregularity that Ny was due to be questioned about in May 2017 by a Stockholm judge. Apparently rather than face those questions, Ny decided to close the investigation against Assange the very same day.

 

• In fact, correspondence that was later revealed under a Freedom of Information request shows that the British prosecution service, the CPS, pressured the Swedish prosecutor not to come to the London to interview Assange through 2010 and 2011, thereby creating the embassy standoff.

 

• Also, the CPS destroyed most of the incriminating correspondence to circumvent the FoI requests. The emails that surfaced did so only because some copies were accidentally overlooked in the destruction spree. Those emails were bad enough. They show that in 2013 Sweden had wanted to drop the case against Assange but had come under strong British pressure to continue the pretence of seeking his extradition. There are emails from the CPS stating, “Don’t you dare” drop the case, and most revealing of all: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”

 

• It also emerged that Marianne Ny had deleted an email she received from the FBI.

 

• Despite his interview with Ny taking place in late 2016, Assange was not subseqently charged in absentia – an option Sweden could have pursued if it had thought the evidence was strong enough.

 

• After Sweden dropped the investigation against Assange, his lawyers sought last year to get the British arrest warrant for his bail breach dropped. They had good grounds, both because the allegations over which he’d been bailed had been dropped by Sweden and because he had justifiable cause to seek asylum given the apparent US interest in extraditing him and locking him up for life for political crimes. His lawyers could also argue convincingly that the time he had spent in confinement, first under house arrest and then in the embassy, was more than equivalent to time, if any, that needed to be served for the bail infringement. However, the judge, Emma Arbuthnot, rejected the Assange team’s strong legal arguments. She was hardly a dispassionate observer. In fact, in a properly ordered world she should have recused herself, given that she is the wife of a government whip, who was also a business partner of a former head of MI6, Britain’s version of the CIA.

 

• Assange’s legal rights were again flagrantly violated last week, with the collusion of Ecuador and the UK, when US prosecutors were allowed to seize Assange’s personal items from the embassy while his lawyers and UN officials were denied the right to be present.

Information dark ages

Even now, as the US prepares its case to lock Assange away for the rest of his life, most are still refusing to join the dots. Chelsea Manning has been repeatedly jailed, and is now facing ruinous fines for every day she refuses to testify against Assange as the US desperately seeks to prop up its bogus espionage claims. In Medieval times, the authorities were more honest: they simply put people on the rack.

Back in 2017, when the rest of the media were still pretending this was all about Assange fleeing Swedish “justice”, John Pilger noted:

[QUOTE]

In 2008, a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch” foretold a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally. The “mission” was to destroy the “trust” that was WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising such an unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim.” …

According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington’s bid to get Assange is “unprecedented in scale and nature”. …

The US Justice Department has contrived charges of “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy”. The favoured Espionage Act, which was meant to deter pacifists and conscientious objectors during World War One, has provisions for life imprisonment and the death penalty. …

In 2015, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security”. This is a kangaroo court.

[END QUOTE]

All of this information was available to any journalist or newspaper that cared to search it out and wished to publicise it. And yet not one corporate media outlet has done so over the past nine years. Instead they have shored up a series of preposterous US and UK state narratives designed to keep Assange behind bars and propel the rest of us back into the information dark ages.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

29 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat

While in truly technical terms Dr Payal Tadvi committed suicide on May 22nd 2019 in her hostel room in Mumbai, but for all practical reasons, I would call it a murder, a crime which was not merely racial hatred but also look like Islamophobia as she seem to belong to tribal community practicing Islamic faith. The twenty six year old Gynecologist was pursuing her post graduate course and would have become the first doctor from her community. It is so difficult for the Adivasis to come up and stand when there is so much of concealed hatred. It is reported that Payal has complained to higher authorities about the continuous harassment by her savarna colleagues and room mates namely Dr Hema Ahuja, Dr Bhakti Mehra and Dr Anikta Khandelwal who were her seniors too. They would not only not allow her to perform surgeries but were regularly harassing and humiliating her.

Payal had informed this to her mother Abeda Tadvi and father Salim who live in Jalgaon and work in Zila Parishad office. She was a very hard working girl, a brave one who passed out her MBBS degree in Gynecology from Miraj. A report in the Hindu, quoting her husband Dr Salman Tadvi says, “When she came to Nair Hospital for her postgraduation, she was asked to temporarily share a room with Dr. Hema Ahuja and Dr. Bhakti Mehar. The two began harassing her soon,” “The two doctors would go to the toilet and wipe their feet on her mattress and litter it. When she would be away, they would taunt her that she was spending time with her husband,” he said.

Her mother Abeda Tadvi is a cancer patient and has been listening to her daughter and standing with her all the time. She said : “My daughter was extremely strong. But this constant abuse eventually broke her. The three accused should be punished so that it sets an example for others who traumatise and torture students like Payal.”

How do you define this treatment given to Payal by her savarna seniors? This is pure hate crime ? All those who are insulting Dalits and Adivasis, humiliating them, compelling them to commit suicide, attacking them, their habitat, their land are criminals and should be dwelt under hate crime laws. The savarna hate crime must be now on the top of the government agenda if it want to win ‘sabka vishwas’, trust of all. The three savarna doctors must be prosecuted with stringent laws so that this become an example but we know very well that the government and its officers have never been sincere in following the constitution and implementing the rule of law otherwise Dr Payal would not have died. Where are the institutional mechanism to protect SC-ST students. Her death is an institutional killing like that of Rohit Vemula and the BYL Nair Hospital, Mumbai can not get away from its accountability in this regard. Why are institutional mechanism not strong to deal with the discrimination which is rampant in our educational institutions. Why was there no ‘committee’ which could have taken action against these three girls. If there is a committee then what did it do ? Who are the members of the committee ? Are there SC-ST members in these committees ? Can we trust those committees where no member belong to these communities.

For clarification of many, unlike the scheduled castes, the tribes have got reservation irrespective of faiths. Payal belonged to Bhil community which has about 2.7% people practicing Islam though around Maharashtra. Total number of Bhils and Gonds in India is nearly 2.8 crore, which is 27% of the total adivasi population in India.Among the Muslim Tribal communities 1.32 lakhs live in Jammu and Kashmir and 1.12 lakh hails from Maharashtra where Bhils are the biggest tribal community where Islam is one of the practicing faiths.

Dr Payal was killed by the three seniors who happened to be women. She became the victim of hate crime where her tribal identity practicing Islamic faith might have further aggravated her troubles. How can the racists hate-mongers allow a tribal Muslim doctor, full of confidence and equally meritorious, to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. This is the crisis that the caste Hindus suffer. First they blame that the SC-ST dont have merits and when people come and join them, they become so notorious that they create all the obstacles so that these students leave their courses mid way and return their home. Those who remain in the institutions are continuously harassed in the hope they will give up. Payal did not leave the hostel and decided to stay put. There is a limit of patience. She was after all just 26 years old with no one to help her or even console her. This is how girls from Dalit Adivasi communities face when they are in these manuwadi institutions. The whole atmosphere in these so called institutions of merit is so suffocating with brahmanical arrogance that it kills the students from the Dalit Bahujan Communities.

With more and more brahmanisation process in these institutions, further obstacles are being created so that students dont come up and leave. That is a strategy by the savarna elite where the institutions and their caste owners to are party to hate crime. Will Maharashtra government act and get this case heard in a fast track court so that the hate criminals get the maximum punishment. Let the government develop mechanism in all our colleges, universities, institutions as well as offices like Women Cell, develop special cell for SC-ST communities so that such murders are not repeated and India show its commitment against caste and race based prejudices which are order of the day.

Our salute to Dr Payal Tadvi . her fighting spirit will remain alive and her death will always remind us the grave nature of discrimination that exists in our minds and body against Dalits and Adivasis. We will remain the most barbaric, uncivilised and highly prejudiced society If India does not address this issue with honesty. With so many people being kept outside humanity and denial of justice to them will never make us a great nation. Time to show real intent to fight against hate crimes on Dalits and Adivasis.

Vidya Bhushan Rawat is a social and human rights activist.

28 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Team

In Shahjahanpur of Uttar Pradesh a mother walked with her dead son’s body home as the hospital denied ambulance. The deceased child had been admitted to the hospital after he encountered high fever. It was alleged that three ambulances were parked at the hospital but the authorities failed to spare one.

The doctors of the concerned hospital dismissed the claims of the parents. The father of the deceased told the news agency, ANI that the doctors asked them to take their child to another hospital. The hospital also refused to give them a vehicle for going to another hospital.

With no money in their pockets, the deceased decided to walk to another hospital. The mother of the deceased alleged that her son had passed away on their way to the hospital.

The emergency medical officer, Anurag Parashar stated that they had admitted a child named Afroz in their hospital at 8:10 pm. Parashar added that since the condition of the child was not good, they asked the parents to take him to Lucknow for proper treatment. Parashar alleged that on hearing this, the parents of the child ‘scoffed’ and said that they will take their child wherever they want. After saying this, the parents of the deceased allegedly left.

Madhya Pradesh Farmer, Family Of Five Consumes Poison In Suicide Pact, Unable To Repay Rs 1.6 Lakh Debt

In Madhya Pradesh a small scale farmer killed himself in a suicide pact along with his family. Ashok Prajapati, a resident of Rewa district attempted suicide with his wife and three children by consuming poison. While Ashok, his wife Sunita and their 14-year-old son died their two other children are still undergoing treatment in a hospital.

According to Ashok’s father his son was a small scale farmer and after years of facing losses, he borrowed Rs 1.6 lakhs from a local moneylender to start a brick kiln.

The troubles started after Ashok failed to repay the loan. He was allegedly getting threats from the money lender. And on Friday night, he gave poison-laced soft drink to his children and wife before consuming himself.

Bihar man asks vendor his name, shoots at him on knowing he is Muslim

In a suspected case of hate crime, an inebriated man here asked a street vendor his name and then shot him in the back on learning that he is a Muslim, police said on Monday.

The suspect, Rajiv Yadav, also asked the man, Mohammed Qasim, to go to Pakistan, they said. On the compliant of Qasim, a case has been registered against Yadav, who is absconding, Station House Officer Neeraj Kumar Singh said.

“The incident took place at Kumbhi village in Cheria Bariyarpur police station area of the district on Sunday. An FIR has been registered and search is on for Rajiv Yadav. We are making efforts to bring the accused to book at the earliest,” he said.

A video of Qasim, who sells detergents to make a living, expressing his ordeal while undergoing treatment at a hospital, has gone viral on social media.

The clip shows Qasim alleging that the man fired at him in an inebriated state after asking him his name.

“I was on my daily round when the attacker stopped me and asked me my name. When I replied, he exclaimed – you are a Muslim. What are you doing here? You should go to Pakistan. He, thereafter, whipped out a pistol and opened fire. The bullet hit me in my back. His firearm had just one bullet. As he proceeded to load more ammunition, I shoved him away and ran for my life,” Qasim, who is in his 30s, alleged, adding that bystanders did not come to his rescue.

CPI leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who had contested from Begusarai in the Lok Sabha elections but lost by a huge margin to BJP’s Giriraj Singh, said leaders who spread hate for political gains were to be blamed for the incident.

“For such incidents, leaders and their cronies who spread hate for their political gains are responsible. We will not rest until the guilty are punished,” he tweeted.

Hijab-clad student in Bengal college ‘harassed’ by Jai Shri Ram chanting men

A 23-year-old hijab-clad student of North Bengal Medical College in Siliguri was allegedly threatened and intimidated by a group of 10-12 men chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ inside the institution campus on Saturday.

“I along with a friend around 10 PM were returning from the canteen after dinner when we saw a group of 10-12 men standing on the road. We were walking on our own but after noticing my attire they started shouting ‘Jai Shreei Ram’ while pointing fingers at us. Later they started thumping their feet to intimidate us. We immediately ran away to save ourselves,” said the final-year medical student.

The student maintained that she had never seen the accused in the college campus earlier. The local police initially refused to take her complaint but later asked her to remove the word ‘threatened’ from the FIR, she said. The FIR, though, was finally filed the next day with the word added.

“I am a hijab-wearing Muslim, I always wear this attire. I have never faced such harassment in my life. There was no one in the street that day to save us. Is this how we have to live now?” she added.

4 year old kid stripped, burnt with Hot Khichdi for asking extra egg in West Bengal Childcare Centre

In a disgusting and disturbing incident in West Bengal, a 4-year-old boy was stripped and burnt with steaming khichdi at a government-run child development centre since the boy asked for an extra egg for breakfast. The shocking incident of the kid crying in pain happened in Raghunathganj area of Murshidabad district on Friday. This happened in a state-funded organisation where children up to six years are given supplementary nutrition, immunization, and non-formal education.

The incident came to light after the child’s mother lodged a police complaint against the woman after her son came home crying. As per Hindustan Times, a case has been filed against the woman who has gone into hiding since the shocking incident.

28 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.

Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as “the most important assassination of the 20th century”. The assassination’s historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba’s overall legacy as a nationalist leader.

For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo’s destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.

When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold’s Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba’s determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo’s resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba’s Congolese rivals , and hired killers.

In Congo, Lumumba’s assassination is rightly viewed as the country’s original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on 30 June, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.

The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba’s followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai. Since Lumumba’s physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.

No sooner did this unification process end than a radical social movement for a “second independence” arose to challenge the neocolonial state and its pro-western leadership. This mass movement of peasants, workers, the urban unemployed, students and lower civil servants found an eager leadership among Lumumba’s lieutenants, most of whom had regrouped to establish a National Liberation Council (CNL) in October 1963 in Brazzaville, across the Congo river from Kinshasa. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement may serve as a way of gauging the overall legacy of Patrice Lumumba for Congo and Africa as a whole.

The most positive aspect of this legacy was manifest in the selfless devotion of Pierre Mulele to radical change for purposes of meeting the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress. On the other hand, the CNL leadership, which included Christophe Gbenye and Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was more interested in power and its attendant privileges than in the people’s welfare. This is Lumumbism in words rather than in deeds. As president three decades later, Laurent Kabila did little to move from words to deeds.

More importantly, the greatest legacy that Lumumba left for Congo is the ideal of national unity. Recently, a Congolese radio station asked me whether the independence of South Sudan should be a matter of concern with respect to national unity in the Congo. I responded that since Patrice Lumumba has died for Congo’s unity, our people will remain utterly steadfast in their defence of our national unity.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History

17 January 2011

Source: www.theguardian.com

By Dr Gilbert Sebastian

Sachin Mathew (name changed), one of my students who completed M.A. in at the Central University of Kerala subsequently did his B.Ed. and worked in a school in the rural part of Gorakhpur, the district the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath hails from. He had given me an interesting account of the actual conditions prevailing there. I asked him to write about it but was not inclined to write it. So I thought of making this brief note which is not, by any means, to denigrate our fellow citizens in north India but for the understanding of the compatriots of south India, especially, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh which refused to give a second tenure to the Modi government. This is for the understanding of these south Indians who wonder why Modi government won a second term in spite of the note-ban which was an “organised loot and legalised plunder”, according to Manmohan Singh; the Rafale Deal which was the “Largest Defence Scam” in Indian history according to Adv. Prashant Bhushan; writing off the debts of 3 lakh 16 thousand crore rupees of big industrialists; acute farm crisis driving an average of 12,000 farmers to suicide every year; price rise; grueling unemployment; mob lynchings; etc. The pinch of the stomach made little impact on the electoral outcome in 2019. The majoritarian nationalist rabble-rousing on terrorist attacks especially at Pulwama and the surgical strike at Balakot in Pakistan were sufficient to win the votes of the north Indians. This signaled a return of nationalist ideology – communal and anti-Pakistan in character quite unlike the secular and anti-imperialist nationalism of the Nehru era.

Returning to the discussion on Gorakhpur, the Principal cum Owner of the school is a matriculation-failed person. Sachin Mathew was the most educated person among the teachers of the school. The fees in the school is around 3000 rupees per month. Yet the demand for education was so high that the students were sitting so cramped on the school benches that they could not free their hands for writing.

On the average, the supply of electricity in the district is only for four hours a day even as the summer heat goes up to 40-45 degree Celsius.

An average house in the area was a hall in which they live on the one side and their animals live on the other side. The youth dress impeccably with tucked in shirts and shoes. But if you visit their places of stay, it is clear that they live in very unhygienic conditions. Flies cover the food they offer so it is hard to follow their friendly prodding, ‘Khao, khao’ (Eat, eat). So Sachin Mathew decided not to visit their houses anymore.

When they hear that he was from Kerala, they express their high regard for the state which they say is very educated and equipped with knowledge of English and this appreciation is also reflected in the high demand for getting educated in schools where teachers from Kerala teach. But they invariably ask a Malayalee whether he/she eats beef and they add, ‘How could you do this? The cow is like your mother.’ Sachin Mathew hails from a Christian background in north Kerala. They give a complacent smile when they hear that he is from a Christian background. But they start hurling communal abuses as soon as they hear about Muslims.

The narrative above may cast light on the culture and living conditions of an average rural locality in north India and could make us understand why Modi was voted back to power. Rural underdevelopment and miserable living conditions in the Hindi belt go hand in hand with communal anti-Muslim sentiments, obviously powered by dominant class politics. The fertile land of the Gangetic plain makes agriculture an earning proposition. So people are able to afford costly education but the quality of education remains so low.

Article 45 under Directive Principles of the Constitution of India says, “The State shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years.” (emphasis added). This promise remains belied even after 69 years of the inauguration of the Constitution and the prime responsibility lies with the dominant class politicians who should be asked to give an explanation. India would have been a very different country if at least, basic literacy was provided to all Indian citizens so that they would be aware of their basic rights and would not be swayed by communal passions. This is of extreme importance for the future of India because once the delimitation of constituencies is carried out by 2025, the seat share of south Indian states will further go down and the Hindi belt with a growing population would overwhelmingly determine the shared destiny of India. It may be underlined that the biggest challenge, in the days to come is to win people over from the grip of communal ideology.

Dr. Gilbert Sebastian is an Assistant Professor at the Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod.

26 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org