Yesterday Iftiqar Gilani,Today Binayak Sen

 

By Subhash Gatade
26 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Does anybody remember the Delhi bureau chief of Kashmir Times, Mr Iftiqar Gilani who was hounded by the BJP government on fraudulent charges under the draconian Official Secrets Act supposedly for possessing some 'secret' documents. Interestingly when it was revealed that all the 'secret' documents purported to be in possession of Mr Gilani were easily available online, then the law and order people had no other alternative than to release him.
The world very well knows that why Mr Gilani was treated in such a humiliating manner. The only 'crime' the accredited journalist had committed was that he happened to be son in law of a famous Kashmiri leader.
Today the same fate awaits Dr Binayak Sen - a paediatrician by training and profession and a human rights activist by choice. This receipient of the famous Paul Harrison award for work in community health has received a new identity. - A menace to public safety - The Chattisgarh police whose own record of human rights violations would shame even the KPS Gills, has used the provisions of the draconian Chhatisgarh Special Public Safety Act and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act ( a substitute for POTA ) to detain Dr Binayak Sen in the wee hours of 14 th May. And the recent high court order has even refused him a bail.
It has been more than twenty five years that Dr Binayak Sen left his job at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi to dedicate himself to serve the poor and the downtrodden in Chhatisgarh. It was the time when a new workers- peasants movement was taking shape in Chattisgarh ( which was then part of Madhya Pradesh) under the leadership of the legendary leader Shankar Guha Niyogi. The martyrdom of more than eleven workers in Dalli-Rajhara in the immediate aftermath of the assumption of power by the Janata Party government was a news all over the country. Binayak Sen never looked back and continued working for the people despite many highs-lows of the movement. He played an important part in the formation of Shaheed Hospital at Dalli-Rajhara, a hospital run by the workers for the other downtrodden sections of society.
To further his concern for the really needy Dr Binayak donned many roles. He worked on community health projects, ran a clinic, also ran a organic farm near Raipur and was also adviser to the Chhatisgarh government for its community health project called 'Mitanin'. He found himself drawn into the fledgling human rights movement in the state when violations of human rights saw a quantum jump. But for his intervention ( of course alongwith other members of the civil liberty movement) the rest of the world would have never known the killing of twelve innocent tribals at Santoshpur by the security forces of the state supposedly to curb the Naxalite 'menace'. (31st March 2007) He was instrumental in forming an all India fact finding committee of civil liberty organisations to look into 'Salwa Judum' a campaign of arming tribals started by the government and using them as mercenaries. The report brought out by these organisations was an eye-opener. It showed how the state government has even allocated budget for this campaign which it calls a 'spontaneous response of the tribals towards the Naxalite 'menace'.
It was only last year that Dr Binayak Sen, - alongwith other civil liberty organisations and activists - had taken the initiative to organise a Convention in Raipur. The aim of the convention was to highlight the precarious human rights situation in the state, but an important item on their agenda was to focus the attention about a sinister move by the Chhatisgarh government to silence every dissenting voice. In fact Raman Singh led government had already made decisive moves in the direction of enacting a new law 'Chhatisgarh Special Public Security Act' (2006) which had several provisions similar to the (now lapsed) draconian POTA.
It was rigthly pointed out that the proposed act CSPSA not only included violation of the principle of certainty in criminal law (including vague definition of membership and support to terrorist organisations) but also absence of pre-trial safeguards (including insufficient safeguards on arrest, the risk of torture, obstacles to confidential communications with counsel). An important provision which rather made it worse than POTA was the 'virtual impossibility of obtaining bail as there is no provision for remedy of appeal or review of detention.'
Little did any of the organisers or the participants to the convention had the premonition that Dr Binayak Sen himself would be charged under the act, detained for months together by denying bail on flimsy grounds.
Despite campaign by democratic rights activists which were joined in by voices of medical fraternity from the world over, the powers that be seem to be least concerned about his detention. For the powers that be it is not a matter of concern that world renowned intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Romila Thapar and several others have expressed their 'opposition' to this unwarranted detention of Dr Sen. For them it is not a big thing that 1500 doctors spread in different parts of the world who have been acquainted with the work of their fellow doctor have appealed to the Chhatisgarh government that he be released immediately and all false charges against him be dropped forthwith.
It should be added that 'Medico Friend Circle'(MFC) - a thirty year old organisation of doctors who are working to make health services more accessible to the poor and who have consistently opposed the corporate control over people's health, recently held a press conference in Raipur to oppose Dr Sen's detention. In fact they showed the media a thirty minute CD based on the work of Dr Sen, who is closely associated with MFC's work since his youth. In fact more than thirty well-known medical professionals spread in different parts of the country made it a point to be present in the Press meet and declare their solidarity with their comrade.
But leave dropping charges or releasing him, the courts are is not ready to grant him bail.Dr Sen has been charged with 'a prima facie case that the applicant was involved with some banned organisation' .The high court did not deem it necessary to grant interim relief despite knowing the fact that ' the said meeting between leader of a Maoist organisation and Dr Sen took place in the jail premises themselves' in the 'presence of jail officials' and the letters which the police claimed to have seized from Mr Sen's house were sent from the jail themselves with due stamp of the jail officials.
The Chhattisgarh PUCL has termed this order of the Chhattisgarh High Court as "unfortunate" as the Court has not appreciated all the material facts and evidence of the case as presented by the legal counsel for Dr. Binayak Sen during the arguments. It has also decided to move the Supreme Court so that the highest courts of the country can decide on the merit of the case. It has also resolved 'to take stock of the alarming situation in Chhattisgarh with regard to ruthless use of repressive laws and anti-democratic actions of the State Government and, in turn, formulate future strategy and action plan to defend democracy and restore the rule of law.'
These days media is agog with news of another innocent doctor called Dr Haneef who has been apprehended by the Australian police. It is for everyone to see to what extent the Australian police went in proving that he is a 'terrorist'. It is a mark of the vibrancy of the Australian civil society that people there have stood up in Dr. Haneef's defence. The consistent campaign by the civil liberty organisations with due support from the media has helped expose Australian government's highhandedness in l'affaire Haneef. It is a matter of time that Dr Haneef would be released.
One just wishes that much like their Australian counterpart, the civil society in this part of the globe also wakes up to the innocence of Dr Binayak Sen and tell the powers that be that 'We want him out' !
If the Australians can fight for the human rights of an Indian, should the Indians maintain a conspiracy of silence when one of their own is being brutalised by the state.

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Lessons From The Lal Masjid Tragedy

By Robert Jensen

12 July, 2007
Counterpunch


Islamabad, Pakistan.

For my first three days in Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound. I had landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government forces would eventually storm the mosque and the attached women's seminary to end the confrontation with fundamentalist clerics and their supporters.

The final assault was finally unleashed as two companions and I drove to Lahore as part of a lecture tour. During several hours of intense discussion in the car, they gave me background and details that explained the real tragedy of the conflict.

When the news of the final assault came via cell phone we all fell silent, and we all quietly cried -- for those killed and for opportunities lost, out of our grief and from our fear.

In the Western news media and even much of the Pakistani press, the story was framed as crazed radical Islamist forces challenging relatively restrained government forces. Indeed, the two brothers who ran the mosque preached an interpretation of Islam that was mostly reactionary and sometimes violent. None of us in the car -- two Muslims and one Christian, all progressive in theological and political thought -- supported such views.

But there was more to the story. Farid Esack, one of the world's foremost progressive Muslim theologians who was in Pakistan to teach and lecture, and Junaid Ahmad, a Pakistani-American activist and law student directing the lecture series, both pointed out that key social/economic aspects of the story were being overlooked.

In addition to calls for shariah law under a fundamentalist Islamic state, Lal Masjid imams Abdur Rashid Ghazi and Mohammed Abdul Aziz critiqued the corruption of Pakistani political, military and economic elites, highlighting the living conditions of the millions of Pakistanis living in poverty. As in most Third-World societies, the inequality gap here has widened in recent years, as those who find their place in the U.S.-dominated neoliberal economic project prosper while most ordinary people suffer, especially the poor.

"We can reject the jihadist and patriarchal aspects and still recognize that there is in this fundamentalist philosophy a call for social justice, a challenge to the power-seeking and greed of elites," said Esack, the author of Qur'an: Liberation and Pluralism. "When I spoke with Ghazi, it was clear that was an important part of his thinking, and it's equally clear that the appeal of this theology is magnified by the lack of meaningful calls for justice from other sectors of society."

Esack, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School and is a former national commissioner for gender equality in South Africa, had been visiting the mosque regularly and speaking to Ghazi and others inside until government forces sealed the area a few days earlier. A native of South Africa who was active in the struggle against apartheid, Esack spent much of his childhood in Pakistan at a madarasa, where he was a classmate of Aziz. Contrary to the media image of Ghazi, the cleric had a broader agenda and wanted to learn more about how an Islamic state could be structured to ensure economic equality, Esack said.

"My vision of an inclusive polity influenced by progressive Islamic values is very different than Ghazi's, of course, but his theology should not be reduced to a caricature, as it so often was, especially in the West," Esack said.

Ahmad emphasized that another crucial part of the story involved economics, specifically land. Press reports focused on the provocative activities of students and supporters of Lal Masjid members threatening video store owners, raiding brothels and clashing with police, but an underlying cause of the conflict was the existence of "unauthorized" mosques. Many of these mosques and madrasas had been built without permits on unused public land in Islamabad. As the city has grown more crowded and developers eyed that real estate for commercial building, the government took the risky step of destroying some of those mosques (though the many non-religious, profit-generating projects also built without permits remain undisturbed). Clerics protested, adding to the intensity of the Lal Masjid conflict.

Esack and Ahmad agreed that another aspect of the crisis mostly ignored in the press was the fact that the events played out in Islamabad, home to the more secular/liberal and privileged elements of the society. While those liberals might ignore such movements and conflicts in the outer provinces, many found it offensive that such an embarrassing incident could happen in the capital, where the world eventually would pay attention.

"We hear about how this is bad for the image of Pakistan, with no comment about the lives of ordinary Pakistanis and the substance of what the country is about," Ahmad said. "Instead of talking about these fundamental questions of justice, many people wanted to see the incident ended to avoid further tarnishing of the country's image. It's like the obsession the United States has with simply changing its image in the Muslim world rather than recognizing the injustice of its policies."

In the construction of that image, the stories of the reality of the lives of people at Lal Masjid are typically untold. As the crisis unfolded and some of the madrasa students left the compound, the government gave them some money and told them to go home.

"The problem is, many had no homes to go to," Ahmad said. "Whatever the reactionary theology of Lal Masjid, it provided a place for many who were dispossessed or from poor families. If the economy ignores people and the state provides nothing, where will they go?"

My trip to Pakistan had been set months in advance; my presence there during this crisis was coincidence. Throughout my stay, as I listened to the discussion about the conflict, I realized how much less I could have understood the events if I had been in the United States, even though I would have been reading the international press on the web. The complexity of such stories so rarely makes it into print, and the humanity of the people demonized drops out all too easily.

As we drove in silence, I thought of how easy it is from positions of safety and comfort to denounce fundamentalism, how often I have done just that. But who are we targeting when we make such statements? I have no trouble denouncing the bin Ladens and al-Zawahiris, or the Bushs and Robertsons, and critiquing their twisted worldview. But what of the ordinary people struggling against the elites who ignore the cries of the suffering? When those people take up a fundamentalist theology that we Western left/progressives reject, must we not highlight the inequality we also say we oppose?

Esack said some have asked him what he hoped to gain by going to Lal Masjid and talking with someone like Ghazi, but he has no doubts about the value and appropriateness of his visits there.

"When we abandon engagement and dialogue with those who hold these beliefs, we are abandoning hope. My goal is not to wall myself off from other Muslims, but to search for authentic connections, even across these gaps. Is that not how we can heal the world, and ourselves?" he said. "It is precisely when we start to think of some of us as 'chosen' and others as 'frozen' that we happily become willing to defrost them with our bombs."

That moment in the car, as we absorbed the news that the troops had cleared the mosque and that Ghazi and dozens of others were dead, I felt angry at people like Ghazi and at the same time a deep sorrow for his death. I felt a much deeper rage at Pakistan's military president, Pervez Musharraf, and the U.S. leaders who support him. And I felt a kind of fear for the Muslim fundamentalism that unleashes such violent forces, which always reminds me of the equally frightening Christian fundamentalist theology circulating in the United States.

I bounced between a deep sense of despair and an equally deep sense of hope. Once the confrontation was set in motion, perhaps the people inside the mosque and the soldiers killed were doomed. But in the car in that moment, I could feel hope that the work of people like Esack and Ahmad was setting in motion other forces. Mostly I was grateful to be in their company to share the grief. In such moments, that connection is perhaps the most human and the most hopeful of endeavors.

Om makes it to chess terra final

Yesterday 14 July 2007, Om won four and a half points in the under 9s and was tied in the third place at the North UK chess Giga finals. This is a major achievement for Om as its the first time that he has made the cut and gets a look at the front running pack in the country.

Well done Om.

Recording a dream

12/7/07 @ 6.10 am

This morning I dreamt of many mambers of my family, many of who were dead.

I saw my late grand uncle Unniman, with who I had some nice chat.

I also saw my late paternal grandmother in her Irinjalakuda home - she was trying to evict a Caucasian woman who was living in her home. They (the family) had already denied her most facilities, so she was cooking for herself, on the western part of the home. I was trying to woo her and Ammuma was trying to wean me off, telling me how she refused to go et al.

I also saw the MKP family, and Pradeep was taking me on a ride to another house for meals etc.

 

Some wise principles from Little Buddha which it would be wise to respect and follow to the letter:

 
 
 
 
 

Children in the front seat of a car can cause accidents. Accidents in the back seat of a car can cause children.

 
 
 
 
 

If you cannot lend a hand, then be a nuisance! Either way, the most important thing is to take part!

 
 
 
 
 

If you believe that the quickest way to a man's heart is the stomach, know that you are aiming a little too high!

 
 
 
 
 

If you can laugh when everything is going horribly wrong, that means that you have found somebody to blame!

 
 
 
 
 

Women are like swimming pools: they cost a great deal of money to maintain, considering the time that you spend inside!

 
 
 
 
 

Never drink while driving. You could spill your beer!

 
 
 
 
 

Some bosses are like clouds: the minute they disappear, the day suddenly gets brighter!

 
 
 
 
 

To err is human. To blame someone else for your problem, is strategic.

 
 
 
 
 

Men wouldn't lie as much to the women in their life, if the women in their life didn't ask so many questions!

 
 
 
 
 

Women marry because they believe that he will change one day. Men marry because they believe that she will never change. Both are mistaken!

 
 
 
 
 

Your future depends on your dreams. Don't waste any time, go to bed NOW!

 
 
 
 
 

HAVE A NICE DAY !

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Dinner table chat about house prices turns nasty


Will Hutton
Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer


At a gathering of my wife's family last weekend I was sharply reminded of the generation gap when it comes to property. The over-35s are winners with their cushion of equity, which grows vast the nearer they are to pensionable age; the under-35s have debts that make them feel fearful at becoming losers in the property jungle.

I had conversations that I am sure are reproduced all over the country. A mother spoke of her fears that it would be impossible to move to a larger flat in the same neighbourhood to accommodate a second baby. Another said that my generation did not understand how hard it was for young people to get started these days without well-off parents.

Britain has created a monstrous house-price-inflation machine that is beginning to devastate lives, segregate communities and dominate our culture. And do serious damage to the process of wealth generation. Last week's rise in interest rates to 5.75 per cent, with further interest-rate increases certain, is the price of a freedom to borrow.

We want that freedom, while deploring the irrationality it has produced. Which is why complaining about the latest interest-rate increase is pointless. The Bank of England is only doing its job - trying to hit 2 per cent inflation. It confronts never-ending inflation in house prices that makes home-owners richer, and who become ever more ingenious in translating that wealth into higher consumer spending and lower saving.

The property market is the epicentre of the problem. A recent report from the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, chaired by economist Professor Stephen Nickell, argued that despite the doubling in house prices over the last 10 years, today's property market is still not overvalued. Higher demand, with another 223,000 new households forming every year is meeting stagnating supply. In 2000, house prices on average were four times incomes; now they are seven times and over the next 20 years will rise to 10 times.

It is an argument that is hard to counter - in which case there is trouble ahead. The Bank of England needs to see a sharp deceleration in house-price inflation in order to meet its inflation target. But if today's prices are as solidly underpinned as Nickell argues, and set to increase by another 50 per cent in the years ahead, then interest rates may have to rise very high indeed in the immediate future - certainly to 7 or even 8 per cent - to get the result the Bank needs.

What policy-makers obviously want to see is an orderly slowdown in prices rather than actual falls, while something is done to avert Nickell's forecast. Yet the whole exercise is fraught with risk. The market is frothy; many individuals are overborrowed. Anybody buying a house today risks seeing the price falling sometime in 2009 or 2010. House prices will probably begin to increase again afterwards, but today's risks are acute.

There are already casualties; repossessions are rising sharply and businesses closing, overwhelmed by debt. Parents are trapped into living with their middle-aged children. Neighbourhoods are becoming ever more segregated by class. And conversations like the one my family was having last weekend will become political. More affordable housing, as the government recognises, is a political, social and economic necessity.

The simple answer is to build more houses, especially social housing, but that means eroding the green belts and relaxing planning laws - unpopular ideas. There are tougher measures, too. If housing faced higher taxes, either through inheritance tax, a wealth tax, lifting stamp duty, or limiting tax-free capital gains on housing, then house-price inflation would slow. And if Britain repealed its far too generous concession that non-residents and non-domiciled individuals can buy and hoard houses without paying tax, that would dent overseas demand. All have been ruled out because of a recoil at higher taxes.

But the mood is changing. It seems the middle class has begun to decide that the current mayhem is not in its interests. Privately some Tory policy-makers are toying with finding ways to use the tax system to slow down house-price inflation, pondering whether it really would be political suicide.

The Labour party has been paralysed, writing off taxing as leftist and impractical. But the politics of the house-price inflation machine are beginning to change. It may have made many over-50s very rich, but for the rest the social division, the private heartache, the risks of massive indebtedness and yet dearer houses make no sense. Right-wing policies have created a world we don't like. The pendulum is swinging back.

The NHS is a rip-off

Giles Whittell

Remember the name Chainsaw Rick. I have added the chainsaw bit, but you will see why. He appears in a so-called documentary that has not yet secured a British distributor but will spawn an awful lot more about Rick when it does.

The film is Sicko, a two-hour take-down of the mighty US healthcare industry directed by and starring the potato-faced Michael Moore (he of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 911 and subject of too many right-wing diatribes to count). In it, Rick is an uninsured sadster who loses two fingers to a chainsaw and has to talk hard cash with an accountant before his general anaesthetic. It’ll be $12,000 to reattach the easy finger, he is told; $60,000 for the pair. Rick goes for the budget option.

Fully half of Sicko is devoted to envious glimpses of better-run, more equitable and more compassionate healthcare systems in other countries, such as Canada (where another power-saw victim gets all five digits reattached for nothing) and Britain, where Moore would clearly choose to live if he didn’t have such an avid following and such comprehensive health insurance at home.

“Keep your British health system,” he told one of our reviewers after a screening on Skid Row in LA. “Never get rid of it. It’s a wonderful thing.” He has also made the mistake of calling British healthcare “free”.

Let us be clear: Michael Moore is amiable, fearless and funny, especially when provoked. He is also a brilliant film-maker who has transformed his genre in the US, where documentaries now pack out cinemas from coast to coast.

You can take this as official. I have met him and liked him and am entirely trustworthy. The same cannot be said of Moore, of course. He is routinely denounced as a misleading, self-serving propagandist by critics who fail entirely to grasp that these are his great strengths.

When Moore barged his way into General Motors headquarters, and American culture, while making Roger & Me in 1988, it was about time. Here at last was a booming, populist, shamelessly blinkered voice from the American Left to answer those that had boomed unanswered from the Right throughout the Reagan years. Small wonder that he found a far-from-fringe constituency and became embarrassingly rich.

Moore’s European critics, in particular, continue to misunderstand his challenge and his audience. They delight in exposing his crafty way with “facts”, as if the corporate interests he attacks weren’t just as crafty. They worry that the millions of Americans who pay to see his output might actually believe everything he says, as if, being Americans, they lack the power of critical thinking. And they forget that many of those millions of Americans do in fact, quite reasonably, share Moore’s view that GM ignored its social responsibilities when Japanese competition hit home; that Kmart never had any business selling lethal handgun ammo to kids; and that when Charlton Heston raised a rifle in defiance a few days after the Columbine high-school massacre, he was a berk.

Moore, by contrast, was the man-grizzly who stood up to the idiot president of the NRA and lived to tell the tale. He was my hero. But now he has started spouting nonsense about the NHS, and he should know it’s nonsense, and know that we know.

It goes without saying that healthcare on the NHS isn’t free. But just how unfree it is gets too little attention. We pay for it through our noses, every month.

Next year’s NHS budget will be about £104 billion. That’s roughly £1,733 per man, woman and child. Multiplied by four for a typical two-child family, then divided by 12, that equates to median monthly family healthcare expenditure of £577, or $1,155 in American money. I can buy some very respectable US health insurance for $1,155 a month. In fact, on a quick and painless stroll through the website for Kaiser Permanente, a leading nonprofit US healthcare provider, entering my basic family details and the Beverly Hills zipcode, the most expensive family policy I can find that does not depend on contributions from the state or an employer costs $400 less than the sum Gordon Brown currently chooses to spend from my taxes, each month, on the NHS.

Being honest, I must add a few hundred to my US bill to cover “deductibles” and the portion of my US taxes going to federal schemes like Medicare and Medicaid. But I must also cop to earning more than the UK average, which means I pay more than average for my NHS care; through the nose, as I say.

American roadworks tend to be adorned with signs announcing, “Your Tax Dollars at Work”. There should be signs saying “Your Tax Pounds at Work” at the entrance to every NHS hospital and surgery, and whenever “at work” fails to describe what goes on inside them, taxpayer-patients should whinge like hell. They may not like it. They may not think it British, but nothing else is working and in the meantime they are being royally ripped off.

Really? But aren’t waiting lists down, as Mr Blair used to tell us every Wednesday? I would refer the Right Honourable gentleman to a recent ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court in favour of a man who sued to be allowed to buy insurance to speed up an operation. “Access to a waiting list,” the court found, “is not access to healthcare.”

Forty-seven million Americans are uninsured. This is a problem. Several million more are inadequately insured. Another problem. But that leaves more than 200 million fully insured Americans who’ve never heard of waiting lists. I envy them.