Myanmar’s appalling apartheid

May 30, 2014

For decades, Myanmar’s military rulers have tried systematically to erase the Rohingya’s existence with oppression, periodic mass expulsions and denials of their identity

 

Minura Begum has been in labour for almost 24 hours, and the baby is stuck. Worse, it’s turned around, one tiny foot already emerging into the world in a difficult breech delivery that threatens the lives of mother and child alike.

Twenty-three years old and delivering her first child, Minura desperately needs a doctor. But the Myanmar government has confined her, along with 150,000 others, to a quasi-concentration camp outside town here, and it blocks aid workers from entering to provide medical help. She’s on her own.

Welcome to Myanmar, where tremendous democratic progress is being swamped by crimes against humanity toward the Rohingya, a much-resented Muslim minority in this Buddhist country. Budding democracy seems to aggravate the persecution, for ethnic cleansing of an unpopular minority appears to be a popular vote-getting strategy.

This is my annual “win-a-trip” journey, in which I take a university student on a reporting trip to the developing world. I’m with this year’s winner, Nicole Sganga of the University of Notre Dame, spotlighting an injustice that some call a genocide.

There are more than 1 million Rohingya in Rakhine state in the northwest of Myanmar. They are distinct from the local Buddhists both by darker skin and by their Islamic faith. For decades, Myanmar’s military rulers have tried systematically to erase the Rohingya’s existence with oppression, periodic mass expulsions and denials of their identity.

“There are no people called Rohingya in Myanmar,” U Win Myaing, a spokesman for Rakhine state, told me.

He said that most are simply illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Racist narrative

This narrative is absurd, as well as racist. A document as far back as 1799 refers to the Rohingya population here, and an 1826 report estimates that 30 per cent of the population of this region was Muslim.

Since clashes in 2012 claimed more than 200 lives — including children hacked with machetes — the authorities have confined Rohingya to internment camps or their own villages. They are stripped of citizenship and cannot freely go to the market, to schools, to university, to hospitals.

Tens of thousands have made desperate attempts to flee by boat, with many drowning along the way.

This year, the Myanmar authorities have cracked down even harder, making the situation worse. First, the government expelled Doctors Without Borders, which had been providing health care for the Rohingya. Then orchestrated mobs attacked the offices of humanitarian organisations, forcing them out.

Some kinds of aid are resuming, but not health care. That’s a sterile way of putting it. I wish readers could see the terrified eyes of Shamshida Begum, 22, a mom whose 1-year-old daughter, Noor, burned with fever.

Shamshida said that at home the thermometer had registered 107 degrees. Even after damp cloths had been placed on Noor to lower her temperature, the thermometer, when I saw it, still read 105 degrees. What kind of a government denies humanitarians from providing medical care to a toddler?

Noor survived, but some don’t. We visited the grief-stricken family of a 35-year-old man named Ba Sein, who died after his tuberculosis went untreated.

“He died because he couldn’t get medicine,” said his widow, Habiba, as friends made a bamboo coffin outside.

Now she worries about her four small children who, like other children in the camp, haven’t been vaccinated. The camp is an epidemic waiting to happen.

Minura, the woman with a breech delivery, survived a 28-hour labour and haemorrhaging, but lost her baby. The infant girl was buried in an unmarked grave — one of a large number of achingly small graves on the outskirts of the camp.

“Because I am Rohingya, I cannot get health care and I cannot be a father,” Minura’s husband, Zakir Ahmed, a mason, said bitterly after the burial.

Restoring humanitarian access

The United States has spoken up, but far too mildly; Europe and Asia have tried to look the other way. We should work in particular with Japan, Britain, Malaysia and the United Nations to pressure Myanmar to restore humanitarian access and medical care.

President Barack Obama, who visited Myanmar and is much admired here, should flatly declare that what is happening here is unconscionable. Obama has lately noted that his foreign policy options are limited, and that military interventions often backfire. True enough, but in Myanmar he has political capital that he has not fully used.

As a university student, Obama denounced apartheid in South Africa. As President, he should stand up to an even more appalling apartheid — one in Myanmar that deprives members of one ethnic group even of health care.

Myanmar seeks U.S. investment and approval. We must make clear that it will get neither unless it treats Rohingya as human beings.

— © New York Times News Service

Change and continuity

May 30, 2014

Updated: May 30, 2014 04:04 IST

Akeel Bilgrami

 

What Narendra Modi proposes as change and novelty is entirely continuous with policies that Manmohan Singh’s government have put into place

One pundit in the aftermath of the Indian elections has described the Prime Minister-elect as seeking to “reshape the entire political universe of India” (Ashutosh Varshney in The Guardian). It is in the nature of public life in the modern period that even just the rhetoric and pretence of “change” can bestow upon a politician an ersatz glamour. In the drumbeat of electioneering over several recent months that rhetoric and pretence on the lips of Mr. Narendra Modi was flamboyantly yet carefully cultivated and, above all, purchased at obscene expense. The media, funded and controlled by the same corporate sources that paid for this public relations achievement, acquiesced with conviction in the pretence and repeated the rhetoric each day both in print and on screen.

The strategy has paid off; the man now has the added glamour of the nation’s most exalted office which, suppressing his natural swagger, he has approached with an affectation of humility and express concern for the poor and working people of the country, the very people that the policies and politics he stands for will sink into ever-increasing poverty and insecurity.

Declaration of change a pretence?
These unstintingly negative remarks I have made are intended to recoil from the charitable and hopeful responses that even some of those made anxious by Mr. Modi’s election have resigned themselves to. A belief in democracy requires two things: an acceptance of the upshot of an election and a refusal to blame the electorate if the upshot fills one with dread. Beyond this no graciousness is required, least of all a slackening of the critical powers one brings to assessing the upshot. In particular, there is no reason to surrender to some hope that a deeply tainted victor is going to revise his convictions or his character, simply because of the reality of having to live with his victory. Such realism, like much realism, is better described as complacence. It pacifies the effort and struggle that is called for to oppose what he represents. This pacification was already being advised prior to his election by political commentators who chastised Mr. Modi’s critics as unintelligent for applying the term “fascist,” with its European connotations, to what Mr. Modi represents in the Indian context.

In the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, the term “fascist” came to be associated with two defining features. First, the finding of an external enemy within a nation (in the case of Germany, the Jews, the gypsies) and despising and subjugating them. Second, what Mussolini offered as an explicit definition of fascism: the fusion of the interests of corporations and the state. I ask the reader to look at Mr. Modi’s record with Muslims and his avowed economic programme and decide for herself where the lack of intelligence really lies.

Why am I calling Mr. Modi’s declaration of change and a new future for India an empty rhetoric and pretence? Because what it proposes as change and novelty is entirely continuous with policies that Manmohan Singh and his economic advisers have put into place. If there is any change, it is, as so often with the BJP, a more clear-eyed and unqualified pursuit of what the Congress had first generated. This had happened earlier, too — though not on the economic front — when Indira Gandhi first and then Rajiv Gandhi had introduced majoritarian and communal elements into the political arena. The BJP was then able to pursue that to its logical end without the lip service to secularism that the Congress was bound, by its more honourable past, to retain. And similarly now the neo-liberal policies of the UPA government will be extended by the BJP, unhampered by the former’s lip service to an employment scheme and food security programme that, for the most part, remained unimplemented. For anyone without amnesia, even as a regional messiah, Mr. Modi has had antecedents who similarly promised fabulous transformations. The euphoria around the “Gujarat Model” had its premonition in Chandrababu Naidu’s “Andhra model,” whose lopsided metropolitan development at the cost of ignoring the rest of his region eventually led to his steep downfall in a subsequent election and then later to the Balkanisation of his state. A few truthful commentators have already observed just how much the “Gujarat model” pursues growth at the cost of what is called “human development.”

Finally, the proposal that the BJP will seek to change the large-scale corruption that came to be associated with the Congress is also pretence. This same pretence was adopted by an earlier BJP government and exposed to be so then, proving that corruption is now built into the kind of thing that Indian capitalism has become in the last two decades, no matter who is in power.

Indifference to immiseration
Another pundit (Victor Mallet, Financial Times, May 22) revealingly says: “Educated Muslims in India are willing to give Modi a chance.” It reveals first of all that the educated urban Muslim stands politically apart from the mass of other Muslims, a fact that goes back a long time. Jinnah’s form of nationalist politics as it developed in the post-Khilafat period (indeed it was motivated to combat the dynamic effects of the mass mobilisation of Muslims during the Khilafat movement) represented precisely such careerist Muslims, mostly from Uttar Pradesh, continuing, as Maulana Azad had pointed out, an aspiration that Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had first formulated many decades earlier. But what it further reveals is that those same educated urban Muslims who in their separatist politics under Jinnah were expressing an anxiety about their prospects for jobs in a united India dominated by a Hindu majority, are now confusedly expecting that a Hindu majoritarian ideologue because of his zeal for metropolitan “development” will create a scenario that provides them with jobs.

The zeal for this particular form of development is not a novelty of Mr. Modi’s either. It was an explicit aspiration of the previous government, with P. Chidambaram preposterously declaring (Tehelka interview, May 31, 2008) that he wanted 85 per cent of India to become cities. Preposterous not only because of the impertinence of an aspiration to transform within a few years the agrarian forms of livelihood that have defined a society for millennia, but because of its brazen indifference to the immiseration that it brings in its wake through the dispossession of countless people of their land and their livelihood.

Neo-liberalism and dissatisfaction
Given these deep continuities passing themselves off as a promise of change, one needs a diagnosis of the striking difference between the outcome of the present elections and that of the elections in 2004. In 2004, the mass of Indian people repudiated the pretence of an emergent and luminous India. This time they have not. The diagnosis is not hard to find. It is true that in 2004 the Congress party was galvanised by an impressively energetic campaign almost single-handedly by Sonia Gandhi, a form of leadership it wholly lacked in the current election. But the underlying explanation is to be found in the very continuities I have been insisting on. The effects of neo-liberal economic policies pursued by both major parties and their coalitional partners over this entire span have created deep dissatisfaction among the Indian electorate with whichever of them held power. The dissatisfaction may not be articulated explicitly as one against neo-liberal policies because those policies are seldom identified by the media and the pundits as the causes of those effects. But even just a little knowledgeable and honest analysis would reveal them to be so.

The point, however, is that so long as those effects are with us, this pattern of failure and dissatisfaction will continue until the political parties who oppose rather than promote neo-liberalism emerge out of their abject weakness and begin to assert their political energies and will. The prospect of this happening may seem bleak at the moment, but the continuing failure of the policies adopted in the last two decades, which Mr. Modi now offers in their most unconstrained form, can be safely predicted and it is bound to breed the stimulus for a genuine rather than pretence at change.

It is not as if this has never happened in other parts of the world. Some of the countries in South America, such as Bolivia for instance, which the international media utterly ignores precisely because these countries are striving to remove themselves from the orbit of neo-liberalism, are exemplary. Against overwhelming odds, their people have generated movements which elected governments that have creatively resisted the insistent weight of globalised finance and are gradually uplifting the poorest sections of their societies. What sort of politics allowed such governments to be elected? How was such a politics constructed and mobilised among the people? How exactly are they resisting the pressures to succumb to neo-liberal policies? We would be well advised to study these polities and political economies and seek detailed and careful answers to these questions for ourselves.

(Akeel Bilgrami holds the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy at the Columbia University.)

Copyright© 2014, The Hindu

உங்களுடைய வீடுகளிலும் நூலகம் அமைக்கலாமே!

 

- நெல்லை சலீம்

“கோவில் இல்லாத ஊர்களில் கூட குடியிருக்கலாம், ஆனால் நூலகம் இல்லாத ஊர்களில் குடியிருக்க கூடாது”  என்பார்கள். உண்மைதான்! நூலகம் என்பது ஒவ்வொரு ஊர்களிலும் மட்டுமின்றி வீடுகளிலும் இன்றியமையாத ஒன்றாகும். உங்களுக்கு பிடித்த இன்பமான  ஒர் இடத்தின் பெயரைச் சொல்லுங்கள் என்று ஆப்ரகாம் லிங்கனிடம் கேட்ட போது, “என் மனதிற்க்கு பேரின்பத்தை அள்ளி அள்ளி வழங்கும் ஒரே இடம் நூலகமே” என்றார்.

முன்போரு காலத்தில் எல்லா ஊர்களிலுமே நூலகம் இருந்தது. அன்றாட செய்திகளை படிக்கவும், தெரிந்து கொள்ளவும் நூலகத்தையே தொடர்பு கொள்வார்கள். நூலகத்தின் மூலமே அன்றைய அரசியல் பணிகளில் இருந்து, ஆட்சி அதிகாரம் வரை உள்ள அத்தனை விஷயங்களையும் தெரிந்து கொள்ள நூலகத்தையே நாடிச் செல்வர். ஆனால் இன்று நூலகம் என்பது அரிதாகி விட்டது.

இதற்கு பிரதான காரணம் இன்றைய இளைஞர்களிடம் வாசிக்கும் பழக்கம் குறைந்து விட்டதன் எதிரொளியே, நூலகங்கள் நம்மை விட்டுச் சென்று விட்டன. அரசு நூலகங்கள் ஒவ்வொரு ஊர்களிலும் மூடப்பட்டு வருகின்றன. அதனுடைய வெளிப்பாடு தான் சமூகத்தில் ஏற்படக்கூடிய பிரச்சனைகளும், குழப்பங்களும் அதிகரித்துள்ளதன் சூழல் வளரும் இளம் தலைமுறையினர் எந்த வித இலக்கும் இல்லாமல் பயணித்துக் கொண்டிருக்கின்றனர்.

அவர்களுக்கு சமூகத்தைப்பற்றிய அக்கறை இல்லாமலும், தங்களைப் பற்றிய சிந்தனை இல்லாமலும் சென்று கொண்டிருக்கும் சூழல் ஏற்பட்டுள்ளது. படிப்பதில் இருந்த ஆர்வம் தற்பொழுது உள்ள விஞ்ஞான வளர்ச்சியின் மூலம் குறைந்து விட்டது என்று சொல்லலாம். அனைவரிடமும் தொலைபேசி இல்லாமல் இல்லை. நல்ல பெரிய மொபைல் போன்களை வைத்துக் கொண்டு ஃபேஸ்புக், டுவிட்டர், வாட்ஸ் ஆஃப் போன்ற சமூக வலைதளங்களில் தங்களுடைய நேரங்களை செலவழித்து வருகின்றனர்.

இதன் மூலம் ஒரு தகவலை தெரிந்து கொள்ள முடியுமே தவிர, வாழ்க்கையின் எதார்த்தங்களை எடுத்துச் சொல்லாது. இன்றைய இளைஞர்கள் பெரும்பாலும் வங்கிகளில் அக்கவுண்ட் வைத்துள்ளார்களோ இல்லையோ, இந்த சமூக வலைதளங்களில் அக்கவுண்ட் இல்லாமல் இருக்காது. இது அவர்களின் நேரங்களை வீணடிப்பதிலும், அவர்களின் மூளையையும் சோர்வடைய செய்கிறது.

இதில், சில பயன்தரக்கூடிய தகவல் பரிமாற்றங்கள் இருந்தாலும், பெரும்பாலான இளைஞர்கள் பொழுது போக்கிற்காகவே பயன்படுத்துகின்றனர். ஃபேஸ்புக்கில் இருப்பவர்கள் ஒரு சிலரை தவிர, பிறர் அனுப்பப்படக்கூடிய விஷயங்களை  பகிரக்கூடியவர்களாகவும் அல்லது அதை லைக் கொடுப்பவர்களாகவும் தான் இருக்கின்றனர்.அவர்கள் சொந்தமாக எந்த தகவல்களையும் பதிவு செய்வதில்லை. பெரும்பாலனவர்கள் தங்களுடைய புகைப்படங்களை  பல கோணங்களில் அனுப்புவதற்கே நேரம் சரியாக இருக்கின்றது.

ஃபேஸ்புக்கும் சில போராட்டங்களில் பங்கு பெற்றது. எகிப்தில் ஹோஸ்னி முபாரக்குக்கு எதிராக தஹ்ரீர் சதுக்கத்தில் திரண்ட மக்கள் போராட்டத்தின் ஒவ்வொரு துளிகளையும் ஃபேஸ்புக்கின் மூலம் தெரிந்து கொண்டனர். உலக மக்களுக்கும் சென்றடைய இலகுவாக இருந்தது.

அதேப்போன்று தமிழகத்திலும் கூடன்குளம் போன்ற போராட்டங்களின் செய்திகளை மக்கள் முன் கொண்டு போய் சேர்ப்பததில் ஃபேஸ்புக்கின் பங்கு அளப்பறியது. செய்திகளை பரிமாறிக் கொள்ளக்கூடிய ஒரு கருவிதானே ஒழிய நம்முடைய அறிவை வளர்ப்பதற்கு தகுந்த இடமாக ஏற்றுக் கொள்ள முடியாததே என்றே சொல்லலாம்.

இது போன்ற சமூக வலைதளங்கள் மூலம் இளைஞர்களிடம் எந்தவித சமூக முன்னேற்றமும் ஏற்படவில்லை. அவர்களுக்கு சமூகத்தை பற்றிய சிந்தனைகள் ஏற்படுவதில் குறைவுதான் ஏற்பட்டுள்ளது.

ஒரு மனிதனின் அறிவு எவ்வாறு அதிகமாகின்றது என்று பார்த்தால், நூலகத்தை தொடர்பு கொள்வதன் மூலமும், நூல்களை ஆழ்ந்து படிப்பதன் மூலமே ஏற்படும். முன்பெல்லாம் படிக்கத் தெரியவில்லையென்றாலும் கூட, புத்தகத்தை வாங்கி வீட்டில் வைப்பார்கள். வரக்கூடிய நம் சந்ததிகளாவது படிப்பார்கள் என்று. ஆனால், இன்று எந்தப் பெற்றோரும் தம்முடைய குழந்தைகளின் அறிவை வளர்க்க வேண்டும் என்ற எண்ணத்தில் புத்தகங்களை படிப்பதற்கு ஆர்வத்தை ஏற்படுத்துவதில்லை.

நம்முடைய  வீட்டில் கம்யூட்டர், டீவி, கிச்சன் என்று தனித்தனி அறைகளை ஒதுக்குகின்றோம். ஆனால், நூலகத்திற்கு என்று இடங்கள் ஒதுக்குவதில்லை. நாம் நம்முடைய வீடு கட்டும் திட்டத்தில் நூலகத்தைப் பற்றிய எந்தத் திட்டமும் தீட்டுவதில்லை. நம்முடைய குழந்தைகளுக்கு நூல்களை பற்றி விழிப்புணர்வு ஏற்படுத்துவதில்லை. அதனுடைய முக்கியத்துவத்தைப் பற்றி அவர்களிடம் எடுத்துக் கூறவது கிடையாது.

இதனால், வளரும் இளம் பருவத்தினர் எந்தவித ஆர்வமுமின்றி பயணித்துக் கொண்டிருக்கின்றனர். இதனால், ஒவ்வொருவரும் தங்களுடைய வீடுகளை நூலகங்களாக மாற்றுங்கள். சிறியளவிலாவது அதனை ஏற்படுத்தி உங்கள் பிள்ளைகள் மட்டுமின்றி, உங்கள் அண்டை வீட்டார், உறவினர் ஆகியோர்களை நூலகத்தைப்பற்றிய அவசியத்தைப் ஏற்படுத்துங்கள். எதிர்காலத்தில் ஊர்களில் அல்ல; ஒவ்வொரு வீடுகளிலும் நூலகங்கள் உண்டு என்ற நிலையை உருவாக்குவோம். எதிர்காலத்தில் ‘வாசிப்பு’ நிறைந்த சமூகமாக மாற்றியமைப்போம்.