The India Cable: MEA Evasive On Taliban; As ‘War on Terror’ Story Ends, New Cleavages Replace 'Islam v West'
Plus: J&K ironically shut down during Parliamentary IT Committee visit, CJI calls out communal media, Naseeruddin Shah stirs debate, and like humans, samosas get unique IDs
A newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas | Contributors: MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, Sushant Singh and Tanweer Alam | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal
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Snapshot of the day
September 3, 2021
Pratik Kanjilal
In a supreme irony, the Parliamentary Committee for IT led by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor was on a study tour of Jammu & Kashmir even as the former state was again shut down, virtually and actually. Security forces fear outbursts against the Indian state following the death of 91-year-old separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, and his forced, hasty burial. The Internet Freedom Foundation has written to the IT committee, saying that vital freedoms assured by the Supreme Court in the Anuradha Bhasin case are being denied to the people of Kashmir. Here’s what is lost when the internet is shut down.
An Australian court has sentenced Vishal Jood, a youngster from Haryana on an expired visa, to prison for violent assaults on Sikhs in Sydney. Jood’s release is sought by Haryana Chief Minister ML Khattar, BJP leader Kapil Mishra and Delhi BJP spokesperson Tajinder Bagga. Analysts had said, “Hindu nationalists around the world have been emboldened by the erosion of civil liberties among members of minority faith groups in Hindu-majority India, particularly Muslims.” Meanwhile, here in India, recording and disseminating videos of hate crimes against Muslims is now a career advancement tool for Hindutva activists.
A Delhi court saw dramatic arguments Friday as lawyer Trideep Pais – who represents former JNU student Umar Khalid, accused by the Delhi Police of being the mastermind of the 2020 riots – made mincemeat of the chargesheet. Quoting some hilarious passages, he asked: “Is this how chargesheets are written? It seems like a script of some news channel. Where did they get this from?… "This is the kind of stuff which is read and peddled, the creation of public opinion in order to substitute the lack of evidence to carry out your objective of unfairly prosecute people when you have no material to do so.”
To general consternation, the political science syllabus of the university named after Jayaprakash Narayan in his native district in Bihar has excluded his political philosophy. Other intellectual oustees include Ram Manohar Lohia, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Raja Rammohun Roy and MN Roy.
GST collections have crossed Rs 1 lakh crore in 11 of the last 12 months, with the Modi government welcoming rapid economic recovery and improved compliance, but economists can’t analyse these tax numbers because critical data points are no longer shared by the authorities. Until December 2020, when monthly GST collections were released, the Finance Ministry offered details of the number of GSTR 3B returns filed, and a state-wise break-up of revenues. But since then, state-wise trends are available only for February, March, July and August. GSTR 3B returns data was last released in January.
“We have had a special relationship with the US, which we say is strategic. However, we cannot live in this world with American support alone. We live in this neighbourhood.” Plainspeak from former R&AW chief AS Dulat, who also notes that India is in trouble because “for too long, our foreign policy has been impacted by domestic concerns.”
Infosys has embarrassed the government by bungling the new IT portal. Chairman emeritus NR Narayana Murthy is now on the cover story of the RSS magazine Panchjanya, and the story contains extraordinary insinuations.
In March, six Indian Sukhoi 30s will be put up against American-built JASDF F-15 Eagle fighters from a base in Ishikawa Prefecture. In this Quad exercise, South China Morning Post reports, Tokyo was keen on the Russian-built fighters taking part because Japanese fighters have come up against Su-30s flown by China over the East China Sea and by Russia near disputed islands. Japanese pilots want a better understanding of these aircraft.
As extreme poverty returns, India sees a surge in “child slavery”, reports Kavitha Iyer for Al Jazeera. After the Covid-19 pandemic, “child labour shows resurgence, worsened by inadequate rescue efforts.”
India has among the highest days of school closure globally. Online teaching has worsened significant pre-existing inequalities of access.
Kolkata’s 140-year-old tramway system — the first in Asia and the last in India — is not very fast but totally emission-free. Unfortunately, it is on its last legs, reports the New York Times.
Some samosas now have serial numbers to distinguish between varieties and batches. Some customers have “mixed fillings” about the supply chain management innovation. Others want a QR code.
Indian foreign ministry evasive on Taliban
In a news conference yesterday, the government tried to ‘clarify’ talks with the Taliban. It has refused to call them terrorists, though it is a staple of domestic political rhetoric. “It’s not a matter of yes or no,” the External Affairs Ministry spokesperson said when asked if India would recognise a Taliban government, adding that the Taliban responded positively to Indian concerns. The spokesperson did not explain why the talks were not photographed, a standard procedure for on-the-record diplomatic engagements, and evaded questions about the Haqqani network, a key member of the Taliban, which is designated a terror group by the UN.
Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani is wanted for attacks on the Indian Embassy and consulates in Afghanistan, including a suicide bombing in 2008 in which Indian diplomats were among 58 killed, and the attack on a gurdwara in Kabul in 2020, in which 25 were killed.
Court frowns upon Delhi riot investigation
“When history will look back at the worst communal riots in Delhi since Partition, the failure of the investigating agency to conduct proper investigation… will surely torment the sentinels of democracy,” said a Delhi court while discharging three accused ― former AAP councillor Tahir Hussain’s brother Shah Alam, Rashid Saifi and Shadab.
The court took a harsh view of the Delhi Police, which answers to Home Minister Amit Shah. The accused were neither specifically named in FIRs, nor was their role specified. No independent eyewitnesses were on record.
In another Delhi Riots case, the Delhi High Court granted bail to five Muslim men accused of the murder of head constable Ratan Lal. “The right to protest and express dissent is a right which occupies a fundamental stature in democratic polity, and therefore, the sole act of protesting should not be employed as a weapon to justify the incarceration of those who are exercising this right,” Justice Subramonium Prasad said.
CJI calls out communal media
A Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice NV Ramana heard petitions seeking directions to the Centre to prevent and punish the dissemination of “fake news” about last year’s religious gathering at Nizamuddin Markaz. “The problem is, everything in this country is shown with a communal angle by a section of the media. The country is going to get a bad name, ultimately,” said the bench, adding, “Did you (the Centre) ever attempt to regulate these private channels?” Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, talked up the controversial IT Rules as the cure – which do not even apply to the television channels whose broadcasts led to the matter coming before the court in the first place. But this mention seems to have set the stage for the eventual transfer to the Supreme Court of challenges to the IT Rules – now being heard before various high courts around the country.
Mizoram-Assam violence again
In the northeast, two BJP-ruled states are at it again. Mizoram alleges that a JCB operator was kidnapped at gunpoint near the interstate border by Assam Police, who dragged him by a river and ripped off his clothes. Mizoram’s Kolasib District Magistrate H Lalthlangliana wrote to his Hailakandi counterpart in Assam Rohan Jha that this was a huge setback to the peace initiative. On July 26, six Assam Police personnel were killed and scores injured in a gunfight with Mizoram Police.
The Long Cable
Faisal Devji: ‘Islam v West’ story is over, the lines of geopolitical cleavage are now different
Faisal Devji is Director of the Asian Studies Centre, University of Oxford. His work reflects an interest in Indian political thought and modern Islam, and ethics and violence in a globalised world. Tanweer Alam of The India Cable spoke with him.
Tanweer Alam: How do you see the recent events in Afghanistan and their implications for the region?
Faisal Devji: For the first time in decades, there is an opportunity to release Afghanistan from the domination of global politics and make it a site for regional concerns. Defined as it was by distant aims having to do with the security of Americans and Europeans, and their geopolitical rivalries with Russia and China, the global intervention in Afghanistan has clearly been a failure. It also led to proxy wars between regional powers as Afghanistan was torn out of its own context, which was thus rendered politically inoperative. Just as India has always insisted on a regional solution to her conflict with Pakistan, so, too, should she be intent on a regional partnership to stabilise Afghanistan.
The number and range of its neighbours would make it difficult for any one country to dominate Afghanistan, and might even lead to a more general improvement of relations across the region. None of Afghanistan’s neighbours wants to see the continuation of civil war there, and the proliferation of terrorism, refugees, and narcotics. This should provide the grounds for a pragmatic policy of engagement with the new government in Kabul, which is highly unlikely to submit to the hegemony of any foreign power. This is required for a partnership consolidating the region.
TA: With all major global powers dealing with Taliban-ruled Kabul, what happens to the Islam vs West binary?
FD: The days when a narrative of global conflict between Islam and the West was believable are gone. People may continue to harbour prejudices, but Afghanistan shows us that the lines of cleavage are now different, with the political actors including Russia, China and India, along with the US and Europe, and countries like Pakistan, Turkey, and Iran. In this situation, Islam can exist as a political factor only through its instrumentalization by one or more of the former powers. This appears to take us back to pre-9/11 days, which implies the risk of such instrumentalization spinning out of control. But that depends on state sponsors of terrorism more than the militants themselves. We have seen that any of these states, from the US to Iran and Pakistan, is capable of instrumentalizing terrorism.
All of this indicates the reduction of Islam to a second-order factor in politics, even if it continues to be seen in places like France as the main threat to secular society. This fear is internal to the West. Islam is no longer primarily an external threat and has thus ceased to be part of a purely geopolitical understanding, despite continuing worries about immigration and terrorism. The distinction between domestic and foreign dangers is increasingly indistinct.
TA: Should we worry about the Taliban fuelling Islamophobia?
FD: Islamophobia does not require the Taliban or, indeed, Islamic forms of violence to exist. Rumours, historical narratives, and minorities which look or behave differently are all that is needed. It has become a self-sustaining movement. This is why well-meaning efforts by liberal Muslims in India to castigate fellow-believers who applaud the victory of the Taliban, even if for ‘anti-colonial’ rather than religious reasons, are pointless and only show up their own fearful attempts to police the views of other Indians. Anti-Muslim prejudices and actions will, of course, make use of any evidence they can obtain, but do not in fact need them.
Instead of trying to align all Indian Muslims in a single political and ideological direction, which itself plays into the image of a uniform community, such people should defend the right to live and think differently within the law. We need an expansion of freedoms, not their restriction, no matter how sensible the cause. In any case, the new lines of conflict globally have little to do with Islam. The end of Afghanistan’s occupation signals the end of the War on Terror narrative, which legitimised Islamophobia globally. Muslims may be persecuted domestically in countries like India, but barring the rise of new forms of global militancy, are likely to fade away as an international threat.
TA: Will the success of the Taliban embolden religious extremists?
FD: Should their control over Afghanistan last, it may be seen as an encouraging victory by Islamists, not least because they have had a difficult time since Al-Qaeda and ISIS pushed them off the radical edge of Muslim politics. Islamism is in effect a Cold War movement, modelling its politics on Soviet visions of an ideological state run by a single party. But this model was already dead as a global form by the time the Taliban first took power in the 1990s. If anything, they represented its most violent and degraded example.
Since 9/11, especially, Islamist parties around the world have understood that the true threat to them comes not from the dictatorial post-colonial state they had been fighting, but from new forms of global militancy like Al-Qaeda. Unlike the Cold War antecedents of the Islamists, these new global outfits emerged out of the post-Cold War period of neoliberal globalization. This explains their disinterest in the nation state as well as their global causes, networks, recruitment and targets. Given this, Islamists the world over have turned to some version of nationalism, capitalism and democracy, however authoritarian. It remains to be seen whether the Taliban will conform to this pattern. What is certain is that its Islamism is not what it was during its first incarnation. And its enemies, too, are globalised militants like ISIS.
Reportedly
The rift between Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy and his sister YS Sharmila continues. For YSR’s 12th death anniversary commemoration meeting yesterday, it was YS Vijayalakshmi, their mother, said to be close to Sharmila, who sent invitations, and not Jagan. Jagan sees his wife YS Bharathi as a possible heir, and not his sister. Sharmila launched the regional YSR Telangana Party on July 8, a point of discord in the family. The entire YSR saga has been about succession, ever since he died in a plane crash 12 years ago.
House without Deputy Speaker illegal?
The issue concerning the Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha is again in the spotlight. A petition filed in the Delhi High Court by Pawan Reley says that the post had been vacant for 830 days, in violation of Article 93 of the Constitution. A Deputy Speaker enjoys the same legislative powers as the Speaker. And in the absence of the Speaker because of death, illness or any other reason, the Deputy Speaker also assumes administrative powers.
The Hindu reports that soon after the 2019 general election, the government had approached the YSR Congress, but occupying the post would have conflicted with their political interest ― special status for Andhra Pradesh.
Prime number: 1,008
Prime Number: 1,008The number of vaccine doses given per 1,000 population in rural Kerala, compared to 827 in urban areas of the state.Caste certificates needn’t be re-verified
Repeated verification of caste certificates would harm members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the Supreme Court said yesterday. It should be done only in cases of fraud, or if they were issued without proper enquiry.
Deep Dive
At the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Priyamvada Gopal has published critical work on the British Empire for two decades. In recent years, she has been involved in student protests for the decolonisation of universities. An interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
CCG seeks election integrity
The Constitutional Conduct Group has written to the Chief Election Commissioner on the urgent need for updated, accurate electoral rolls. The group of senior, retired bureaucrats have protested against the linkage of voter rolls with Aadhaar. The latest inductee in the Election Commission, AC Pandey, is a bureaucrat who worked closely with the Yogi Adityanath government until two years ago.
Antitrust case against Apple
Apple Inc faces an antitrust challenge in India for “abusing its dominant position in the apps market by forcing developers to use its proprietary in-app purchase system.” A case was filed before the Competition Commission of India by a little-known nonprofit, which argues that Apple’s fee of up to 30% raises costs for developers and customers, and acts as a market entry barrier.
Op-Eds you don’t want to miss
IAS officer Ayush Sinha’s vulgar display of state power needs to be understood in the larger context of culture and norms that govern relationships between the bureaucracy and the public, writes Yamini Aiyar. He is an inevitable consequence of a corrosive culture that distances the state from the public and legitimises demands for public “discipline”.
CP Rajendran and Mallika Bhanot write that in the Ganga-Himalaya basin, there is rock solid scientific evidence to demand the cancellation of hydel projects okayed by the Modi government. In a separate piece, they note, “There is no scientific way to erect a hydroelectric power project in the Garhwal Himalaya because erecting such a project itself would be unscientific.”
Partha S Ghosh writes that Modi’s goal is to fan Hindutva passions at regular intervals so that people stay distracted from rising prices, unemployment and foreign policy setbacks.
For true federalism, each state must have its own education policy, since centralised policies aim at constructing monocultural nationalism, write Jahnavi Reddy and Neethu Joseph.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s views and actions earned him the reputation of a hardliner. But a leader whose political career spanned almost the entire lifetime of independent India and Pakistan is not easy to define, write Ipsita Chakravarty and Safwat Zargar.
The Haqqani network, which now gets the lion’s share of political power in Afghanistan under the Taliban, remains Pakistan’s most loyal proxy and an al-Qaeda affiliate. Mohammed Taqi says this has implications for India.
K Jayakumar writes that questions about the differential pricing of vaccines, mismanagement of oxygen resources, indifference about migrant workers, the invoking of UAPA and sedition laws and the death of Stan Swamy in judicial custody have died prematurely. The media has gone silent, as if those issues are no longer relevant.
Suresh Menon makes a case for the Indian Test cricket team (average age 30) preparing for succession, and urges some stars to make way for a new generation.
Asif Iqbal Tanha, a student activist accused of 33 criminal offences, including murder, terrorism, rioting, and sedition, who spent a year in jail, explains why he will not stop opposing India’s new citizenship law.
Kudrat Mann analyses what Delhi’s courts have said about the police’s investigation of the Delhi riots of February 2020.
Rajni Bakshi says India is “in the midst of a large and epochal struggle for the future of India and what it means to be a Hindu” but the organisers of the upcoming ‘Dismantling Hindutva’ conference have fallen for a decoy in seeing this challenge merely as a contest between ideologies. “Why not instead focus on what really is at stake—the dream of…India as an open society in which unconditional and equal right to life, dignity and freedom of expression is so vibrantly lived that all authoritarian tendencies and hate-based agendas become powerless.”
Listen Up
In the 1950s-60s, the House of Jaipur’s Jai and Ayesha were seen as India’s golden couple, rubbing shoulders with American film stars and British royalty. Hear how partying collided and sometimes cohabited with politics.
Watch Out
Actor Naseeruddin Shah’s 57 second video message criticising those Muslim Indians who have celebrated the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan has stirred a massive debate on social media. Some accuse him of adding grist to the Hindutva propaganda mills who look for any excuse to demonise Muslim Indians while others have welcomed his opposition to “political Islam”.
Over and Out
The non-selection of R Ashwin for the Indian cricket XI generated outrage of all kinds. It has to be the “greatest NON selection we have ever witnessed across 4 Tests in the UK !!! 413 Test wickets & 5 Test 100s !!!!”, said Michael Vaughan.
TV drama passed off as news has led to a show-stopper. When an anchor asked Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen why so many people were fleeing Afghanistan, Shaheen said… hear for yourself. It’s epic. (Watch from 04.30 to 05.20)
New Zealand furniture store Annabelle’s is charging $NZ 800 for a cot on sale, discounted down from $1,200. It is a charpoy, sold as a “vintage Indian daybed”. Sleep easy.
ABBA’s Indian fans would be happy to know that the 1970s era pop group have released their first fresh music in 39 years, ‘I Still have Faith in You’. The digital avatars are a bit creepy, though. ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’, minus the electronic garbage, is vintage ABBA.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.