Naked Punch Asia: issue 02

Naked Punch ASIA An Engaged Review of Politics

Featuring: David Barsamian Ali Ahmad Kurd Munir Malik Emi Foulk

02 FREE COPY

Security barrier Type H - Near the American Consulate, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi

- Near the American Consulate, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi

LONG MARCH SPECIAL ISSUE

Art work above: Sajjd Hussain, Thothay.

NAKED PUNCH ASIA - 02

CREDITS: Editor:: Qalandar Bux Memon Editorial Committee: Vijay Prashad Fawzia Afzal Khan R A Somairi Picture Editor: Sara Khan Design: Q.alandar Bux Memon For submissions email: info@nakedpunch.com .

Cover art: Bani Abidi TITLE: Security barrier Type H - Near the American Consulate, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi

Art work above: Sajjd Hussain, Untitled.

CONTENTS iSSUE

02

situations - Pakistan +++Qalandar Bux Memon The Lawyers and the old Granite Block.

p. 5 +++ALI AHMAD KURD: Interviewed by Qalandar Bux Memon and Riaz Akbar.

p. 11 +++Munir Malik TRIALS TRIBULATIONS AND INTIMIDATION.

p. 13 +++Emi Foulk FISHERFOLK fight agains the lawless rule of sindh’s feudal lords.

p. 23

situations - India +++ P. SAINATH p. 29

Interviewed by David Barsamian

URDU POETRY +++Including, Sahir Ludhianvi, Nazim Hikmet, and Habib Jalib.

p. 35

FROM THE COMMUNARDS +++CLR JAMES EVERY cook can govern.

p. 48 +++ Nazim Hikmet Some advice for those who will serve time in prison.

p. 57

THE LAWYERS AND THE OLD GRANITE BLOCK

by Qalandar Bux Memon

Art Work by Sajjad Hussain, Istiraahat -1.

I First Historical Note by way of Prologue.

‘Those who sow should eat’ [Jo kheray so khai] – this was the slogan upon which the radical and revered Sufi poet Shah Inayat set up, in the 18th century, an agrarian commune. Shah Inayat was born in Multan; in youth he affiliated himself with the Qadiriya order and, for his education, travelled widely, including a long sojourn in Delhi and further into South India, before settling in Mirpur (today Jhok Sharif ), in Sindh.

Jagirdars, Kolhoras, and the Mughal governor colluded to arrest and behead Shah Inayat on January 1718. Since, his death he has been called, ‘the Mansur of Sind’. Mansur al – Hallaj, of course, was the Sufi, who for uttering in the streets of Baghdad, ‘ana’l haqq’ (‘I am the creative truth’, also translated as, ‘I am God’) was himself beheaded on the orders of an Emperor in March, 922.

Shah Inayat’s commune began life when Shah Inayat set up a system of collective farming on his land and invited peasants to farm with him. He held that the land belonged to God and that only those who worked to grow the crop were entitled to it. His thoughts convinced peasants far and wide not to pay tax to either the Empire or the Jagirdars. As the commune acquired more attendants so too did it attract the wrath of local landlords and the Empire. Local landlords sponsored armed attacks on the commune and followed this up with a four month siege. Sufis and peasants held onto the commune and the attackers retreated. Shah Inayat protested to Delhi, and the Mughal court, at this stage, outraged that a holy man had been attacked, ordered the attackers’ land to be given to Shah Inayat as compensation. Seeing this as ‘God’s work’, Shah Inayat allowed the commune to grow.

News of Shah Inayat’s social reforms attracted peasants, and oral history suggests that the commune grew to 40,000 strong. Instinctively, the ‘old granite block’ continued to plot for the commune’s downfall.

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The opportunity came in 1716 when Delhi sent a new governor to the area of Thatta, Nawab Azam Khan. Local jagirdars convinced Azam Khan of the danger from Inayat’s commune, who in turn wrote to Delhi, warning of a rebellion that threatened the Empire. Alarmed, Delhi promptly sent in troops; upon their arrival in Mirpur began the second siege of the commune. The commune, fortified after the first attack, resisted for months. Having failed to archive their goal with force, the ‘granite block’ turned to cunning (its refuge). Offering peace terms, swearing no less then on the Quran to guarantee Shah Inayat’s safety, they angled him out of the commune, arrested and then be-headed him and duly sent the head to Delhi as a gift to be presented to the Emperor Furrukh Sher .

Before the beheading, a dialogue is said to have taken place between Shah Inayat and Azam Khan.

I quote a few lines:

Azam Khan: Why did you make yourself infamous and made yourself a target for the arrows of affliction?

Shah Inayat: What shall a lover do if he does not carry the burden of blame?

No hero possesses a shield against the arrows of fate.

Azam Khan: Now since you are going to be killed, how can you hope for life?

Shah Inayat: Never he dies, whose heart is living through love.

Thus, my eternal life is fixed in the scroll of the world.

Azam Khan: Why did you not come out, obeying the order of the leaders?

Shah Inayat: How could we disciples turn our face towards the Kaba If our Pir (spiritual leader) turns his face towards the wine house?

Azam Khan: Are you now sad because your wishes have not

been fulfilled?

Shah Inayat: From the moment I performed ablutions from the fountain of love, I uttered the funeral prayers over everything existent.

II Second Historical Note by way of Prologue.

In the 1950s, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, while being lead away from prison in a horse cart in chains, composed the following poem:

The tearful eye, the noisy spirit is not enough, my friends, the accusation of love is not enough, my friends, let’s go today to the bazaar in chains’ The poem went on:

let’s go with hands waving, intoxicated, dancing, let’s go with dust on our heads, blood on our sleeves, let’s go to the city where our love lives, everyone is watching -the city’s rulers, - its people, -the unhappy morning, -the day with no purpose, and the arrow of accusation, the stone of abuse, Who except us is their intimate friend?

Who now in our beloved’s city is left pure?

Who now is left worthy of the executioner’s hand?

Pick up the burden of the heart, my friends, let us go, heartbroken ones, We are the ones who have to be murdered again, my friends.

‘Hands waving, intoxicated, dancing’ – these words recall the habitual activities of Malangs and Qalandars of Pakistan.1 It could well describe Mansur Al Hallaj or our Mansur of Sind being led to execu-

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tion, ‘hands waving, intoxicated, dancing’, and in love. The last two lines also direct our attention to Sufi lore, ‘let us go, heartbroken ones, we are the ones who have to be murdered again, my friends’.

In tales composed by Shah Latif and Bulleh Shah it is the heartbroken ones who are martyred for their love. For example, Latif in this tale of Sasui and Panhu, has Sasui state, ‘A thousand thorns do prick my feet; they cause me endless woe!

Alas, my feet are torn, one toe meets not the other toe; And yet, with bare feet I will go to my beloved one’.

Faiz was well aware of Sufi poetic traditions and it is no coincidence that he chooses to create these images. However, whereas it had been Sufis that had battled the ‘granite block’ in the past, the task now fell on the Progressives (Progressive Writers Association), who had ‘picked up the burden of the heart’.

The Progressive Writers Association [Anjuman Taraqi pasand Musaniffeen] began life in a Chinese restaurant. In 1934, in London, Indian intellectuals gathered over dinner where Sajjad Zaheer circulated a draft document that, once polished, was to form the manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association [henceforth, PWA]. Their aim was revolutionary. The manifesto states that in a time when ‘radical changes are taking place in Indian Society’ and yet ‘the spirit of reaction’ though

‘moribund and doomed to ultimate decay, is still operative and making desperate efforts to prolong itself’, the writers duty is to ‘give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist in the spirit of progress in the country’. The PWA wished to ‘rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, academic and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long; to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people; and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future’.

The manifesto further states, ‘we believe that the new literature of India [Pakistan] must deal with the basic problems of our existence today – the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation’. These sentiments are well summed up in Premchand’s presidential address to the first meeting of the PWA, where he announced, ‘Hamen Husn ke meyaar badalne honge’ [we will have to change the standard of beauty]. And, one can add, the standard of love.

Whereas decadent Urdu poets (whose descendents today script Bollywood songs) had celebrated the beauty of the beloved and the resultant oppressive desire of the lover without the social or philosophical undertones of Sufi poets, the progressive conceptualized beauty and love as belonging to ‘anti-colonial’ and ‘class struggle’.

Faiz, Habib Jalib, and Sahir Ludhianvi are some of the progressive writers who took up this challenge and infused the traditional Sufi martyr poetry with a political dimension suited for their time. Like

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Mansur and Shah Inayat they suffered the afflictions of love. Exiled, jailed, tortured, stricken of wealth, they made their way in life as modern ‘wayfarers’. Faiz was jailed in the 1950s on trumped up charges of treason, and in 1977 he went into exile, returning to his beloved country only two years before his death. Habib Jalib was imprisoned under Ayub, Bhutto, and Zia, and though he was released by Benazir’s first administration, he saw through its sham and wrote:

The status of the poor is still the same the days of the ministers have indeed changed every Bilawal of the country is under debt while Benazirs (literally the poor) of the country walk without shoes [Haal ab tak wahi hain ghareeboan kay Din phiray hain faqat waziroan kay her Bilawal hai pase ka maqrooz paoon nangay hain Benazeeroan kay].

Sahir Ludhainvi, though a successful lyricist in Bollywood, remained faithful to progressive ideals. Sahir, with the progressives, held that, ‘the art that doesn’t reach the poor has not achieved its potential’. The CIA assassination of P. Lumumba occasioned from Sahir’s pen what is perhaps one of the finest martyr poems ever written, titled, Blood, However, is Blood. I present it in full:

Tyranny is but tyranny; when it grows, it is vanquished Blood however is blood; if it spills, it will congeal It will congeal on the desert sands, on the murderer’s hand On the brow of justice, and on chained feet On the unjust sword, on the sacrificial body Blood is blood; if It spills, it takes root

Say this to Coercion’s manipulative intent Say this to the Laila, the darling of the assembly (UN) Blood is wild, it will splatter and stain your garments It is a rapid flame that will scorch your harvests That blood which you wished to bury in the killing fields Has risen today in the streets and courts Somewhere as a flame, somewhere as a slogan, somewhere else as a flung stone When blood flows, bayonets cannot contain it When it raises its defiant head, laws will not restrain it Tyranny has no caste, no community, no status nor dignity Tyranny is simply tyranny, from its beginning to its end Blood however is blood; it becomes a hundred things: Shapes that cannot be obliterated Flames that can never be extinguished Chants that will not be suppressed.

III THE LAWYERS AND THE OLD GRANITE BLOCK Who are these black coated lawyers? These dancing, whirling, singing lawyers, who face the stones of abuse, these ‘intoxicated ones’, who are they?

Who are these murdered, tear-gassed, beaten, slandered-against lawyers? Let me answer simply: they are ‘hope’. If one were to answer politically, then they are the ‘vanguard’. If the answer is to be historical, then they are today’s Inayats, today Mansurs, today’s Jalibs, today’s Faizs, today’s Sahirs, today’s ‘lovers’.1

Let them hide all they want, skulk in their lairs The tracks of spilled blood will point out the executioners’ abode Let conspiracies shroud the truth with darkness Each drop of blood will march out, holding aloft a lamp

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon tells us, that the post-colonial scenario in the Third World

Say this to tyranny’s worthless and dishonored Destiny

1 For more on the murder, arrest and other intimidations of the lawyers see, Munir Malik, Trials, Tribulations, and Intimidation, Naked Punch Asia, this issue.

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finds the native national bourgeoisie situating its ‘historical role’ as that of an ‘intermediary’. He writes, ‘its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged…the national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent… and it will play its part…in a most dignified manner’. The national bourgeoisie will continue the practices of the former colonial masters. The change is merely in the skin color of the rulers.

Whereas before they were white, now they are brown. What is not challenged in the post-colonial scenario are the moribund institutions, discourses and traditional oppressive power structures inherited from colonialism – landlordship, feudalism, Pirism, an elite and aloof bureaucracy, the schism between town and country, sectarianism of all kinds and other obscurantist traditions and customs. This, enigmatically, Fanon refers to as ‘the old granite block’.

It was for challenging this ‘old granite block’ that Iftikhar Chaudhry, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, has been illegally deposed. His challenge, in the public interest, was sustained and vigorous. There are many cases in point, let me elaborate on a few.

Famously, he stopped the privatization of Pakistani Steel Mills on the grounds of ‘indecent haste’ and for lack of transparency, which was being manufactured by the then Prime Minister, ‘Shortcut’ Aziz for possible personal benefit. Further, he took suo moto notice of the violation of wedding meal restrictions against two ministers of Punjab, in another case he restrained the government of Punjab from using government land for the building of a commercial plaza. Likewise, he stopped a mini golf project, which was to be built in a public park.

The New Murree project was also taken up as a suo moto case. The project, sponsored by then Chief Minister of Punjab, Pervaiz Elahi, envisioned using pristine forestland of Partriata, Murree, to set up a tourist enclave for the ‘jet- setting’ rich. Partriata forest, however, filters the water for the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad; its hasty demolition would have disturbed a unique ecosystem, on which millions rely. The Chief Justice ordered that the project be stopped until the developers provided proper assurances about the protection of

the environment. In a case petitioned by Mohammad Ismail Memon (2007), the Chief Justice, taking notice of the death of a retired professor from starvation due to non-payment of his pension and authored the judgment, which required the finalization of all pending pension matters within two weeks, he further directed that all future pensions be processed before retirement of the claimants and if this was not done the head of concerned departments would be punished for contempt of court. Munir Malik noted the impact of this judgment, ‘thousands of aged and impoverished retired civil servants have secured a new lease on life’. But by far the most significant cases, in this regard, are the ones he has taken up with concern to missing persons.

Over 4, 000 persons have ‘disappeared’ across Pakistan. Some have been taken by the military, a result of its oppression of Baloch and Sindhi lands and the persons who fight against this. Others – and here the role of the national bougeoisie as an ‘intermediary’ is clear -- have been picked up under the largesse of ‘The War on Terror’. The Pakistani military and bourgeoisie have not only opened up Pakistan for logistical support to Nato forces in Afghanistan, allowed drones to shower down missiles on northern parts of Pakistan (both for a handsome commission), but they have also sold their citizens – ‘intermediary’ business agent that they are. The American ‘Reward for Justice’ program is authorized to give multi-million dollar rewards globally for information that prevents ‘terrorism against US interests worldwide or leads to the arrest or conviction in any country of an individual for the commission of such an act’. 2 The important point to note is that money is not given upon successful conviction but merely upon arrest. Most of the prisoners captured, tortured and rendered (not always in this order) to Guantanamo Bay have come by way of Pakistan. Pakistani intermediaries would have been handsomely rewarded.

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is one case in point. Arrested, allegedly by Pakistani agency personnel while travelling to Karachi Airport with her three children, she was rendered to Afghanistan, tortured and now awaits trial in a New York court. Her children are still missing, and one is reported to have died 2 see, http://www.reprieve.org.uk/documents/ OFFTHERECORDFINAL.pdf

in captivity.3 In the Sindh High Court, a petition has been filed against her illegal rendering to US authorities and for her and her children’s return to Pakistan. I estimate that unless the judiciary is restored, we are not likely to see a case that goes against the business interests of our intermediaries judged fairly.

Another case worth mentioning is that of Binyam Mohamed. Binyam, a British resident who having recently converted to Islam decided to travel through Muslim lands, was picked up in 2002, at Karachi Airport, where he had gone for his return flight to Britain. Pakistani intelligence officers held him in Karachi where, as intermediaries for the British spy agency MI5, they tortured him. A recent article in the Guardian newspaper explains, ‘A policy governing the interrogation of terrorism suspects in Pakistan that led to British citizens and residents being tortured was devised by MI5 lawyers and figures in government, according to evidence heard in court. A number of British terrorism suspects who have been detained without trial in Pakistan say they were tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents before being questioned by MI5’.4 Binyam told his lawyers that, ‘before being questioned by MI5 he had been hung from leather straps, beaten and threatened with a firearm by Pakistani intelligence officers’. Binyam was later rendered to Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay prison before being released this week after 6 and half years, without charge. Rangzieb Ahmeh, another British resident captured in Pakistan had three of his fingernails pulled out by the ISI during interrogations. Again, it was Pakistanis who tortured while the British asked the questions.

The ‘old granite block’, playing its dignified part of business agent and intermediary, has not been able to ‘transform’ the country from its colonial set-up nor actively provide law and justice to its citizens. The Chief Justice of Pakistan, by taking up the missing persons cases ,challenged the interests of the ‘old granite block’ and also those of the 3 see, http://therepublicofrumi.com/archives/aafia01. htm#2003-07 4 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/16/pakistan-torture-mi5-agent-binyam

British and American administrations, who would like to sweep their torture regimes under the rug of history. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry began taking up cases of missing persons in late 2006. By November 2007 the court had 400 missing persons cases registered. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan had filed a petition with a list of 199 missing persons. Before being deposed, the Supreme Court judges had forced agencies and government departments to trace 99 of these persons.

Forty-four were released by April 2007. In the case of Mr. Janjua, who has been abducted by agencies and is said to be held in Azad Kashmir, then Deputy Attorney General Nasir Saeed Sheikh, suggested that the case be disposed of, a suggestion that a pliant judge would no doubt have accepted.

Iftikhar Chaudhry’s rebuke, however, will stand in the annals of Pakistani history as an inspiration for future judges, petitioners and lawyers. He replied, ‘“Who are you to tell us to dispose of the case? It’s a question of our authority. You are responsible for tracing out the missing people’. In taking up these cases the Chief Justice has defended the constitution of Pakistan5 from the abuse that our business agents had wrought against it.

The fight of the Lawyers movement is for the rule of law to reign in the country, protected and enforced by an independent judiciary..7 This requires a judiciary and judges that have teeth and administer justice to ordinary citizens and not just for the rich and powerful. Let me here quote the radical Scottish thinker Henry Brougham: ‘It was the boast of Augustus that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much more nobler will be the sovereign’s boast when he shall have it to say that he found law…a sealed book and left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich and left it inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of the craft and oppression and left it the staff of honest and shield of innocence’. The lawyers’ movement is well on the way to making that boast.6 5 Article 10 states, ‘No person who is arrested shall be detained in custody without being informed, as soon as may be, of the grounds for such arrest, nor shall be denied the right to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner of his choice’.

6 For more on the aims of the Lawyers Movement see, Interview with Ali Ahmad Kurd, Naked Punch Asia, this issue.

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“Create in your heart and soul, a respect and desire to fight for the people, for rule of law, the constitution and the rights of humankind”.

Ali Ahmad Kurd.

Qalandar Bux Memon and Riaz Akbar in Conversation with Ali Ahmad Kurd.

Ali Ahmad Kurd QBM: How did you resist General Zia’s regime? Tell us about your political activity.

AAK: I have been a political activist throughout my life, and for that reason I have been on ‘jail yatras’ for more than six and half years. I believe that it is the duty of anyone who is minimally educated or is aware of the workings of politics and society through newspaper readership, TV channels or magazines to fight for the rights of people -- that is, for their fundamental rights. Fighting for the fundamental rights of people, in my opinion, is political ‘work’, and I am fortunate to have taken part in such activity. I have been affiliated with many parties, Provincial Bar Associations, Supreme Court Bar Association and the Pakistan Bar Association, and have used my position for the struggle of the peoples– for the disadvantaged people.

We agitated against Zia from the platform of bar politics. We convened a lawyers’ convention in Lahore and brought together

a large gathering, an estimated 3500 lawyers, including eminent figures like Yahya Bakhtiar, Mehmood Ali Kasuri, Syed Kirmani and others. It was in that convention that we formulated four points. These points served as a basis for the formation of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

All dictators have wreaked havoc on the country; they have shaken its foundations, by destroying public space, debate, creating a culture of violence and backdoor politics. The damage done by Zia was particularity profound and Musharraf was equally damaging. The line of thought for resistance set against Zia by the lawyers continues to radiate today. There is continuity in our outlook.

QBM: Did you participate in ‘student politics’? How do you view the government decision to lift the ban on student unions and student politics?

AAK: Yes! My activist training comes from experience in student politics. I was simultaneously president of both the student bod-

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ies of Balochistan University Law College and Degree College, and so I was at the forefront of all of the agitation of that era.

Every youngster, I believe, should be a fighter. If they don’t have in their heart and soul a respect and desire to fight for people – for the rule of law, constitution and the fundamental rights of humankind, than they are not doing justice to their life’s.

Leadership emerges and gets trained from the politics of student unions. But when you put a ban on them, students only get to read curriculum books. This might get them a good job but it does not help them in other aspects. Life is not just about being a doctor or a civil servant; it is also about effectively influencing others with the force of your moral character and allowing others to influence you.

QBM: There were many movements which helped to bring Z.A Bhutto to power did you play any role in these?

AAK: I was an ardent activist of the National Awami Party at that time and was its general secretary...when Bhutto overthrew the Balochistan government. Throughout Bhutto’s rule I was either in jail or protesting against him. I do regret these protests. It was a phase of life which has passed. Bhutto was a great leader, deep down he felt the pain and anguish of the poor.

The most intelligent-almost genius-like politicians born in Pakistan are Mr. Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy and Bhutto. It is a token of his success that we see Bhutto being respected across the country and the world by enemies and friends alike today.

would turn violent and people would ransack and burn buildings and vehicles. They thought that, if violence is not used, their movement would not succeed, that no one would notice it.

We have engendered a new culture of peaceful demonstration and agitation. I claim that any future mass movement will have to follow our example. People will no longer tolerate violent movements.

Secondly, we have made people aware of the importance of constitutionalism. It is a sacred document...all of the problems that Pakistan is facing - poverty, ignorance, terrorism and intolerance – are due to disrespect for the constitution.

We have, besides the fact of the tough, dry and complex nature of law, instilled its significance to laypersons. This is our success.

Pakistan is nominally a federation but its units have their own peculiar forms and manifestations of separatism which have brought Pakistan to the verge of disintegration. It is the lawyer’s movement that has reunited people on grounds transcending their parochial provincialism uniting them for a national cause.

Dictators are not unaccompanied rather they are often spokesmen of background players who chalk out programs and then rule. They try to convert the public/society into a crowd. Dictators can easily rule a crowd. We transformed that crowd into ‘awaam’ (‘the people’), and gave it a shape. And when it takes this shape of an ‘awaam’, this awaami taqat (‘people power’) is such that it can challenge any dictator.

RA: Why did you decide to study law?

AAK: I was not a bookish student and did not read much but I always attempted to be amongst the frontrunners in class. I would not work throughout the year but prepare shortly before exams.

My student age coincided with huge political upheavals in the country – this was the period of Yahya Khan’s Martial Law and dismemberment. So learning was not easy. I am unsure why I chose law, but it has turned out well. One reason that comes to mind is that law has a relation to raising ones awareness and consciousness, and this was at the forefront of my mind at that time.

QBM: What does the principle of rule of law means to you and what has been its role in your life?

AAK: Generally, I have a reputation of being an agitator. In my personal life I am courteous and composed. Rule of law here is important to me. It means a uniform standard of justice in Pakistan – regardless, of who one is. Law should be the same and applicable to all. It should not be different for a poor person and a rich one, or for an ordinary voter and a minister. This is the essential application of rule of law.

Also, unless you don’t familiarize the masses with this spirit, beauty and colour of ‘rule of law’, we will miss the path to civilization. Society progresses if it is on the right path towards civilization...

In politics, rule of law is that the judiciary has its own sphere, executive its own and the parliament its own. And that they are supreme in their respective spheres.

Pakistan is a feudal country. Even today the feudal lord’s have a firm grip on Pakistan’s power structure. Yet, for two years lawyers- who are largely from lower middle class or middle class background- have dominated the nations attention. This is a new force in the old dynamics of Pakistan and as stated it is Middle Class and Lower Middle Class. It is a miracle that we have weakened the feudalist monopolist culture that reins in Pakistan.

RA: You have called for another Long March are the lawyers and the civil society members left with any energy and passion?

AAK: Yes! A simple proof this is the celebration 28th October when I and my colleagues were elected. People across the country took part in this celebration. I knew that people had responded to our message and were behind the fight for a strong independent judiciary. There are hundreds and hundred of thousands of people with us. They realise that the progress of the nation is dependent on an independent Judiciary.

QBM: Do you have a message for students?

AAK: Life, I say it again, is not just about getting a education and then getting a good job...Life involves expressing one’s Godgiven abilities, qualities and energies for the good of society.

What good is my individual success if there isn’t any beauty in the surrounding?

This is precisely the task youth and students; they should be fighters, that is, they should struggle for the rights of their fellow human beings and so engender beauty in the society.

RA: What has been the impact of the Lawyers Movement on Pakistan’s politics and society?

AAK: Its impact is global and historic. The Lawyers Movement has shaken the old political culture of Pakistan. Past movements

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TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS AND INTIMIDATION

By Munir Malik 2007. However, Mr. Rasheed

This chapter cannot do jus- Razvi agreed with my suggestion tice in recounting the innumerthat lawyers who reside in Malir able sacrifices that the lawyers and other adjoining areas should have rendered during their strug- assemble at the Malir District gle to establish the supremacy Courts to join the procession of of the Rule of Law. However, two the Malir Bar Association as the names that keep coming to mind Airport was not far from there. deserve mention at the outset I accordingly informed my col- those of two valiant lawyers leagues, including Pervez Akhtar from Karachi - Pervez Akhtar Kiyani who resided in GulshanKiyani and Raja Riaz who gave e-Hadeed. The next morning the supreme sacrifice with their I got up early and my younger lives. On the martyrdom of Person insisted that he would come vez Akhtar Kiyani, a senior lawyer along. We drove towards the Maand friend of his who resides lir District Courts but the National near Malir, Asghar Shaheen, had Highway was blocked at Quaidathis to say: bad by long vehicles that had been parked on both sides of the “On 11th of May 2007 I was highway. I took an alternative present in the Sindh High Court road and after changing course Bar Room and enquired from Mr. a number of times, I reached Rasheed Razvi if any transport the Malir District Court premises arrangements had been made to at Malir. There I met Hasan Jaftransport lawyers to the Karachi fer, Advocate High Court as was Airport to welcome the Chief agreed upon the night before.

Justice of Pakistan the followHe narrated the roadblocks that ing day. He informed me that he had encountered and had vehicles had been arranged and to put away his black coat and that I should reach High Court tie in a shopper, or else, risk bepremises at 8:00 am on 12th May ing identified as a lawyer in an

atmosphere that was extremely hostile. He informed me that a number of Advocates proceeding to Malir had been beaten back by armed gangs and, in fact, some had even been kidnapped.

He had heard that the President Malir Bar Association had been brutalized and had suffered serious injuries. A short while latter Pervez Akhtar Kiyani joined us.

He was not wearing the uniform prescribed for proceedings in the courtroom, wearing shalwar kameez to disguise his identity.

As the procession of lawyers started to move from the Malir Bar, he affixed a banner with a portrait of the Chief Justice on my car. However, when we reached Kalaboard the road was blocked with water tankers and heavy vehicles and the crowd was chanting slogans in favour of a personality whose party was part of the Government of Sindh. Processionists that made up the lawyers’ cavalcade raised counter-slogans in favour of the Chief Justice. Sensing danger,

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Pervez Akhtar Kiyani remarked to me that he was ready to give his life for the Chief Justice. When we arrived at Malir Halt, the road was again blocked and we came under indiscriminate gunfire.

Rangers present at Malir Halt stood by idly. As a result, the lawyers disbursed and tried to find refuge by crossing the railway track and proceeded on foot to Rafah-e-Aam and Baloch Society.

My son, Hasan Jaffer, together with one lady advocate and I kept sitting in the car. After a few minutes but what seemed to be an eternity, the firing stopped.

We were able to escape by flying on the car a flag of a political party belonging to the coalition governing the Province of Sindh.

After dropping Hasan Jaffer at his residence I went to Pervez Akhtar Kiyani’s house to find out how he was but he was not present.

When I returned to my residence a friend telephoned to inform me that he had watched Geo TV which had flashed news that Pervez Akhtar Kiyani had expired.

I could not travel to Jinnah Hospital but asked a friend who lived

in the city to visit the morgue at Jinnah Hospital to find out if the mortal remains of Mr. Kiyani had been brought there. There were 22 corpses at Jinnah Hospital, only 15 of which had been identified. I finally contacted a relative of Pervez Kiyani who lived in the city and requested him to proceed to Jinnah Hospital and see if he could identify the dead body, which he did. The body of Pervez Kiyani was brought home in a private ambulance and the cause of his death was stated as “bullet was fired on his neck and he was expired on the spot.”

Raja Riaz, a senior lawyer and former Vice President of the Karachi Bar Association was one of the active foot soldiers of the lawyers’ the movement. He is reported to have had an altercation in High Court bar room with another senior lawyer who was commenting on the lawyers’ movement. Apparently extremely harsh words were exchanged.

While it is reported that the two lawyers on the intervention of common friends patched up

and embraced each other as a token of letting bygones be bygone, the very next day, on 10th September 2007, Raja Riaz was gunned down in the morning a few meters from the Sindh Governor’s official residence. Raja Riaz was riding a taxi that was intercepted by two men riding a motorbike and was shot at point blank range. He succumbed to his injuries on the spot.

Iqbal Kazmi is a Karachi lawyer who filed petitions in the Sindh High Court accusing the Sindh Government of instigating the May 12 violence in Karachi. He stated that in order to pressurize him into withdrawing the petition he was kidnapped and tortured by some unknown persons after he had filed the petition and threatened with grave consequences if he failed to unconditionally withdraw his petition.

The Chief Justice was “suspended” on Friday the 9th of March 2007. On 10th and 11th of March the central leadership of the

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bar had announced a three-day protest and a complete boycott of all court proceedings. The first opening day of the courts after our call was Monday 12th of March. Lawyers held peaceful countrywide protests. In their public statements spokespersons for government maintained that our protests would fade away in a few days and then it would be business as usual. We were not ready to forsake the Chief Justice and accordingly the government had resolved to crush dissent with an iron hand. We got a preview of the government’s intentions when protesting lawyers attempted to march towards The Mall Road from the premises of the Lahore High Court, Lahore. In a brutal baton charge by ‘stalwarts’ of the Punjab Police, at least 40 lawyers were injured.

Mr. Latif Khosa, Member Pakistan Bar Council, had the honour of being amongst the first to shed his blood. His forehead was cut open by the batons wielded on him. Images of Mr. Khosa, profusely bleeding, sent a chilling message across the country and abroad. But the legal fraternity was not to be deterred. The very next day it swarmed Constitution Avenue in Islamabad and held protest meetings throughout the country to condemn the brutality perpetrated in Lahore by the socalled guardians of the law.

On the night of the 4th of May 2007, the members of the Sahiwal Bar Association took out a peaceful torch-bearing procession from the Sahiwal District Court Premises to the centre of the city. En route, this peaceful procession was attacked by the law-enforcing agencies. The

attack had all the hallmarks of deliberate and premeditated action as the police carried bottles of acid and cans of petrol that they threw on the faces of the processionists. The acid attacks caused grievous body burns while the petrol thrown on the faces blew up the torches resulting in the scarring of hands and faces of those holding them aloft.

The face of the President of the Sahiwal Bar, Mr. Muhammad Usman bore scars that were visible when we arrived in Sahiwal en route to our journey to Multan weeks later. The police refused to register a First Information Report (FIR) on the complaint, thus compelling the aggrieved lawyers to file a private complaint against the offending police officers before a judicial magistrate.

On the contrary police registered a false case against 41 lawyers.

The then Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court who was also a member of the Supreme Judicial Council ordered that the files relating to the complaint filed by the lawyers be sent to him at the principal seat of the Lahore High Court Bar where he sat on it for a long time and then marked it for disposal by another judge in whom the lawyers of Sahiwal hardly reposed any confidence.

Attempts to intimidate and pressurizing the Chief Justice into resigning from his office are well documented in the record of the Supreme Court in Constitutional Original Petition No.21 of 2007 filed by him directly in the Supreme Court and particularly in his affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court on 29th May 2007. Regretfully, persons close to the Chief Justice were also not

spared.

Syed Hammad Raza the Additional Registrar of the Supreme Court was shot-dead shortly before dawn on 13th May 2007.

Hammad Raza had close ties to the Chief Justice dating back to when the Chief Justice of Pakistan was Chief Justice of the Balochistan High Court. Immediately upon the suspension of the Chief Justice on the 9th of March 2007, Hammad Raza was taken into custody by the Security Agencies who subjected him to 4 days of grilling with a view to manufacturing evidence against the Chief Justice in support of the charges contained in the Reference. Hammad Raza was a material witness that the defence intended to call to rebut certain allegations contained against the Chief Justice in the Reference, and to depose on the removal of certain files and documents from the chamber of the Chief Justice after the restraint imposed upon him by the executive on 9th March 2007. Police claimed that armed robbers were behind the killing but his widow squarely puts the blame on the govern-

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ment and its agencies. According to her on the fateful morning she ran out of her house crying for help and saw several policemen lurking around the lawn of her house. Her cries went in vain.

Dawn reports that according to the family, four persons broke into Mr. Raza’s official residence through the kitchen window at around 4.15 am. They overpowered his parents who lived on the ground floor, tied them up and asked them about Mr. Raza.

The newspaper Dawn quotes his widow as follows:

credible follow up on the FIR.

The Sindh High Court Bar Association, Karachi was supposed to host the Chief Justice of Pakistan on 23rd March 2007.

The visit would commemorate the Golden jubilee of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and the Chief was to open the SAARC law conference that was to be held in Karachi around the same time.

These functions were postponed in view of the “suspension” of the Chief Justice on 9th March 2007.

However, in April, after the stay of the proceedings before the “As my husband responded to Supreme Judicial Council by the the knocks and opened the door, Supreme Court, Mr. Abrar Hasan, we saw four clean shaven men then President of the Sindh High in trousers and shalwar kameez.

Court Bar revived the invitation, They were aged between 28 and leaving it to the Chief Justice to 35. One of them was holding a select a date of his convenience. pistol and another carried a knife. After the successful address at On seeing Hammad, the gunman the Lahore High Court Bar, the shot him in the head and fled,” Chief decided to accept the Ms. Shabana said. She said she invitation. It was widely reported ran downstairs crying for help in the press from 5th of May and was surprised to see some onwards that the Chief would policemen in the lawn. They did address the members of the bar not do anything. However, police on the lawns of the Sindh High officer Shaukat Pervez, a neighCourt at Karachi on 12th May bour, responded to her screams. 2007.

SP Pervez, who is detailed with The chronology of events prethe prime minister’s security ceding 12th May has been laid squad, shouted at a police patrol, out in the report of the fact findstanding about 100 feet away ing team of the Human Rights from his house, to catch the culCommission of Pakistan. Relyprits but by the time the patrol ing on various newspapers, moved the attackers had disapthe report titled “A city under peared.” siege- Carnage in Karachi” mentions that on 5th May 2007 the The nephew of the Chief Justice, Muttahida Qaumi Movement Mr. Amir Rana, an Advocate prac- (MQM) held a demonstration and ticing at Quetta lodged an FIR press conference at the Karachi with the Bijli Road Police Station, Press Club where a minister in Quetta alleging that a Brigadier the ruling coalition stated that and 15 unnamed people barged “this constitutional issue of the into his house and harassed his Presidential Reference has been family. To date there has been no converted into a political issue by

the opposition parties and certain lawyers’ organizations which are trying to create a crisis-like situation in the country for their ulterior motives”. A spate of statements and counter-statements followed, with the Pakistan Peoples Party, the Awami National Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (N) vowing to accord a historic welcome to the Chief Justice. However, the parties in the government viewed it as a conspiracy to de-stabilize their government. On 8th May, the MQM founder, Altaf Hussain announced the holding of a rally on the very day that the Chief Justice was scheduled to arrive. The political scene appeared to heat up when, on the evening of 9th May, three independent television news channels went off the air in Karachi, Hyderabad and Nawabshah despite the denial

by PEMRA that it had issued any instructions imposing a ban on their airing in the said cities.

On Sunday, 6th May, after the conclusion of the Chief Justice’s visit to the Lahore High Court Bar, I returned to Karachi by an evening flight. I visited the High Court Bar Room the next day and addressed the members of the bar urging them to continue their resistance. As far as the address of the Chief Justice on 12th May was concerned, he was the guest of the Sindh High Court Bar Association and it was for the host to decide any rescheduling. So long as the invitation held the field, the Chief was determined to attend. In view of the pressing demands of the Karachi Bar Association and the Malir Bar Association that the Chief should address their

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members as well, the Chief’s counsels made it known that he would proceed to the Malir Bar from Karachi Airport, then stop at the Quaid’s Mazar, onwards to the District Court premises on M. A. Jinnah Road and then to the Sindh High Court. On the morning of May 9th, I received a telephone call from my partner, Faisal Siddiqi, informing me that the firm’s offices had been sealed on the specious ground that it was using residential premises for commercial purposes. This notice was issued notwithstanding the new Building Regulations in which such an office would qualify as “other residential user”.

The sealing order was immediately challenged in the Sindh High Court which suspended the notice forthwith and ordered that the premises be de-sealed.

On the sealing of my office and in view of frequent phone calls that I was receiving on my cell phone threatening harm to members of my family, I immediately hired the services of a private security agency to guard my house round-the-clock and to protect my family. The security agency also installed an electronic alarm designed to go on as a warning to would-be intruders.

In the early morning hours of May 10th I was watching television in the ground floor guest room of my house. I was keen to catch up on news regarding the Chief’s proposed visit to Karachi on 12th May. My son and daughter were also up late and every so often one or the other would barge into my room complaining about one teasing the other.

In the process they would set off the burglar alarm and I had

to re-set it a number of times.

Finally fed up, I admonished both of them and instructed my daughter to check the status of her applications for admission to Summer School in the United States on the desktop computer installed in my upstairs family room. The computer was so placed that the operator would be facing the street outside shielded only by a large glass windowpane. I was waiting to catch the 3:00 am news on television and at about five minutes to three, I heard a burst of gunfire. My first impression was that some persons were firing in the air with automatic weapons as they do in some marriage functions. My second impression was that the neighbor’s house had been attacked. When my terrified daughter came running downstairs it dawned on me that it was in fact my house that had come under attack. I immediately slid my family under the bed and walked to the car porch. My security guard made an appearance from the servants’ toilet at the back of the house. He had no clue of what had happened.

I went upstairs and turned on the lights of the terrace and it was then that I noticed empty casings of bullets strewn all over my house. There were bullet holes on the ceiling of the family room and my daughter had just escaped what could have been fatal injury by inches- a bullet had pierced through the window next to which the desktop computer was located.

My first impulse was to call the police help line but I instantly realized that in the circumstances the police could not be trusted. I, therefore, called my friend Tariq

Mehmood in Islamabad and he was quick to contact Geo and other television channels. I called up some friends in Karachi including my partner, Salahuddin Ahmed, son of the Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court. After about 10 minutes hoping that the press would arrive before the police I called the police help line. The first to arrive was a mobile from the Darakshan Police Station. I refused to open the main gate and rightly so because by their tone and attitude they were treating me like an accused and not the complainant. It was only after Geo’s news crew had arrived that I opened the gate and at that very moment the police mobile took off. Finally the Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court arrived and it was only then that the police registered an FIR of attempt to murder. At least 19 empty shells were recovered from inside my house by the police although the next morning I found some more. Dawn was there early in the morning and I reiterated our resolve to go ahead the Chief’s visit on 12th May 2007.

On 11th May 2007 I flew from Karachi to Islamabad to accompany the Chief Justice from Islamabad to Karachi the next day. The Chief entered the departure area through the gate reserved for ordinary citizens to board PK 301 departing for Karachi at 10:00 am. Accompanying him were his lead counsel, Aitzaz Ahsan, his associate Gohar Ali Khan, Ali Ahmed Kurd, Hamid Khan, Asma Jahangir, Hafiz Abdur Rehman Ansari, Dr. Tariq Hassan, Athar Minwalla, myself and others. We landed at Quaid-e-Azam

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International Airport Karachi at 11:55 am. On the tarmac I saw a helicopter with markings of the law enforcement agencies. We had seen press reports to the effect that the local administration would transport the Chief to the venue of his address in a helicopter. The Chief was determined to resist any such forced move.

It took us about 10 minutes to disembark. The Chief’s defence team (and I mean the pen-toting legal defence team) surrounded him by forming a ring around him to escort him to the waiting area. Just as he set foot on the passenger tube linking the aircraft with the arrival building, two men in police uniform attempted to drag him towards the service exit of the passenger tube. Lawyers surrounding the Chief successfully resisted. We were apprehensive that the plan to transport him by helicopter was being executed. We briskly moved forward towards the arrival lounge but, again, two persons, this time in plainclothes, attempted to pull the Chief away.

We took the escalator to the departure lounge and while most of us remained outside, the Chief was seated in State Guest Lounge 2.

the Chief was going to take into the city and whether he planned to stop by the Quaid’s Mazar. I said that the trip to the Quaid’s Mazar would depend upon the situation outside but that we proposed to visit the Malir Bar, then on to the district courts and finally the High Court. I said we could not be certain of our movements and since our hosts had promised to come to the airport to fetch us, we would wait in the lounge until they arrived or we heard from them otherwise. About an hour after we had arrived at the airport’s guest lounge, the Registrar of the Sindh High Court arrived. He informed me that the Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court had directed him to reach the airport with the assistance of the police and to take two official cars of the High Court to transport the Chief Justice of Pakistan. The Registrar, Mr. Abdul Malik, informed me that because of the roads being blocked by containers and water-tankers he was flown to the airport in a helicopter and he had witnessed smoke billowing over the city. It was impossible for him to provide transport as he himself had been brought to the airport in a chopper.

We were now starting to receive reports of a city under siege.

What surprised me most was that while there were reports of indiscriminate firing and crossfiring in the streets and alleys of Karachi, the highest law enforcing agencies of the Province, including the Home Secretary, were waiting outside the guest lounge doing nothing but twiddling their hands. The Home Secretary asked me what route

I received phone calls from scores of lawyers detailing their plight. The Vice-President of the Malir Bar Association phoned to say that Zahoor Hussain Mahar, President of the Malir Bar had been kidnapped but had been released with a warning to desist and was released after being badly beaten. Roadblocks prevented the lawyers from gathering at the Malir Bar. The few who attempted to reach the

airport had to turn back in the face of bullet volleys and ran for their lives. Some took refuge in the adjoining localities while the lucky ones were able to trek back to their homes.

The reports coming from the City Courts were equally distressing.

A former President of the Karachi Bar Association recounted on the phone how a group of lawyers, including a former President, Muhammad Ali Abbassi, walking on foot from the City Court to the High Court were intercepted a few hundred meters from the City Courts by an armed group and detained for almost 4 hours in terrifying circumstances. The HRCP fact-finding mission reports on a rally of City Court lawyers as follows: “The lawyers requested the police to call the Rangers because they did not have confidence in the police’s ability to protect them. At about 3.45 pm, DSP Malik Manzar informed them that he had orders from “above” that he could not help us; but at about 4:30 pm, he called again to assure security, but asked the lawyers to leave the City Courts.

Finally, on the intervention of Justice Sarmad Jalal Usmani, the Town Police Officer phoned to say that the Rangers would not come, but that the lawyers could leave in police mobiles. At about 5:00 pm, the lawyers were taken from the city courts to the Sindh High Court. On the way, armed MQM picketers hurled abuses at them in the presence of the police, who failed to take any notice.”

Reports pouring in from

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the premises of the Sindh High Court were ominous. Despite the fact that on 11th May 2007, a division bench of the High Court comprising of Justice Sarmad Jalal Osmany and Justice Ali Sain Dino Metlo, had on a pro-publico petition filed before it issued a directive to the Sindh government to ensure foolproof security for the Chief Justice all along the route of his choice, the law enforcing agencies were nowhere to be seen and if seen were found to be silent spectators. The High Court rejected the government’s offer to provide the Chief Justice with a helicopter that would drop him at the venue of his address. Reports that we received at the airport lounge indicated that on the morning of 12th May the Sindh High Court Building was literally under siege by an armed mob.

Some High Court judges were seen scaling the walls of the High Court compound to get to their respective chambers. The car of the Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court escaped serious damage from a mob that had surrounded it and was able to enter the High Court Building under the escort of some lawyers who had intervened. The Sindh High Court Chief Justice took suo moto action and summoned the Corps Commander and the Director General Rangers to appear before him but for reasons best known to them they did not. The Home Secretary and the Inspector General Police were again directed to ensure safe passage for the Chief Justice and to remove all obstacles impeding entry to the High Court premises.

A report filed in Dawn of

13th May 2007 describes with graphic detail the state of the city on May 12th. It states that “at least 34 people were killed and over 140 others injured as a major portion of Sharea Faisal turned into a battlefield on Saturday when rival political groups clashed with each other soon after the arrival of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, who remained confined to the lounge of the airport throughout the day and returned to Islamabad without addressing a lawyers’ convention on the premises of the Sindh High Court. The utter failure of the Sindh government and the law-enforcers to maintain law and order made the city hostage to political workers… Journalists staged a sit-in at the airport in protest against manhandling of newsmen and camerapersons at various troubled spots by political workers and against an armed attack on local Aaj TV channel.

Many camerapersons were injured and their expensive cameras smashed while they were beaten up.”

At around 3:30 pm the Chief Justice huddled with his counsels and debated whether to return to Islamabad or to wait until calm was restored to the city and then to proceed to the Sindh High Court Building. Could we save precious lives by returning to Islamabad? But there were no return flights until 7:00pm. At the same time we all felt that he had obligation to condole with the families of those who had lost their lives and those who had suffered injuries. We were all of the view that it would be inappropriate to unilaterally call off the address to the Sindh High Court Building, the more so when at least 300 lawyers had braved extreme provocation and were still assembled in the bar room of the Sindh High Court Bar. The decision to wait was unanimous. At around 6:30 pm Aitzaz asked me to request the Chief Justice that he be excused as he needed to fly back to Islamabad to prepare for the ongoing proceedings before the Supreme Court. The Chief saw off Aitzaz and Gohar

We waited for hours and Ali Khan outside the lounge and hours at the Karachi Airport. they departed to board the 7:00 Kamran Khan of Geo Television pm flight from Karachi to Islamainterviewed me on my cell phone bad. at around ten minutes to five.

I told him that the law enforcAt around 8:30 pm some police ing agencies had completely officers came to me outside the abdicated themselves from their state guest lounge. They asked responsibilities and that in fact me to receive, if my memory while Karachi was burning the serves me correctly, 13 separate Home Secretary and Inspector orders in which Aitzaz Ahsan, General of Police were in the Hamid Khan, Asma Jehangir, Ali departure lounge all day sitting Ahmed Kurd and some others outside the lounge where the were externed from the Province Chief Justice was seated. I spoke of Sindh for a period of 30 days. I loud enough for them to hear me refused to accept Aitzaz’s externand within minutes they disapment order as he had already peared. left. The externment orders were

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all stereotype, made without the slightest application of the mind and, in fact, such was the efficiency of the administration that the names mentioned in the externment orders did not match with the names of those who had arrived with the Chief Justice.

A journalist who was covering the proceedings for a television channel was also externed on the assumption that he was a lawyer who had accompanied the Chief Justice from Islamabad. Asma Jehangir, standing next to me enquired whether there was an externment order for me when I interjected that I belonged to the Province of Sindh and therefore could not be externed. The police officer serving the externment orders, on persistent enquiry by Asma as to my fate, took her aside and informed her that I was to be arrested under preventive detention laws when I came

out of the airport. I volunteered to stay behind and face arrest and the Chief seemed to agree at first. Asma was, however, fearful not of my arrest but about reports that MQM militants were waiting to manhandle me outside the airport. She communicated this fact to the Chief Justice who insisted, rather ordered, that I return with the rest of the party to Islamabad. In fact, he locked arms with me and sat by my side until we had boarded the plane.

It was a pleasant surprise to see Aitzaz on board. His flight has been called back from the runway to accommodate the Chief Justice and those accompanying him. As he took the empty seat next to Aitzaz, there was sadness written all over his face. He had been deeply grieved at the events that had transpired that day. All of us were downcast but at the same time we were strong

in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. We arrived at Islamabad Airport shortly after midnight. Such was the indignation at the events of 12th May that the Chief was greeted by lawyers in large numbers from Rawalpindi and Islamabad vociferously denouncing the carnage in Karachi and demanding that General Musharraf should go.

On the night of 12th May, General Pervez Musharraf spoke at a public rally in front of the Parliament building at Islamabad. Delivering his speech from behind a bullet proof screen he had the audacity to rule out the imposition of emergency as according to him hundreds and thousands of people were with him. He held the Chief Justice and opposition parties responsible for the Karachi carnage, the former on account of his refusal to accept the government’s advice against

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travelling to Karachi, and added “if they think they are powerful then they should know that people’s power is with us”. He urged the legal fraternity to stop protesting and await the verdict of the Supreme Court.

Who was responsible for the carnage? It is for the reader to judge and for history to record its verdict. Official figures submitted in the High Court of Sindh in Constitutional Petition 1020 of 2007 indicate that 50 persons had died, 234 were injured, 110 vehicles were torched, four properties were burnt down and the office of Aaj Television came under gunfire that lasted for hours.

We are mature enough to understand that brute force in the final analysis cannot stop the march of an idea the time for which has come.

In the aftermath of the seminar held by the Supreme Court Bar Association in the Auditorium of the Supreme Court building, the then Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Muhammad Ali Durrani, requested the Supreme Court to take notice of certain speeches delivered at the Seminar. An Inter Services Press Release quoted General Musharraf as having told the officers of the Jhelum Garrison that the tone and language used at the seminar organized by the Supreme Court Bar Association were tantamount to humiliating the armed forces and the judiciary, and speeches made and the slogans raised in the seminar were an assault on the apex court. He is also stated to have chastised the media and private TV channels for politicizing a “purely judicial and legal

matter.” On 29th May 2007, the Interior Ministry formally requested the Supreme Court to take notice of “misbehaviour and derogatory remarks made by lawyers at the seminar.” It appears that Reference was to the speeches of Hamid Khan and Ali Ahmed Kurd.

Aitzaz stated that he owned all the statements and speeches at the seminar and that if necessary he would produce affidavit from a thousand lawyers owning the same. The Supreme Court Bar Association stated that it would file its own contempt petition against General Pervez Musharraf, Mr. Shaukat Aziz, Mr. Pervez Elahi and others for having issued statements on the merits of the Reference and for making derogatory remarks against the Chief Justice. A three-member bench of the Supreme Court ordered that the contempt case in respect of the happenings at the Seminar should be heard by a full court and directed the Interior Ministry to file a formal petition against the lawyers if it desire to pursue contempt proceedings.

Another contempt application was filed in the Supreme Court by a free lance journalist, Shahid Orakzai. While in his application he targeted Hafiz Abdur Rehman Ansari and me, the application was technically defective in as much as he had made a body (SCBA) and not individuals as respondents. The three-member bench dismissed the application as withdrawn. As events transpired both sides chose not to file their respective contempt applications.

On 15th March 2007, a constitutional petition was filed in the Sindh High Court by one Shaikh Rehmatullah, Advocate, seeking

a direction that proceedings be taken against me under Article 6 of the Constitution as I had committed high treason “by trying to use my influence and pressurizing the Supreme Judicial Council.” I was hardly bothered and till today I have not followed the fate of this petition. On 6th May and 9th May anonymous paid advertisements appeared in the press issued under the authority of “impartial lawyers” casting aspersions on the Chief Justice and posing the question as to how he would be able to dispense justice in cases in which counsels appearing against him before the Supreme Judicial Council and those who supported him were to appear before him if he was reinstated. The advertisements were so ridiculous that they did not merit even a reply.

On 8th of July 2007 I had been interviewed at length on the phone by a private TV channel. In a rather lengthy interview, I took exception to the invocation, time and again, of the doctrine of state necessity by the apex court. I stated that the lawyers will burn that Supreme Court which gives a verdict in the Chief Justice’s case like the verdict rendered in the case of Maulvi Tamizuddin. What I had in fact meant was not the burning of the Supreme Court building in the literal or figurative sense but the burning of the doctrine itself.

When the 13-member bench hearing the case of the Chief Justice assembled on 9th July 2007, I was not present in the courtroom but I was informed that the bench was visibly upset at the remarks I had made in my television interview. Members of the bench termed my statement as

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“irresponsible”, “shocking”, “very strange”, and the bench directed that I appear in person before the court the very next day. I received this communication from the Registrar Supreme Court just as I had reached Islamabad Airport to catch a flight to Karachi. I appeared the next day and wanted to address the court but I was told that I should file my statement in writing by the next day and appear before the court in person. On the next day I appeared before the court with a written statement in which I stated that I had been quoted out of context and that if, in some way, I had offended the bench it should be considered as “a slip of the tongue” and that I had full confidence in the bench to do justice.

Justice Ramday looked at my statement and directed me to file it with the office of the Supreme Court. The verdict was now about 10 days away and given all that had transpired since 9th of March we had reason to be upbeat.

Geo TV invited Justice (retired) Tariq Mehmood and me to their program “The Great Debate” held in an auditorium in Islamabad to a debate on the judicial crisis and the candidature of General Musharraf in the next presidential election. While Tariq and I were espousing the case against the eligibility of General Musharraf, Dr. Sher Afgan Niazi and Mr. Ahmad Raza Kasuri were defending General Musharraf. At one point in the debate Mr. Kasuri levelled a false and malicious charge that the lawyers who had defended the Chief Justice in the Reference had received foreign and local funding I made a statement on solemn oath that the

charge was simply untrue and the sons and daughters of Pakithat the Chief Justice’s lawyers stan should we fail in our venhad represented him gratis beture. cause they were convinced of the righteousness of his cause and had in fact dug into their own pocket to meet expenses and questioned whether Mr. Kasuri could make a similar statement in respect of his client- the Federation- Mr. Kasuri was overcome with uncontrollable rage and used filthy and abusive language against me prompting the producer of the show to mute the audio. It appears that a few days later when Mr. Kasuri was entering the Supreme Court Building somebody sprayed black paint over his face. Mr. Kasuri lodged a First Information Report in the Secretariat Police Station accusing Mr. Khurshid Ahmad Khan, an Advocate from NWFP as the principal accused and naming Aitzaz, Tariq Mehmood and, myself as abettors. While Aitzaz, Tariq, and myself were never questioned or arrested in this case, the unfortunate Khurshid Khan was picked up on the imposition of Emergency and was badly beaten in custody suffering serious bodily injury.

The intimidatory tactics did not scare us one bit. To the contrary they served to strengthen our resolve. It got us thinking Re-printed here with that it was the establishment the premission of Pathat was nervous and running scared because we were washing kistan Law House and away old beliefs that had been Munir Malik. From, stamped on the minds of the Munir Malik, THE PAmasses. We were engaged in an KISTAN LAWYER’S enterprise that challenged the status quo and we were gaining MOVEMENT: AN UNmomentum that was generating FINISHED AGENDA, a dynamics of is own. We were Pakistan Law House, afraid not of what the present 2008. held for us but of the future of

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All Photo’s by Emi Foulk.

FISHERFOLK’S FIGHT AGAINST THE lawless rule of Sindh’s feudal lords.

By Emi Foulk

On a warm morning in April last year, two armed men shot holes through the bottom of Yameen Mallah’s boat.

It was 8 am and the fisherman was late; if he was to take in any fish before the sun rose too high, he had to do so within the next hour. Had he been out on the lake as usual, perhaps it would not have been he who was targeted when the black Mazda pick-up pulled up, and men, brandishing pistols, jumped out, firing at and destroying six vessels. Perhaps it would not be he who today plies the only trade he knows with an old, inflated tire in lieu of a boat.

In September, I meet Yameen Mallah in his home village of Soomar Malla in a rural corner of Sindh. The village, surrounded on three sides by low lying brush and desert, has no electricity or running water. Its 700 residents are all fishermen and women, and have been for generations. They share the name that designates their profession and their caste: Mallah. They are known as Ameer ul Bahar, King of Water.

The title’s cruel irony is not lost on anyone. The fisher folk of Soomar Malla and its neighboring villages are among the poorest in Pakistan. They describe themselves as neglected and helplessly cast into a de facto system of bonded labor by the wealthy landlords who control the district. Sanghar is known for its entrenched and brutal feudalism. Dominated by the powerful ruler-cum-spiritual leader Pir Pagara, Sanghar has long retained an effective independence from the jurisdiction of the Pakistani government. Or, more accurately, Pir Pagara is the

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government – the head of the Pagara faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-F).

Far from being a king, Yameen can now no longer access much of the Chotiari Reservoir’s deeper waters, where fish are most plentiful.

His catch has suffered. “With this tube, I cannot even earn enough to pay for food and clothing. How can I buy a boat?” he asks plaintively as he holds up a dusty black ring of rubber, tied together with strips of plastic. But justice comes slow to Sanghar, if at all. The men who shot Yameen Mallah’s boat are neither anonymous nor in hiding.

One, according to Yameen, is a thug hired by a local landlord, Asif Nizamani, a member of PML-F. The other is Qasim Zardari, a relation of Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, himself a feudal landlord from Sindh.

On April 21, 2007, then chief minister of Sindh Arbib Rahim announced the abolition of the contract system over the province’s inland waterways. The contract system, first implemented as a means to increase government revenue shortly after Pakistan’s independence in 1947, has since been used by Sanghar’s wealthy landlords as a means to bleed and disenfranchise fishing communities. Under the system, contracts for fishing rights on individual water bodies are sold by the state to the highest bidder, who, in turn, doles out permission to fishermen under the condition that the contractor retains the right to purchase a portion of their catch – at the rate he determines. The last clause has been an open invitation for abuse. In practice, contractors set prices at roughly a quarter of the market rate and then purchase the entirety of a fisherman’s catch, thus milking them of all profit. Unable to provide for his/her family, the fisherperson has no recourse but to borrow from the contractor, ensnaring himself in a downward spiral of debt. It is not unheard of for fisherpersons, unable to meet the minimum payment on their debts, to “disappear”. Landlords, locals say, throw them into private jails or work them on their estates as slave labor.

Asif Nizamani, who held the fishing rights to the Chotiari Reservoir from 2001 until the abolition of the contract system six years later, had a lot to lose with Chief When Yameen turned to the poMinister Rahim’s announcement; lice to protest the destruction of and, according to fishermen of the his boat, they arrested him. The reservoir’s surrounding villages charge, he was told, was “stealand the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum ing fish”. He is currently out on (PFF), a Karachi-based grassroots Rs. 50,000 bail, though there is organization that advocates fisherno chance of him running. With a men’s rights, he did everything he salary of roughly Rs. 50 a day, he could to intimidate fisherfolk into simply cannot afford to leave. Yet, a de facto contract system, new for all of Yameen’s hardships, it did laws eliminating the ‘middleman’ not matter to Nizamani or Qasim notwithstanding. The destruction Zardari whose boat was destroyed, of Yameen’s boat along with five as long as a boat was destroyed. It others in Soomar Malla that April was not the victim that was impor- morning was just the beginning. tant, but the message.

Dusk is falling on Soomar Malla as I sit down with Nazir Mallah, president of the village’s female division of PFF, on a traditional wood and straw cot covered with a colorful and intricately patterned, handstitched quilt – which, she tells me, takes village women a month to make and brings in Rs. 300-400 in Sanghar’s town market. There is no light, save from the dim glow emanating from the odd flashlight, mobile phone or cigarette, but that doesn’t keep a crowd of villagers, children and adults alike, from gathering around the cot, nor does it keep the mosquitoes and flies from whirring overhead. No one is afraid, or ashamed, to talk; on the contrary, they clamor to tell me how they have no clothes, no food, no clean water, no electricity, no roads, no schools. Nothing at all, they say. It is a claim that I hear multiple times as I make the rounds of the villages around the Chotiari Reservoir in the following days.

Mirzadi Mallah, a grandmother in her 40s from nearby Bhulal village, and her family of 16 struggle to survive. Mirzadi’s sons bring in about Rs. 300 per day, far short of the Rs. 700 she needs to feed her family. She makes up the difference by borrowing money and skimping on everything else. “We eat one meal a day, just roti and fish,” she tells me. “When times are good, we can buy vegetables.”

Mirzadi’s family is hardly unique; malnourishment is visible throughout the village. Faces are prematurely aged, and most, young and old, look a decade older than they actually are. Many of the children’s hands and hips are covered with painful pustules and sores which villagers suspect are a result of contaminated water. As Fatima Mallah, a 35-year-old with a sharp, angular face, says angrily, “We’ve been working for centuries but we are always deprived. Our hands are calloused, but they have never worked for themselves, only the contractors.”

Unlike some of its neighboring communities, Soomar Malla ap-

situations - pakistan

pears deeply invested in the struggle to improve the conditions of their daily lives. For one, they have an active PFF branch. And over the last two years, they have frequently protested the oppression they face en masse, most recently staging a sit-in in front of a local police station on August 3. “The first thing that deprives us is our loneliness – we are isolated from society and society’s esteem. We don’t have a representative in the assemblies. Neither the state nor the police nor the Fisheries Department cares about us,” says Nazir, the PFF village president, voicing a common sense of disenfranchisement here. She continues: “So we try to go on the stage and protest; we are victimized not only because we are poor and powerless, but also because we are protesting.”

The demise of the contract system was announced more than a year ago, but things have improved only in the last two weeks, after nowPresident Zardari phoned his relative, Qasim, and told him to withdraw from the reservoir “within five minutes,” according to a local official from Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party. But even now, Nazir says, there are problems.

After the ostensible end of the contract system and failed attempts to intimidate the fisherfolk back into what critics call modern-day slavery, Asif Nizamani, the ex-contractor, went to the Senior Civil Court last July to contest ownership of fishing rights in Sanghar. The senior judge, Asim Jamil Memon, a relative of a local landlord according to PFF spokesman Abdullah Khoso, issued a status quo order in Nizamani’s favor. Despite the announcement that all water bodies in Sindh were free and open to independent fishermen, villagers could not fish in the Chotiari Reservoir without Nizamani’s express permission. “The judge ruled in favor of his caste,” Khoso explains.

Since then, 160 fishermen and women have been arrested for trying to fish in the reservoir’s three dozen or so interconnected lakes, and police have filed 180 cases

against 200 fishermen on criminal charges for fishing without Nizamani’s consent. In August 2008, however, the status quo order expired, sparking another round of brutality and protests.

The landlords have all local authorities under their thumb, according to the fisherfolk; and in August, police, together with Qasim Zardari and his private guards, installed checkpoints on the road that runs along the Nara Canal to the Chotiari Reservoir – the sole means of outside access for most area villagers. Villagers transporting fish to market were routinely stopped and beaten, according to PFF reports.

An unauthorized curfew was imposed upon the fishermen, barring all fish-bearing vehicles from departing the villages.

One victim in this new wave of intimidation was Ramzan Mallah, a 34-year-old teacher and father of eight, whose father and brother are fishermen. Ramzan was waiting for a bus home from court on August 15, 2008, having attended a hearing on the status quo order, when two men pulled up in a car and ordered him in. “Qasim Zardari and an armed gunman told me I had stolen fish from a fish farm and was under arrest,” he says, all but repeating Yameen’s story. The two men took him to the Chotiari police

station where, he says, his legs were shackled and he was repeatedly beaten as Zardari and Nizamani looked on. “They threatened me, laughing and taunting, saying ‘If you don’t give us the fish share, you will get a lot worse than this’,” Ramzan recalls soberly, bowing his short-cropped and graying head.

“I was scared and said nothing.”

Over the course of his eight day arrest, Ramzan was transferred to two other police stations, where he was confined in uncomfortable, congested and noisome holding cells. There, too, he was beaten.

Ramzan and I pay a visit to the Chotiari police station, a ramshackle remnant of the British Raj that was built in 1915 and doesn’t look to have been touched since.

Lounging under the palms in front of the aging white brick building is Assistant Sub-Inspector Lahkmir Khan Jamali, a genial middle-aged man sporting a thick moustache, potbelly and traditional Sindhi cap.

Immediately, Jamali denies that the police have done any wrong.

“There is no hostility or brutality from the police, it has all been done by the landlords,” he says, apparently seeing no contradiction in his words. But isn’t it the responsibility of the police to reign in these landlords, I ask. “Until someone comes to the police, we take no action,” he replies, add-

Naked Punch ASIA issue 02. ing that, if police salaries were improved, perhaps their performance would follow suit. And what of the fishermen’s accusations that their complaints have gone ignored? What of the numerous stories of police brutality? What of Ramzan’s account that, not 50 feet from where he now sits sipping mango juice, he was chained and tormented three weeks earlier?

Are the fishermen lying? “They are neither telling a complete lie or the complete truth,” Jamali says with a half-smile. He does not elaborate further.

The Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, adamantly asserts that contracts have been replaced by a new “license system” under which fishing licenses can be attained by all fishermen at no charge. But when I enter the office of Ghulam Muhammed Gul Junejo, the district president of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), I hear yet another story. Junejo, a powerful landowner in the district, assures me he fully supports the fisherfolk, showing me as proof several short, grammatically questionable letters pleading the fisherfolk’s case and addressed to President Zardari and Junejo’s brother Roshan Din Junejo, a member of the National Assembly. The letters, Junejo tells me, are responsible for Zardari’s phone call and the recent letup in Nizamani’s brutal-

ity. What’s more, he adds, he is meeting with the Sindh fisheries minister in a week to announce the release of 145 already paid for licenses. When Abdullah Khoso, PFF’s spokesman who has accompanied me to Junejo’s office, hears those last words, he almost jumps in his seat. There aren’t supposed to be any license fees at all, he counters heatedly. Junejo shrugs his shoulders. “There is feudalism, corruption and extreme levels of barbarism in Sanghar. But they struggled and now the people have relief.” For him, it seems, this explanation is enough – despite evidence to the contrary.

As Khoso and I leave the PPP office, we are followed to the parking lot by one of Junejo’s confidantes, Nawaz Kumbhar, who had helped translate the interview. The problem is not in the situation, or with Junejo’s efforts, he tells me insistently. Rather, it is with the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum. “We say that they just want protests, they do not want a solution. Because if they solved it, they would not have a job. It is the politicians who have solved things.”

The real problem, of course, is that things haven’t been solved.

Water levels in the Chotiari Reservoir have dropped precipitously, a result, according to PFF, of Nizama-

ni’s influence over the Sindh Irrigation Department. The Nara Canal, which funnels water from the Indus River into the reservoir, has been all but dammed up. The contract system has been abolished, but the fisherfolk, it seems, remain under the yoke of the ex-contractor.

After spending a night in Bhulal Village, I wake up just after dawn to witness the fisherfolk at work.

Aboard a motorized fishing boat – a rare sign of prosperity among fishermen here – I am able to overtake the lone wooden boats adrift on the reservoir. When we come upon Shan Ali Mallah, he is scooping water out of the bottom of his boat with a broken plastic jug.

Even a small leak costs money to repair, and Shan’s catch this morning, one tiny shrimp of a fish that will bring in Rs 20, won’t be much help. Others aren’t doing much better. Though they’ve been on the water for four hours, Ibrahim Mallah and his brother and father have netted only two mukkar fish.

Mukkar are an inexpensive breed that sells for Rs. 40 per kilogram, and the two fish won’t be enough to support Ibrahim’s family. But at 8:40 am, the sun is already high on the horizon. The day’s fishing, until evening at least, is over.

Back in the village, Mahmoud Umar Mallah, a 25-year-old father of four, describes the current situation.

“When we were under the contract system, we could not survive. We could not buy extra food, clothing, anything. But it’s not only the contractual system but also the fish in the water – there is no water and there is no fish.” With Rs. 50,000 in debt, Mahmoud cannot envision a better life even for his children.

Residents of Bhulal hired a teacher last year, but families were unable to meet the Rs. 50 per month fee and the teacher quit after only three months on the job. Without an education, Mahmoud worries, his children will have no alternative but to follow in his footsteps, fishing for a pittance under appalling conditions.

situations - pakistan

Poverty keeps the fishermen compliant, or at least that is what the landlords hope. If anything is to change for these villagers along the Chotiari Reservoir, it must begin with a reformation in the sale of fish and with it, in the oppressive, lawless rule of Sindh’s feudal lords.

The words of PFF’s Sanghar branch president, Abdul Rehman, are worth remembering: “Our message to the entire world, to Lahore, Karachi, to other fishermen fellows, is that we need support to completely abolish this contract system and educate our children about their basic rights so that they can live an esteemed life, a respectable life, the life from which they are not living as an outcast.”

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Art Work by Nizakat Ali, Untitled.

Journalism That Matters P. SAINATH

Interviewed by David

Barsamian

P. Sainath is an award-winning journalist who writes about the crisis in the Indian countryside. He is Rural Affairs Editor of “The Hindu,” one of India’s most important newspapers. “I cover the people who live at the bottom end of the spectrum,” he says. He is author of the bestselling book, “Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts.”

BARSAMIAN: September 11, since 2001 is constantly intoned as a mantra in the U.S. There is another September 11 involving Mahatma Gandhi.

SAINATH: We just marked the 100th anniversary of that 9/11, which occurred in South Africa in 1906. Mahatma Gandhi was then a practicing barrister in South Africa, representing in many cases the grievances and issues of the Indian community there. The then South African government had passed extremely oppressive, racist legislation that particularly hurt the community, and there was widespread discontent.

Gandhi addressed a meeting on September 11, 1906, in Johannesburg attended by more than 3,000 people in which he propounded for the very first time his doctrine of satyagraha, the truth and power of a nonviolent form of resistance, that is, to challenge the power of the empire without resorting to violence.

It mystified many of his listeners in that period. The meetings went on before and after

9/11, but that was the crucial date when they launched this doctrine of satyagraha. In subsequent years the Mahatma himself was to recall this as one of the most crucial moments in his life.

He wrote about it later, “Satyagraha in South Africa” —you can find that online, because all the works of Gandhi are now online and available to anyone for free—and says, “This is the technique we subsequently used with such effect in India in the noncooperation movement, in the civil disobedience movement.”

It wasn’t just used by Gandhi. Subsequently it was used in South Africa by others. In the U.S. it was used by Martin Luther King, who openly acknowledged his debt to the satyagraha nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi. So it played a role in your civil rights movement as well. The significance of it is that it set off a process in India that challenged the mightiest empire on earth and shook it to its foundations.

BARSAMIAN: Gandhi was a British-trained barrister who spent many years working in South Africa before he went back to India, where he later became Mahatma. That was a title that the great poet Rabindranath Tagore gave him.

That’s right. But there is a continuity in what happens. Though his life changes in many ways, though his views on many things change, satyagraha, the 9/11 technique that he pioneered, gets honed finer and finer. So if you look at the three 9/11s that the world has seen in the past 100 years: New York, 9/11/2001; Chile, 9/11/1973.

BARSAMIAN: Explain that one.

In 1973, a coup against the elected democratic government of Salvador Allende took place in Chile, completely backed by the U.S. In fact, you will find that for three years before that the economy of Chile had its back broken when President Nixon gave an order to his CIA chief, “Make the economy scream.” And they did. They destroyed Chile’s economy with the kind of assault that was launched on it in favor of corporate interests. In September 11, 1973, 9/11, there was a coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Thousands died, including some of the finest musicians, poets, writers of Chile, people like the folksinger Victor Jara, in the stadium massacre that took place in Santiago. It was one of the bloodiest coups in Latin American history. Today you as a nation are investigating to some extent the crimes of General Pinochet, who was supported by the then American government. Cases are filed against him in the United Kingdom, in Spain, in Chile itself. But at that time Chile was painted as this great success story. Success story of what? Neoliberal economics, corporate dominance, the complete privatization of most services. These things happened in Chile at the time. So in many ways Chile was the first of the neoliberal model stories. It led to incredible bloodshed, to the dislocation, permanent migrations, and diaspora of a lot of Chileans. Of the three 9/11s, one actually changed the world for the better. It generated no hatred, no anger. One can debate whether it would work everywhere, and even I would say that that’s an open question.

Naked Punch ASIA issue 02.

But the fact is that of the three 9/11s, Mahatma Gandhi’s 9/11 had a much better impact.

BARSAMIAN: Everywhere you go in India today you see statues of Mahatma Gandhi. He’s honored and revered. What is his legacy beyond that kind of iconic status?

I have a problem with always looking back only to what was said in the 1920s and what was said during the civil disobedience movement or during the Quit India movement. I do not believe Gandhi was the only leader of the freedom struggle. If you’re looking at statues and reverence, you would find there are far more statues in the villages of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a man who emerged from the untouchable classes of Indian society.

BARSAMIAN: The Dalits.

Exactly. In fact, the difference between Ambedkar and any other Indian leader is that the statues of Ambedkar are put up by public subscription, not by government fatwa, not by institutional order.

Poor people made their own statues of Ambedkar. The freedom struggle of India threw up many, many leaders and luminaries of enormous standing. For me, all these were part of that legacy.

So I don’t only narrow it down to Gandhi. That’s wrong. Many other leaders existed. Gandhi, of course, was the tallest of them, there is no question. However, I think that on many issues I would like to look at Gandhi and Ambedkar in terms of what would their stance or their understanding of the present situation be? How would they act now? That’s far more important for us. On some of the central issues of our time—caste, oppression of the poorer castes and the socalled untouchables—I think history has proven Ambedkar to be right. Ambedkar’s prognosis of the role that caste would play in democracy, of how lack of economic democracy would damage political democracy, has been borne out by our subsequent history. Yes, every one of them is revered, and should be, for their role, but I would rather look at, what would they be saying about today’s issues? What would Gandhi say about the obscene inequality that you’re looking at in the world? A man who said that for those who die of hunger the only form in which God may dare appear is food. That’s the interesting thing for me: What would they say today? How would you take forward some of the great things that they said and did?

Your specialty is covering rural India. You spend much of your time reporting on village life. There have been severe economic and social repercussions in rural India since the so-called neoliberal economic agenda was introduced.

What you call the neoliberal era—the era of liberalization, globalization, and privatization—has been one of the most consciously cruel processes inflicted on the Indian poor. The kind of economic inequality, the obscene levels of inequality which are now existing and which we are still promoting, we have not seen these since the heyday of the colonial empire, when we were enslaved and colonized by the British Empire. The kind of gaps that have come into Indian society are simply stunning. India today ranks 8th in the number of billionaires in the world, but we rank 127th in human development. India may be an emerging tiger economy, but the average Indian has a lower life expectancy than his or her counterparts in Bolivia, Mongolia, or Tajikistan. India may be this growing, model economy, but our per capita GDP is less than that of Nicaragua, Vanuatu, or Indonesia. So for 2% of the population the benchmarks are Western Europe, Australia, U.S.A., Japan. For 40-50% of the population, the benchmarks are sub-Saharan Africa. The inequality has grown tremendously. This was a consciously constructed process with a set of policies that have been enforced in many other countries, and not just in India. These policies are the typical prescriptions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and also of the elites of these Third World coun-

tries, which are very happy to collaborate in this process of transferring huge resources from poor to rich.

And this happens in the Indian context whether it’s the rightwing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, or the so-called moderate, centrist Congress Party, or is there a difference?

The difference between the Congress Party and the BJP in India has been more on the issue of communal and sectarian violence, interreligious sectarian strife. Not on economic issues. Very marginally on economic issues. There has been total continuity. This process was launched in 1991, when the present prime minister was then finance minister.

That’s Manmohan Singh.

And the prime minister then was Mr. P. V. Narasimha Rao. Then the BJP came in and took the process further, much further. Then the Congress comes back and again gets onto the same track.

In 2004, people rejected these policies decisively.

I think one of the proudest moments in Indian electoral democracy was when 600 million people went out and showed the world what electoral democracy means. It was a fantastic show of voting that shook the nation. It destroyed the reputation of many polling agencies and pollsters and TV channels and pundits, who predicted that the reforms were so popular that there was no question that the government would retain its hold.

Instead, the darlings of the West, the darlings of Western corporations, the darlings of the U.S. took the biggest beating in the elections. People like Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, like Mr. Krishna in Karnakata. They took the biggest beatings in the elections. Yet, having to come to power on the backs of rural outrage and even urban anger, the Congress government immediately sets about going back to business as usual, the same policies, with one or two modifications because there is now a huge left presence in parliament that forces them to do a couple of decent things, like an employment guarantee program or a right to information act, these things.

What are the characteristics of the neoliberal agenda.

There are five or six things which you can say have taken place everywhere in the world, including maybe the U.S. in some respects. But those that mark out this package of direction of policy, one is huge cuts in public spending, huge cuts in investment in anything to do with poor people, like in agriculture in India, followed by the withdrawal of the state from vital public services, like health or education or literacy or transportation, followed by a massive wave of privatization, privatization of just about everything, including intellect and soul. So then you have an increasing preference and bias given to corporations, which are privileged over ordinary people. You have food subsidies for poor people being slashed. You have the entire emphasis in resources and credit being given to the top 10% of society, abandoning the poor in many cases. I would argue that in many countries of the world the process you’re seeing is that the rich are seceding from the nation, leaving behind the rest of the country. So all of these policies put together, with more specific variations in different countries, represent by and large the withdrawal of the state, taking its hands off poor people and saying, “We’re not responsible.” Tough love or tough luck or whatever you want to call it. That process has characterized it. It means the diminution of government’s role, that government should not exist. You can call it free-market fundamentalism. Essentially that’s what it is. It’s market fundamentalism. To my mind, the most dangerous form of fundamentalism in the world, because it adds millions of recruits to the armies of the dispossessed, who are then vulnerable to the religious fundamentalists.

So while India is experiencing very high so-called growth rates, there is also a huge surge in inequality.

There has been a huge surge in inequality in virtually every sphere. Hunger, for instance. India added many more millions of hungry people in the 1990s than any other country in the world.

Indeed, if you read the Food and Agriculture Organization’s reports of the United Nations, you will see that India alone between 1997 and 2002, added more newly hungry people than the rest of the world put together. In the time we created our eighth largest number of billionaires, in that same period hunger rose in India while it fell in Ethiopia. In the period of the freemarket reforms, the amount of food that poor Indian people are eating has collapsed. The average rural family in India today consumes 100 kilograms of grain less than it did just five, six, seven years ago. The percapita availability of food grain, which is the food available per Indian, has collapsed by millions of tons. It’s collapsed from 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 437 grams a year ago, which is a huge fall.

Mind you, all these are averages. If you’re looking at the bottom 40%, the compression of the diet of the poor has been cruel, brutal, and barbaric.

In many media accounts of India today, one finds this kind of juxtaposition: on one hand, everyone is practicing yoga and meditation, is vegetarian and living a spiritual life; and then on the other hand, you have the India of Cyberabad, the city in Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad, which is a center of high tech, infotech. There’s Bangalore. We’re hearing about these techno centers staffed by engineers trained at the institutes of higher learning in India. But you’re covering an India that’s fallen through the cracks between those two extreme generalizations.

It’s true. I’m saying that’s the whole point. I reject the idea that there is an Indian reality. There are Indian realities. The process you’re describing is very true of the top 5% of the population, and to some extent to another 5% of the population.

Let me put it to you another way and you will recognize it from your own experience of India.

You’ve been visiting India for many years. It’s only in the last 10, 15 years that you have seen in all the cities that you visit a huge proliferation of weightloss clinics. Did you ever see one before the 1990s? Now, each city has dozens and dozens, we don’t know how many there are, weight-loss clinics helping the urban better off, the urban nonpoor and rich, shed the pounds they acquired during the period of the last 10, 15 years.

So here are your two Indias. On the one hand, you have the top 5-10% of the population desperate to shed excess pounds, and you have hundreds of millions of other Indians desperate not to lose any more weight. So you have these guys going to weight-loss centers and those guys trying to figure out how they don’t lose any more weight because they have to do severe physical labor in the fields. That’s one. At the one end of the spectrum, whenever you visit India, I bet you’ve seen several cover stories about the new salaries of CEOs, about young guys in their 20s earning more than mom and pop did in the last 40 years of their service. That’s true for a minuscule, statistically negligible percentage of the population. At the other end of the spectrum are the real wages of agricultural laborers, that have stagnated and even fallen in those years for the poorest people of the world. So both realities are true.

The ILO, the International Labor Organization, has brought out a report recently which shows you how hypocritical the stuff about labor efficiency is. In both Pakistan and India during the period of the reforms, labor efficiency went up 84%. And the real wages of the workers fell 22% as their efficiency rose. Let me give you an example from the U.S. Paul Krugman, when he wrote that brilliant essay “The Gilded Age,” argued that obscene gaps between the top CEOs and the ordinary workers were a threat not only to economic well-being. Krugman very correctly argues that they are damaging to democracy itself. If you have people who are virtually your slaves, that’s going to affect the mindset in which you work and relate to them. So you have Krugman say-

situations - India

but huge new moneylenders in the form of input dealers, those who sell seed and pesticides. This guy is the king of the countryside. He is the salesman, he is the dealer, he is your agroscientist, he is the technical consultant to the farmer. He is also his money lender.

You have done quite a bit of reporting on cotton.

India has traditionally been a grower and exporter of cotton. What’s been happening in that sector?

Art Work by Nizakat Ali, Journey Series.

ing that, “Look, the gap has gone above 100 to 1, maybe 1,000 to 1.” In India the gap is not 100 to 1 between the top earners and the lowest agricultural laborers. The gap is 30,000 to 1, 50,000 to 1, if you take the salaries of the top CEOs and those of the average Indian agricultural laborer, hundreds of millions of them.

One of the shocking phenomena that’s occurring in the Indian countryside that you have been reporting on now for many years has been suicides among farmers. First of all, when did this start?

And is it directly related to economic policies coming from the central government and from the state governments?

It is very largely policy-driven. It’s also the reflection of what’s happening in globalism. And even that is policy-driven. It really starts around the mid-1990s and in a small way picks up by 1998, 1999. By 2000, the suicides are raging. They are raging in particular regions which are most vulnerable. Those are regions, by and large but not entirely, dealing in cash crops, which have got linked to the volatility of global prices. They are regions where the safety nets have been removed by the state and central governments for poor farmers. As the U.S. increases its subsidies for agriculture, our guys, under the influence of the World Bank and free-market economics, are removing the tiny safety nets and supports that Indian farmers had. So it’s a process that has led to, according to the government of India, over 100,000 farmers who have committed suicide between 1993 and 2003. That’s also a very misleading figure. In the first place, I call that a bogus figure. It’s a huge underestimate. Even by itself it’s an obscene number. Second, it doesn’t take into account regional concentrations of the suicides, which is extremely high.

I’ve been reporting from Vidarbha, in the western state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. In Vidarbha, if you look at the state government’s Web site, it will tell you that there have been 900 suicides in the past year. It will tell you that there have been 300 suicides in the past three months, which means one every 7 or 8 hours. The phenomenon is demoralizing, it’s dehumanizing. It’s just terrible to watch this go on, because I know that I’m covering people who need not have died, who have been pushed over the edge by policy: one, the collapse of public investment in agriculture, which has been negative for some years; two, the withdrawal of the state from the agricultural scene in terms of assistance to farmers. The Agricultural Extension Ministry is closed, the agricultural universities are acting as appendages of foreign multinational

corporations and not of communities of farmers.

They’re not serving the farmers. Deregulation has meant that Monsanto could come and charge three times what it actually needed to on a bag of seed, until it was pulled up by the courts and forced to reduce its price on seed bags to onethird of what it was, and it’s still making a profit at that price. So anybody could walk in and rip off the farmer, who was not getting a fair price on the market for his product, though it becomes costlier and costlier to cultivate. So the indebtedness of the farmer has pushed thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of them over the edge, into suicides.

Explain how the indebtedness works. With the closing of rural banks and financial assistance, they are driven to moneylenders, who charge usurious rates.

This too is entirely a policy-driven process. India was one of the pioneers of what we call social banking. Social banking means that society recognizes there are some areas from which you cannot expect profits in lending. You don’t want to lose money, but you’re not trying to make huge profits out of farmers or out of primary education or out of services for pregnant mothers. These aren’t things that you’re trying to make profits on. So in the social banking philosophy which India adopted when she nationalized the banking industry in the late 1960s, a significant amount of lending was done by the banks to farmers, to agriculture, recognizing that these are the people who place the food on your table, on the nation’s table. Once we went into the brave new world of economic reforms, the banks progressively stopped lending money to farmers, so much so that something like 3,800 to 4,000 bank branches in rural India closed during the reform years, reflecting how serious the banks were about credit to the farmer.

What happened to the money that they took away from the farmer?

That went, as in Latin America, as in Africa, and elsewhere, to fueling the consumption and lifestyles of the top 10%. So the farmer could not buy a tractor except at 15% interest, or at least 14 1/2%. But I can buy a Mercedes-Benz at 4% or 5% interest with no collateral. Huge resources were siphoned away. That happened from policy. So as this happened, farmers were turning more and more to private money lenders. But the reforms process has brought entirely new classes of moneylenders, not your own village sahukar, who is actually cutting a very pathetic figure these days,

It’s a complete disaster, especially in the region that I was mentioning, Maharashtra. In the late 1990s, the European Union, and more particularly the U.S., threw billions and billions of dollars into their corporations that are cotton growers.

I won’t call them cotton farmers because these are businesses, these are not farmers. What happens is that if you look in the 1990s, cotton prices were rather high in the mid-1990s on the New York Cotton Exchange, maybe about 90¢ to $1.10 a pound.

I don’t have the exact figure in my head. After 1997, cotton prices start tumbling, because the U.S. government is putting more subsidies into cotton for its corporations than the actual value of the cotton. Last year, the U.S.A.’s cotton crop was worth something like $3.9 billion, but you got subsidies of $4.7 billion. This went to 20,000 growers. You look at what it means for a grower.

So much so, that cotton-based economies, from Vidarbha in Maharashtra to cotton-based economies in West Africa, Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin, all these countries collapsed under the onslaught of these subsidies. The E.U., which doesn’t have that much cotton growing—you have pockets in Portugal, Spain, and places like that—also got into the act. So with the huge subsidies you’re seeing farm suicides among cotton growers in Burkina Faso. The Indian farmer is a million times more efficient in growing these things than your corporations. But who the heck can fight against those kinds of subsidies? Two of the presidents of these West African nations had a piece in The New York Times in 2005. “Your subsidies are strangling our people.” They explained very clearly what these subsidies were doing. Cotton is a mess also because of the promotion of technologies that are totally unsuitable to these regions. If they’re suitable anywhere, I don’t know. Bt cotton, for instance. It’s what Monsanto has been promoting in Maharashtra. It is much costlier, much costlier to cultivate Bt cotton than to cultivate hybrid cotton, let alone to cultivate organically. The rise in price inputs has been astonishing, because Bt cotton used to cost three times more than a bag of, say, hybrid cotton. So you’ve had this huge rise in input costs. People could charge anything they want because of deregulation of the markets. So that’s the second place in which the E.U. and the U.S. are implicated because of their companies and corporations dumping seeds at much higher cost at phenomenal scalping rates of profit.

Another key issue in India is water.

I was interested to see the front page in The Daily Camera this morning talking about Pepsi acquiring a company here in Boulder. Pepsi and Coke really made their first huge inroads into the Indian market, which was the fastest-growing soft drinks market in the world anyway, by buying out a lot of local companies and expanding their influence and power. One of the problems, though, is that these are highly water-intensive industries in a country experiencing severe water stress. So their factories have shown up in rural areas, sunk God knows how many deep, mechanized wells, which drain away the water from the dug wells of the traditional farmers that don’t run that deep.

All over India, struggles and agitations and movements have broken out against Coca-Cola, against Pepsi, whichever the local soft-drinks manufacturer is. They get groundwater almost free. There is a place in Maharashtra where the soft-drink companies were getting water at 4 paise a liter. It’s not possible to translate 4 paise into cents. It’s a negative amount; it’s maybe minus 10¢ or something like that. Then they shove this into a bottle, the only value added being plastic, and sell it for 12 bucks. The looting of groundwater has been a major problem, and therefore there is very, very strong tension and

Naked Punch ASIA issue 02. resentment against these corporations. Besides which, an Indian nongovernmental organization, the CSE, the Center for Science and Environment, had a report showing the presence of a high level of pesticide content in these soft drinks. That led to a flurry of government actions. Different governments acted for different reasons. Many of them withdrew Coke and Pepsi from government institutions and banned them from educational institutions. In the southern state of Kerala, because of a whole series of clashes with Coke, the newly elected government there actually banned Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the entire state, including production and distribution. That ban has now been overturned by the high court of that state.

But the problem won’t go away. The government says, “We will make legislation.” This is an issue of water, it’s an issue of survival. Everywhere, whether near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, the largest, most populous state in India, you have serious tensions over water. India is a water-stressed country. Many of India’s most serious political problems are over water sharing. Now, as corporations come and take away millions and millions of liters of water from poor farmers, who are already under severe stress for other reasons, it’s becoming a gigantic issue.

There are also water issues with neighboring Bangladesh.

Every one of our problems is in some way, it seems to me, linked to water. Our biggest problem with Bangladesh has always been over the waters of the Farakka Barrage. Our problem with Pakistan has often been over the Indus waters, the Baglihar Dam, in which the World Bank has appointed itself the umpire. All our problems with Nepal are over the Kosi Barrage, which do cause a lot of distress to that country. So water is a very, very serious issue. You had some 25 years ago a vice president of the World Bank saying that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water. You can see that starting to happen.

Why is water so important?

It’s the last nonprivatized resource left on planet earth. The made a shot at oxygen at the Kyoto Protocols, you can pay and you can pollute.

But it’s as yet a bit difficult to privatize oxygen. So water is the last resource left. It’s a $200 billionplus-a-year industry, growing at the rate of 6% to 7% a year. And just four or five companies control this, like Suez and Vivendi. By the way, in your neighboring Latin America many of these companies have been physically ejected by populations infuriated over the privatization of water. In fact, one of the biggest companies in the world made a statement to the Guardian newspaper in U.K. a few months ago saying it’s now impossible to work in Latin America and Africa. We are setting our sights on India and China. Little Uruguay, with about 3 million people, had such a bad time with privatization of water that they held a national referendum and became the first country in the world in 2005 to pass a constitutional amendment banning the privatization of water. Water is the explosive issue. Water and energy are the giant issues of the coming five years.

In Cochabamba in Bolivia, Bechtel privatized the water, and there was a popular revolt and the government was forced to cancel the contract and evict Bechtel. You just mentioned energy.

There is the notorious, now defunct Houstonbased energy company, Enron, which has had some involvement in India.

Enron blew a hole the size of the Titanic in the economy of the richest state in the country, Maharashtra, where all these other problems that we have been discussing were going on. Maharashtra had a state electricity board, which was one of only two state electricity boards in the whole country in 1991 that not only was solvent but was making profit. Today that state electricity board is in the red in billions of rupees, having been forced to get into a contract with Enron that destroyed it. Enron, Bechtel, and GE were the sponsors of a project called the Dabhol Power Corporation, the biggest white elephant that we ever

inaugurated. It has caused such severe economic problems in the Maharashtra economy that it has led governments in search of fiscal stringency, which is what neoliberalism is about, to cut a number of programs, including midday meals for the children of indigenous people. Those meals are a major source of nutrition for poor children in India. All those programs have suffered because of the bankruptcy of the Maharashtra government. Supports to farmers have suffered.

We’re talking about thousands of billions of rupees going down the drain. And mind you, Enron remained a legitimate entity in India long after it was being chased by the FBI in the U.S. They did the same in Argentina. It caused similar damage in other parts of the world as well. The last 15, 20 years are best described as the period of the collapse of restraint on corporate power.

That’s what it’s about. You have a White House today with more CEOs in the cabinet than at any other time in history, I believe. So that is it: it’s about corporate power and the expansion of corporate profit.

Another U.S. corporation which made its mark in a negative way in India is Union Carbide, in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, in central India, There was a disaster in 1984, described as the worst industrial accident in history, thousands of people died.

In some ways I think the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal inaugurates the new era of corporate power. The number of people who died there was several times the number of people who died in 9/11. Every technical decision taken in Union Carbide was taken in the U.S.; the local administration of Union Carbide in India had to implement whatever they were told. The New York Times’ own investigative series on the problem shows that all technical decisions were taken in Virginia, the corporate headquarters. That’s where the technical decisions were taken. Thousands of Indians paid for it with their lives. To this day, not a single person has been punished, not a single person has spent a day in prison. Nothing.

But thousands of families have been destroyed forever.

Explain what happened.

There was a gas leak of methyl isocyanate. This lethal gas escaped from the Union Carbide plant in the dead of night and floated across Bhopal in a cloud, killing thousands of people and ruining the health of many more. The number of victims was understated. At first it was said to be 1,000, and then it was 2,000, and then it was 3,000. We know that something like 20,000 people died there. Whole hospitals have had to come up to deal with the problems of the survivors, who got a pittance as the Indian government of the time entered into a rotten deal with Union Carbide that gave them something that amounted to a few thousand rupees per person. So essentially a corporation killed 20,000 people and got away with it. It also destroyed the lives of a few hundred thousand others. But it got away with it.

Nobody paid the price. Nobody paid a penalty. As I said, that’s about six or seven times the number of people who died in 9/11.

Talk more about the energy sector in India. There are brownouts, cut backs in power. People of means buy generators to supply power.

The power situation is extremely serious. One of the things is that we stopped investing in the public sector quite a long time ago, and we thought that the coming of the Enrons and the others would make up for the withdrawal of those kinds of investments. That’s not happened. Very little additional electricity has been generated, and people are paying higher and higher prices for extremely poor services. Besides, we’ve crippled the state electricity boards, even those which were profitable. And all of them were not profitable; some of them were in losses. But the losses now are a lot bigger and many banks are holding the baby. So the destruction of the power sector

has been tremendous.

Second, there is a huge class bias in the distribution of power. If you live in the rich areas of Delhi, you won’t know too much of the problem, but even they are beginning to face it now. In the villages, people comment on it. When they have power for 8 hours, they say, “Okay, we got some power.” It’s damaged farming very badly, because what little power the farmers had is being diverted to industrial units. And more and more institutions, even hospitals in the countryside, are struggling for power every day. So the energy crisis, the electricity crisis, is very serious. And the rates, by the way, that Enron brought to Maharashtra were the highest for industrial users in the world. Indians were paying higher rates than Californians.

This acute distress which you have been documenting in the Indian countryside also leads to a mass internal migration. The populations of cities like your hometown of Chennai or Calcutta or Delhi or Mumbai have skyrocketed.

It’s in fact a gigantic displacement. I keep saying, India is witnessing the biggest displacement in her history, and they’re not noticing. It’s not coming from one dam, it’s not coming from a mining project, it’s not coming from some development project. It’s coming from the destruction of agriculture primarily, but also from other sources.

Millions of people are moving towards the cities in search of jobs that are not there because we’ve closed down manufacturing units by the hundreds of thousands in the cities. So they end up there as daily wage earners, menial laborers, domestic servants. And the infrastructures of the cities obviously aren’t able to take them. If you look at the United Nations Habitat report, “The Challenge of Global Slums,” this is a worldwide process. The U.N. report predicts that by 2030, a third of all humanity will live in urban slums. A third of urban humanity already lives in slums, but it will be a third of humanity. And the biggest areas of these slums will be India and Africa. So that’s where we are headed. The internal migrations are pushing people towards cities, and to smaller towns as well and to other villages as well.

Where do they go? We have destroyed agriculture without providing them any option or alternative for absorption of their labor.

There was much organization and resistance to World Bank big dam projects in central and western India in the Narmada Valley region. That was kind of celebrated here as a great victory. The people, mostly Adivasis, the indigenous people, were able to stop some of these big dam projects.

Is that an accurate description of what happened?

And did that inspire other movements in India or was it just a one-off?

There is no doubt that the struggle against the Narmada projects was a major inspiration for a number of other movements fighting similar battles. What’s happened, though, is that a recent ruling of the Supreme Court of India has gone against those fighting the dam. I think it’s a very regressive ruling, a very bad decision by the Supreme Court. It is really going to hurt a lot of people and set a very bad precedent for similar struggles against displacement across the country. But understand this: The courts are also part of this.

The Indian middle and upper middle classes are sold on this idea of techno fix, that technology and engineering can answer every problem in the world. “Oh, we’ve got a problem with water?

Let’s interlink 37 rivers.” For God’s sake, it took millions of years for those rivers to work out their own courses, and our engineers are going to set them right in a couple of decades? It’s insane. But the idea that somehow you can control nature to that extent with engineering. Whether it’s the networks of dams on the Narmada or anywhere else, many of these have proven and will prove disastrous.

There is a much bigger one than Narmada coming up in Andhra Pradesh. It’s called the Polavar-

situations - India

am Dam project. It’s going to submerge almost 300 villages. And that’s what the government accepts. It doesn’t speak about a number of other places that are going to be affected. It’s going to destroy a very large number of nomadic communities that live along the river and move with the flow of the Godavari River. So we’re not out of that framework yet. We’re still obsessed with this techno-fix solution rather than looking at issues of equity in water sharing, looking at issues of priority in water sharing. Why should there be hundreds of water amusement theme parks in India drawing on water in high-stress areas away from drinking and farming, spending billions of liters of water, probably, each year in operating these amusement parks and water theme parks?

In the western state of Rajasthan, which is virtually a desert, there are golf courses.

That’s right. In fact, there was a plan once to start golf courses as a food-for-work program in Rajasthan, which got shot down after we did a story in The Hindu on it. The average golf course takes between 1.8 to 2.3 million liters of water a day. Rajasthan is mostly desert. On that amount of water the people of many villages could live through the entire summer season. Instead you are going use it for golf courses. Golf also has this additional problem of extraordinary usage of pesticides. So you’re having shootings in the Philippines, for instance, between golf course owners and farmers, as to, one, the draining of water from the farmers; two, in return for taking their water, you give them pesticides that seep down into the aquifer.

So you have incredible problems of pesticides getting into the food chain, into the water chain in a very adverse way for the farmers’ whose plots neighbor the golf courses.

What are the points of resistance to these neoliberal policies? We’ve talked about some boycotts of Coke and Pepsi initiated by state governments, resistance in Narmada to big dams. What else is going on around the country? For example, there is a militia movement in central and eastern India.

Let me put it this way. I think there are far more interesting and far bigger things happening than the Naxalite movement which you are referring to. The Naxalites basically had a big base in parts of Bihar and Jharkhand and in Andhra Pradesh.

What’s happened is that sucessive Andhra governments have very substantially damaged them, so badly that they have fled into neighboring states, and therefore there seems to be a spurt of activity in these neighboring states. In some of these states, privately their intelligence reports do not give much importance to the size or scope of these militants. In public the governments make a huge thing about them because it’s good for governments to keep exaggerating the threat that people face. Then you can build your national security, your state security apparatus, you can arm yourself to the teeth, you can pass regressive and repressive laws, suspending civil liberties, as they have done in Chhattisgarh, using this as an excuse. It is nowhere really at a stage where you need to do that or suspend civil liberties or anything of the sort. In fact, doing that is very, very counterproductive in regions where oppression of the peasantry is already high. And therefore, you will always find that some militant movements will have a base in the peasantry, however small or however modest. It’s going to happen as long as the oppression exists. But let’s move to something, I think, far more optimistic. I look at the world today. I see a restless and unquiet world, everywhere, anywhere. Americans maybe first noticed the protests during the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. I was thinking at the time, where do you guys live? There have been a thousand Seattles in India, in Latin America, in Africa, in other parts of Asia. Long before you guys had Seattle, people were out battling against privatization, against unfair trade on the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, in villages, the rallies of farmers. That was happening long before. But I’m very pleased that Seattle happened. It’s a good thing. It gave people an idea that something was fundamentally wrong. It’s a very restless world. And if you look at the wave

of changes in Latin America, suppressed and held down for so long. If you look at the fact that your armies of spin doctors sent out to defeat Evo Morales could not pull it off.

In Bolivia.

If you look at the fact that all the attempts, including coups and whatnot, have flopped in Venezuela. All these show you that the world is a stubborn place and it’s not willing to be kicked around so easily. It kicks back. So there are huge changes taking place, there is huge resistance taking place. In India I see it every day. The farmers’ suicides are a form of protest, and a very negative one. It’s a sad thing. But there are also movements of farmers. There are farmers taking on the governments in various places when their land has been forcibly acquired for some corporation.

There is resistance. The trick will be, how do you tie these different streams of resistance together? How do you use that energy on a common program that benefits ordinary people?

India had a reputation for an independent foreign policy. It was a major player and participant in the nonaligned movement, particularly during the years right after independence, when Pandit Nehru was the prime minister, from 1947 until his death in 1964. What trends do you see now in Indian foreign policy?

Can I just take a moment to say something about resistance. I will say that India once again, in 2004, showed the world what democratic resistance was about when 600 million people went out and threw out the governments that implemented these classic neoliberal policies.

That would be the BJP government.

And also in several states. BJP was at the central, federal level. But also Congress state governments that followed similar policies were no less smashed. So there is resistance. The public has shown its distaste, its contempt for these policies. But it goes on.

On the foreign policy issue, I think that you’re right. India’s stature has eroded considerably amongst nations which once looked up to India as the leader. Long before you had your disinvestment movement in apartheid. And your movement was somewhat hypocritical. You had made your money for 40 years, and then a company could say, “You know, we think there is something wrong in South Africa. We shouldn’t be investing here.” Having made tens of millions of dollars out of black slave labor, you could then afford to discover your morals. India, one year before independence, 1946, under Pandit Nehru, closed down its relations with South Africa in protest against racism there. It hurt a very poor country like India. We lost between 5% and 10% of our total external trade. But you know what? I’m extremely proud of the old Indian passport, the first passport in the world which said “All countries except Republic of South Africa.” So that was the kind of foreign policy that gave India stature. If you ask Nelson Mandela which country he looked to, he will not tell you the U.S. or the U.K. He will tell you he looked to India in the years that he was in prison. He knew that India would represent the case of the South African people.

You will find this in many parts of the world, how people were influenced by the freedom-struggle generation of India. The last 15 years have seen significant departures from India’s independent standing as a leader amongst what was called the nonaligned world. Now we are aligned. Whether it’s on the Iraq war or on the dispute with Iran, we are invariably on the side of—I won’t say on the side of America, I will say on the side of the most conservative sections of the American establishment. That’s where we are as a nation in foreign policy.

But India didn’t send troops to Iraq.

Not for want of trying. The BJP government of the time was fully willing to send troops. I think the deputy prime minister, when he visited the U.S., even struck a verbal deal that he would send

troops. But the Indian public would have none of it. India has at least 1 1/2 million people working legally and probably an equal number working illegally in the Gulf. Imagine what would happen to all those families if there were a war there. In any case, why do we want to fight someone else’s wars? As Muhammad Ali said so famously, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” We have had excellent relations in these past decades with the people of Iran, with the people of Iraq. And we nearly got dragged into a war that wasn’t ours.

We have a sordid history, by the way, in Iraq.

Thousands of Indian troops died fighting for British imperialism in that country when it was called Mesopotamia during the First World War. So there was huge public resistance. And the parliament of India maybe became the only one to actually criticize the war, so that move to send troops was completely overcome. And incidentally, still, in the name of some projects or excuses, a few civilian workers have been encouraged to go to Afghanistan, where they are in serious trouble.

We read about the kidnappings and the killings every now and then.

So on an official level the BJP government in October of 2001, did not support the U.S. attack on Afghanistan?

It tried its best to get into the coalition of the willing, from whenever that was formed. It did not criticize officially in any strong way any of the actions of the U.S. government. It was the parliament of the country that had a resolution saying that the war is the wrong thing and this is not the way to settle an issue, on Iraq.

What about Afghanistan?

I think they waffled. Because, you see, they were getting into the embrace of the U.S. And also they were trying to break out of their isolation on the nuclear test that India set off in 1998 under that BJP government. So there was this tacit kind of, you know, we think you should not do this. However, we understand that there are problems.

And in the post 9/11 thing, none of this meant anything. The U.S. was going in there anyway.

In March 2006 George W. Bush visited New Delhi and negotiated a controversial deal with India.

India is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nevertheless, it has weapons of mass destruction.

There is a significant amount of resistance and resentment against this deal in the Indian public. Secondly, it’s interesting that the strands of discontent come from very different parts of the spectrum. Several of India’s top nuclear scientists are totally opposed to it. They think it takes away their independence, it curbs their freedom, it curbs their rights and their direction in their program. But another section just wonders, Why are we getting into this at all? Why are we getting into this embrace? Why are we getting into this situation in the first place? And there is also the section that has all along thought that the nuclear blasts were a bad idea, as I do. But it’s also seen as part of the overall Indo-U.S. embrace, and that makes, say, the left extremely unhappy with it. We’re worried about what’s happening and we don’t know, because there is no transparency to much of these negotiations. We don’t know what has been conceded in return for what.

Talk about the media. You work for The Hindu. In the U.S., there has been enormous concentration of media monopoly control: five corporations basically control what most Americans see, hear, and read. Do you have that kind of thing going on in India as well? it’s a very rapidly developing situation. First I should say that the Indian media at its worst has a far richer spectrum of political opinion than the U.S. media. I’m talking about the mainstream, not at all about the rich alternative media. So you have a better spectrum of political opinion in the Indian media. Also, because it’s such a heterogeneous society, you have giant media in 13 languages and 10 scripts, apart from what you have on television. However, the concentration you’re

Naked Punch ASIA issue 02. speaking of is growing very fast. And, yes, Murdoch is there, too. So are many others. And their influence and their power grow by the day.

Concentration of media in India is taking place without even the restrictions on cross-ownership that other societies have had. So you also have a gigantic trivialization process on in the media.

The farm suicides is a very good example. The day the farm suicides crossed 500 in the Vidarbha region in a record period of time, the Lakme India Fashion Week was going on in Mumbai. It was quite Kafka-esque. There were maybe 512 accredited journalists covering the Fashion Week. There were less than six journalists from outside Vidarbha covering the suicide deaths of 500 farmers. There is a connection between that Fashion Week and the farmers. The models walking the ramp in Mumbai were exhibiting cotton garments. The guys who made the cotton were committing suicide one hour’s flight away. But the media didn’t get the story. In my understanding, the fundamental feature of mass media in our times is the growing disconnect between it, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. And it’s increasingly and painfully true of India as well.

alternative radio audio energy for democracy

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India Today is a popular mass-based magazine.

Does it cover what’s happening in the rural areas?

Very marginally. And only when there is some major explosion or event. If you do a comparison of how much is given to, say, covering fashion and the glitterati and how much to the agrarian crisis, the latter would be negligible. —you somehow manage to actually teach journalism. I’m interested that one of your courses is called “Covering Deprivation.�

It is actually a course devised by the faculty of the Asian College of Journalism. It’s a leading school of journalism in Chennai, in the headquarters of The Hindu. The college is closely connected to The Hindu in some ways. The thinking of the people who started that particular course is that if you want to be a journalist in India, you have to know something about deprivation. You will cover other things anyway, but you need to know something about this. So whether you’re going into broadcast or online journalism or print journalism, it’s a compulsory, core course, covering deprivation. I do a module because I’m the guy who covers these things in the field. But we also bring several modules in that course which bring literally some of the country’s finest economists on agricultural labor, on poor people, on poverty, some very fine sociologists. It’s a course with many kinds of inputs, and mine is one of those.

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ar is sometimes taken to stand for “alternative radio.� a better reading would be “authentic� or “autonomous� radio - free from constraints of concentrated power, state or private, responsive to needs and concerns of the communities it reaches and open to their participation. insofar as it achieves those goals, ar is a fundamental component of authentic democracy and individual selfrealization. long may it flourish!

Palagummi. It’s easy.

You should see some of the instances that I have in mind. Palagummi is the name of a now-nonexistent village in Andhra Pradesh. In India, in my part of the country—and this causes confusion each time I fly into the U.S.—we write our family or village name first and our own name second. So Sainath is really my first name or what you guys call Christian name. Palagummi is my surname. And yet it would be wrong to call me Sainath Palagummi. So my byline just goes as P. Sainath. My granddad used to tell me that Palagummi was a village in the Godavari area, which was always a hotbed of revolt against one empire after the other, and particularly against the British Empire. So the Brits once razed to the ground a number of villages in that area, which no longer exist. A bad idea. It spread us all over the countryside to foment rebellion and revolt.

-noam chomsky

Courtesy of David Barsamian

situations - India

URDU POETRY

‫باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باوخ بس ےلچ ٹوٹ‬ ‫ںیہ ےتور ےس بک وت ناتسچولب ھدنس‬ ‫ںیہ ےتوس کت یھبا باجنپ ِلہا روا‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک بآرُپ ںیہ ںیھکنآ‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫ںیہ ےنام ہو بک ‪،‬مغ ےہ اک تاذ وک نج‬ ‫ںیہ ےنات ںیقودنب رپ ںوگول سب ےب‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک بابسا ںیہ لتاق‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫ںاوھد ںاوھد نشلگ ےہ ےس شراب یک گآ‬ ‫ںاہک راکہم یک ںویلک با شور شور‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک بالگ ۓوہ انپس‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫ےگ ںیتیج مہ وک ںوناولب ےہ معُز‬ ‫ےگ ںیتیب ند ہی ےک ھکد ںیم ںوہک روا‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک بارہز ۓوہ ماج‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫ںیہ ےناسفا ںایرگ ںیلزغ ہدرسفا‬ ‫ںیہ ےناریو ۓوہ ےلیھپ کت رظنِّدح‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک بارس ۓوہ ایرد‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫اوہ لاگنب ادج ےس مہ ےس نلچ یہنا‬ ‫اوہ لاح اک لد وج ےس ھکد سا ہن ھچوپ‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک بالیس ہی وکور‬ ‫الچ ناتسکاپ ہک باجنپ ےرم گاج‬ ‫بلاج بیبح ‪--‬‬ ‫۔ےہ یتاج وہ لاحب ہیلدع بج ۔۔یسپاو ‪،‬ےگ ںوہ ہناور وک چرام ‪ ۱۵‬ےلفاق ےس روہال‬ ‫تابلاط و ہبلط ‪،‬ناوجون ےک روہال ‪:-‬بناجنم‬

‫‪URDU POETRY‬‬

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URDU POETRY

THOUSANDS OF PERSONS ARE STILL MISSING. JOIN THE LONG MARCH AND FIGHT FOR THE THE RETURN OF MISSING PERSONS.

12th May :

11.30 am - 1.30 pm

Film: Missing in Pakistan Film: The Baloch Battlefield.

Speaker Mrs. Amina Janjua Second guest speaker Imran Khan Third Speaker: Rashid Rahman [On Balochistan and Missing Persons] •Question and Answer Session

From the Communards

The Communards were members and supporters of the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune. For NP, they are supporters from across history and the world who contribute to move our societies towards equality, liberty and justice.

every cook

can govern Naked Punch ASIA issue 02.

C. L. R. James Direct Democracy The Greek form of government was the city-state. Every Greek city was an independent state. At its best, in the city state of Athens, the public assembly of all the citizens made all important decisions on such questions as peace or war.

They listened to the envoys of foreign powers and decided what their attitude should be to what these foreign powers had sent to say. They dealt with all serious questions of taxation, they appointed the generals who should lead them in time of war. They organized the administration of the state, appointed officials and kept check on them. The public assembly of all the citizens was the government.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.

Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Modern parliamentary democracy elects representatives and these representatives constitute the government. Before the democracy came into power, the Greeks had been governed by various forms of government, including government by representatives. The democracy knew representative government and rejected it. It refused to believe that the ordinary citizen was not able to perform practically all the business of government. Not only did the public assembly of all the citizens keep all the important decisions in its own

hands. For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.

Intellectuals Intellectuals like Plato and Aristotle detested the system.

And Socrates thought that government should be by experts and not by the common people. For centuries, philosophers and political writers, bewildered by these Greeks who when they said equality meant it, have either abused this democracy or tried to explain that this direct democracy was suitable only for the city-state. Large modern communities, they say, are unsuitable for such a form of government.

We of Correspondence believe that the larger the modern community, the more imperative it is for it to govern itself by the principle of direct democracy (it need not be a mere copy of the Greek). Otherwise we face a vast and evergrowing bureaucracy. That is why a study, however brief of the constitution and governmental procedures of Greek Democracy is so important for us today. Let us see how Greek Democracy administered justice. The Greek cities for a time had special magistrates and judges of a special type, like those that we have today. When the democracy came into power, about the middle of the 5th Century B.C., there began and rapidly developed a total reorganization of the system of justice. The quorum for important sessions of the assembly was supposed to be 6,000. The Greek Democracy therefore at the beginning of each year, chose by lot 12 groups of 500 each. These 500 tried the cases and their decisions were final. The Greek Democracy made the magistrate or the judge into a mere clerk of the court. He took the preliminary information and he presided as an official during the case. But his position as presiding officer was merely formal. The jury did not, as in our courts today, decide only on the facts and look to him for information on the law. They decided on the law as well

From the Communards

as on the facts. Litigants pleaded their own case, though a litigant could go to a man learned in the law, get him to write a speech and read it himself. The Greeks were great believers in law, both written and unwritten. But the democrats believed not only in the theory of law, but in the principles of equity and we can define equity as what would seem right in a given case in the minds of 500 citizens chosen by lot from among the Athenian population.

No Experts He would be a very bold man who would say that that system of justice was in any way inferior to the modern monstrosities by which lawyers mulct the public, cases last interminably, going from court to court, and matters of grave importance are decided by the position of full stops and commas (or the absence of them) in long and complicated laws and regulations which sometimes have to be traced through hundreds of years and hundreds of law books. When the Russian Revolution took place and was in its heroic period, the Bolsheviks experimented with People’s Courts. But they were timid and in any case, none of these experiments lasted for very long. The essence of the Greek method, here as elsewhere, was the refusal to hand over these things to experts, but to trust to the intelligence and sense of justice of the population at large, which meant of course a majority of the common people.

The Organization or Government We must get rid of the idea that there was anything primitive in the organization of the government of Athens. On the contrary, it was a miracle of democratic procedure which would be beyond the capacity of any modem body of politicians and lawyers, simply because these believe that when every man has a vote, equality is thereby established. The assembly appointed a council of 500 to be responsible for the administration of the city and the carrying out of decisions.

But the council was governed by the same principle of equality. The city was divided into 10 divisions and the year was divided into 10 periods. Each section of the city selected by lot 50 men to serve on the council. All the councillors of each section held office for one tenth of the year. So that 50 people were always in charge of the administration. The order in which the group of 50 councillors from each section of the city should serve was determined by lot. Every day, the 50 who were serving chose someone to preside over them and he also was chosen by lot. If on the day that he was presiding, the full assembly met, he presided at the assembly.

sembly consisted of men who were familiar with the business of government.

No business could be brought before the assembly except it had been previously prepared and organized by the council.

When decisions had been taken, the carrying out of them was entrusted to the council. The council supervised all the magistrates and any work that had been given to a private citizen to do.

The Greeks had very few permanent functionaries. They preferred to appoint special boards of private citizens. Each of these boards had its own very carefully defined sphere of work. The coordination of all these various spheres of work was carried out by the council. A great number of special commissions helped to carry out the executive work. For example, there were 10 members of a commission to see after naval affairs, and 10 members of a commission to hear complaints against magistrates at the end of their term. One very interesting commission was the commission for the conduct of religious ceremonies. The Greeks were a very religious people. But most of the priests and officials of the temples were elected and were for the most part private citizens. The Greeks would not have any bunch of Bishops, Archbishops, Popes and other religious bureaucrats who lived by organizing religion. Some of these commissions were elected from the council. But others again were appointed by lot.

At every turn we see the extraordinary confidence that these people had in the ability of the ordinary person, the grocer, the candlestick maker, the carpenter, the sailor, the tailor.

Whatever the trade of the individual, whatever his education, he was chosen by lot to do the work the state required.

And yet they stood no nonsense. If a private individual made propositions in the assembly which the assembly considered frivolous or stupid, the punishment was severe.

Democratic Drama

The council had a secretary and he was elected. But he was elected only for the duration of one tenth of the year. And (no doubt to prevent bureaucracy) he was elected not from among the 50, but from among the 450 members of the council who were not serving at the time.

Here is some idea of the extent to which the Greeks believed in democracy and equality. One of the greatest festivals in Greece, or rather in Athens, was the festival of Dionysus, the climax of which was the performance of plays for four days, from sunrise to evening. The whole population came out to listen. Officials chose the different playwrights who were to compete. On the day of the performance, the plays were performed and, as far as we can gather, the prizes were at first given by popular applause and the popular vote. You must remember that the dramatic companies used to rehearse for one year and the successful tragedians were looked upon as some of the greatest men in the state, receiving immense honor and homage from their fellow citizens. Yet it was the public, the general public, of 15 or 20 thousand people that came and decided who was the winner.

When members had served on the council, they were forbidden to serve a second time. Thus every person had a chance to serve. And here we come to one of the great benefits of the system. After a number of years, practically every citizen had had an opportunity to be a member of the administration. So that the body of citizens who formed the public as-

Later, a committee was appointed to decide. Today such a committee would consist of professors, successful writers and critics. Not among the Greeks. The committee consisted first of a certain number of men chosen by lot from each section of the city. These men got together and chose by lot from among themselves 10 men. These 10 men attended

Naked Punch ASIA issue 02. as the judges. At the end of the performances, they made their decision. The 10 decisions were placed in the hat. Five were drawn out. And the one who had the highest vote from among these five received the prize. But even that does not give a true picture of the attitude of the Greeks towards democracy.

Despite the appointment of this commission, there is evidence that the spectators had a preponderant influence on the judges. The Greek populace behaved at these dramatic competitions as a modern crowd behaves at some football or baseball game. They were violent partisans. They stamped and shouted and showed their likes and dislikes in those and similar ways. We are told that the judges took good care to notice the way in which popular opinion went. Because, and this is typical of the whole working of the democracy on the day after the decision, the law allowed dissatisfied citizens to impeach the members of the commission for unsatisfactory decisions. So that the members of the commission (we can say at least) were very much aware of the consequences of 15 disregarding the popular feeling about the plays.

Yet it was the Greeks who invented playwriting. In Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they produced three tragedians who, to this day, have no equals as practitioners of the art which they invented. Aristophanes has never been surpassed as a writer of comic plays. These men obviously knew that to win the prize, they had to please the populace. Plato, the great philosopher, was, as can easily be imagined, extremely hostile to this method of decision. But the Greek populace gave the prize to Aeschylus 13 times. They were the ones who repeatedly crowned Aeschylus and Sophocles, and later Euripides, as prize winners. It is impossible to see how a jury consisting of Plato and his philosopher friends could have done any better. There you have a perfect example of the Greek attitude to the capacities, judgment and ability to represent the whole body of citizens, which they thought existed in every single citizen.

Slavery and Women There are many people today and some of them radicals and revolutionaries who sneer at the fact that this democracy was based on slavery .So it was, though we have found that those who are prone to attack Greek Democracy on behalf of slavery are not so much interested in defending the slaves as they are in attacking the democracy. Frederick Engels in his book on the family makes an analysis of slavery in relation to Greek Democracy and modern scholars on the whole agree with him. In the early days, Greek slavery did not occupy a very prominent place in the social life and economy of Greece. The slave was for the most part a household slave.

Later, the slaves grew in number until they were at least as many as the number of citizens.

In later years, slavery developed to such a degree, with the development of commerce, industry, etc., that it degraded free labor. And it is to this extraordinary growth of slavery and the consequent degradation of free labor that Engels attributes the decline of the great Greek Democracy.( However, it is necessary to say this. In the best days of the democracy, there were many slaves who, although denied

the rights of citizenship, lived the life of the ordinary Greek citizen. There is much evidence of that. One of the most important pieces of evidence is the complaint of Plato that it was impossible to tell a slave to go off the pavement to make way for a free citizen (especially so distinguished a citizen as Plato) for the simple reason that they dressed so much like the ordinary citizen that it was impossible to tell who was a citizen and who was a slave. In fact, Plato so hated Greek Democracy that he complained that even the horses and the asses in the streets walked about as if they also had been granted liberty and freedom. Near the end of the period of radical democracy, Demosthenes, the greatest of Athenian , orators, said that the Athenians insisted on a certain code of behavior towards the slaves, not because of the slaves, but because a man who behaved in an unseemly manner to another human being was not fit to be a citizen. There were horrible conditions among the slaves who worked in the mines. But on the whole, the slave code in Athens has been described by competent authorities as the most enlightened the world has known.

It was also stated by many that the position of women in Athens during the democracy was very bad. Naturally in these days, they did not have the vote. But for many centuries we were taught that the women of the Greek Democracy were little better than bearers of children and housekeepers for their husbands. Yet some modern writers, on closer examination of the evidence, have challenged the old view, and we believe that before very long, the world will have a more balanced view of how women lived in the Greek Democracy.

The Founders of Western Culture Now if the ancient Greeks had done little beside invent and practice this unique form of human equality in government, they would have done enough to be remembered. The astonishing thing is that they laid the intellectual foundation of Western Europe. Today when we speak about philosophy, logic, dialect; when we speak of politics, democracy, oligarchy, constitution, law; when we speak of oratory, rhetoric, ethics; when we speak of drama, of tragedy and comedy; when we speak of history; when we speak of sculpture and architecture; in all these things we use the terms and build on the foundations that were discovered and developed by the Greeks.

Correspondence is not sure about science. but in every other sphere of human endeavor, whatever the methods, routines, procedures, etc. that are used by people in intellectual and political association with each other, these were discovered, invented, classified and analyzed by the people of ancient Greece.

They not only invented or discovered these things. The men who invented and discovered and developed them — sculpture, politics, philosophy, art and literature, medicine, mathematics, etc. — these men are still to this day unsurpassed as practitioners of the things that they invented or discovered. If you were writing a history of modern civilization, you might find it necessary to bring in perhaps half a dozen Americans. Let us be liberal. A dozen. You will be equally in difficulty to find a dozen Englishmen. But in any such history of Western Civilization, you would have to mention some 60

or 80 Greeks.

Here are some of the names. Epic poetry — Homer. Dramatic poetry — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. Comedy — Aristophanes. Lyric poetry — Pindar and Sappho. Statesmen — Solon, Themistocles and Pericles. Sculpture The Master of Olympia and Phidias. Oratory — Dernosthenes. History — Thucydides and Herodotus. Philosophy — Socrates, Aristotle and Plato. Science and mathematics — Pythagoras and Archimedes. Medicine — Hippocrates.

These are only some of the best known names. And the fact which should never be forgotten and which indeed we should make the foundation of all our thinking on Greece is that by far the greatest number of them lived, and their finest work was done, in the days when the Greek Democracy flourished.

Modern Comparison This is the greatest lesson of the Athenian democracy for us today. It was in the days when every citizen could and did govern equally with any other citizen, when in other words, equality was carried to its extreme, that the city produced the most varied, comprehensive and brilliant body of geniuses that the world has ever known. The United States today has a population of 155 million people. In other words, 1500 times the population of Athens. In economic wealth, any two-by-four modern city of 20,000 people probably contains a hundred times or more of the economic resources of a city like Athens in its greatest days. Furthermore, for a great part of its existence, the total citizen population of Athens could be contained in Ebbets Field or at any of a dozen football grounds in England. This will give you some faint idea of the incredible achievements not of ancient Greece in general, but of Greek Democracy. For it was the democracy of Greece that created these world-historical achievements and they could not have been created without the democracy.

Greece did not only produce great artists, philosophers and statesmen at a time when their work laid the foundation of what we know as civilization. The Greeks fought and won some of the greatest battles that were ever fought in defense of Western Civilization. At the battles of Marathon, Plataea and Salamis, a few thousand Greeks, with the Athenian democrats at their head, defended the beginnings of democracy, freedom of association, etc., against the hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Oriental despotic monarchy of Persia.

In those battles in the 5th Century, Oriental barbarism, which aimed at the destruction of the Greeks, was defeated and hurled back by the Greeks fighting against odds at times of over 20 to 1. The Oriental despots knew very well what they were doing. They came determined to crush the free and independent states of Greece. Never before and never since was so much owed by so many to so few, and as the years go by the consciousness of that debt can only increase.

society, will be a “fully developed individual, fit for a variety 20 of labors, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.” Here is how Pericles, one of the greatest statesmen of the Greek Democracy, described the ordinary Greek citizen: Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece, and I declare that in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.

Marx and all the men who have written of a society of democracy and equality had to place it in the future. For our Greek, this conception of the citizen was not an aspiration.

It was a fact. The statement occurs in perhaps the greatest of all the Greek statements on democracy, the speech of Pericles on the occasion of a funeral of Athenians who had died in war.

The Greek democrat achieved this extraordinary force and versatility because he had two great advantages over the modem democrat. The first was that in the best days of the democracy, he did not understand individualism as we know it. For him an individual was unthinkable except in the city-state. The city-state of democracy was unthinkable except as a collection of free individuals. He could not see himself or other people as individuals in opposition to the city-state. That came later when the democracy declined. It was this perfect balance, instinctive and unconscious, between the individual and the city-state which gave him the enormous force and the enormous freedom of his personality.

Pericles shows us that freedom, the freedom to do and think as you please, not only in politics but in private life, was the very life-blood of the Greeks. In that same speech, he says: And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-today life in our relations with each other; We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.

We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.

Athenian Democrat — What Kind of Man?

Human “Gods”

This has always been an important question but at the stage of society that we have reached, it is the fundamental question: What kind of a man was this Greek democrat? Karl Marx has stated that the future type of man, the man of a socialist

Those simple words need hard thinking for us to begin to understand them today. The United States is notorious among modern nations for the brutality with which majorities, in large things as in small, terrorize and bully minori-

Naked Punch ASIA issue 02.

ties which do not conform; in Great Britain, the conception of “good form” and “what is not done” exercises a less blatant but equally pervasive influence. The Greek democrat would have considered such attitudes as suitable only for barbarians. One reason why the Greeks so hated the Persians was that a Persian had to bow down and humble himself before the Persian King — the Greek called this “a prostration” and this too he thought was only fit for barbarians. Instead, in the midst of a terrible war, he went to the theatre (which was a state-theatre) and applauded a bitterly anti-war play by Aristophanes, and on another occasion, when the ruler of Athens, accompanied by foreign dignitaries, attended the theatre in his official capacity, Aristophanes ridiculed him so mercilessly in the play that he sued the dramatist — and lost the case.

Another great advantage of the Greek democrat was that he had a religion. The Greek religion may seem absurd to us today, but any serious study of it will show that it was as great an example of their genius as their other achievements. Religion is that total conception of the universe and man’s place in it without which a man or a body of men are like people wandering in the wilderness. And the religious ideas of a people are usually a reflection and development of their responses to the society in which they live. Modern man does not know what to think of the chaotic world in which he lives and that is why he has no religion.

So simple and easy to grasp in all its relations was the citystate that the total conception with which the Greeks conceived of the universe as a whole and man’s relation to it was extremely simple and, despite the fact that it was crammed with absurdities, was extremely rational. The Greek gods were essentially human beings of a superior kind. The Greeks placed them on top of a mountain (Olympus) and allowed them their superiority up there. But if any citizen looked as if he was becoming too powerful and might establish himself like a god in Athens, the Athenian Democracy handled him very easily. They held a form of referendum on him and if citizens voted against him, he was forthwith banished for ten years, though when he returned, he could get back his property. Gods were strictly for Olympus.

Around all religions there is great mystery and psychological and traditional associations which are extremely difficult to unravel. But, although the Greek no doubt recognized these mysteries, his relation to them was never such as to overwhelm him.

Thus in his relation to the state, and in his relation to matters beyond those which he could himself handle, he understood what his position was and the position of his fellow men in a manner far beyond that of all other peoples who have succeeded him.

Working Politics In strict politics the great strength of the system was that the masses of the people were paid for the political work that they did. Politics, therefore, was not the activity of your spare time, nor the activity of experts paid specially to do it. And there is no question that in the socialist society the politics, for example, of the workers’ organizations and the

politics of the state will be looked upon as the Greeks looked upon it, a necessary and important part of work, a part of the working day. A simple change like that would revolutionize contemporary politics overnight.

The great weakness of the system was that, as time went on, the proletariat did little except politics. The modern community lives at the expense of the proletariat. The proletariat in Greece and still more in Rome lived at the expense of the community. In the end, this was a contributory part of the decline of the system. But the system lasted nearly 200 years.

The Empires of France and Britain have not lasted very much longer. And America’s role as a leader of world civilization is mortally challenged even before it has well begun.

The Greeks Were a Sophisticated People It is obvious that we can give here no more than a general account of Greek Democracy. There are great gaps in our knowledge of many aspects of Greek life; and even the facts that scholars have patiently and carefully verified during centuries can be, and are, very variously interpreted. There is room for differences of opinion, and Greek Democracy has always had and still has many enemies. But the position we take here is based not only on the soundest authorities, but on something far more important, our own belief in the creative power of freedom and the capacity of the ordinary man to govern. Unless you share that belief of the ancient Greeks, you cannot understand the civilization they built.

History is a living thing. It is not a body of facts. We today who are faced with the inability of representative government and parliamentary democracy to handle effectively the urgent problems of the day, we can study and understand Greek Democracy in a way that was impossible for a man who lived in 1900, when representative government and parliamentary democracy seemed securely established for all time.

Take this question of election by lot and rotation so that all could take their turn to govern. The Greeks, or to be more strict, the Athenians (although many other cities followed Athens), knew very well that it was necessary to elect specially qualified men for certain posts. The commanders of the army and of the fleet were specially selected, and they were selected for their military knowledge and capacity. And yet that by itself can be easily misunderstood. The essence of the matter is that the generals were so surrounded by the general democratic practices of the Greeks, the ordinary Greek was so vigilant against what he called “tyranny”, that it was impossible for generals to use their positions as they might have been able to do in an ordinary bureaucratic or representative form of government.

Pericles Cries So it was that the Greeks, highly sophisticated in the practice of democracy, did not, for example, constantly change the men who were appointed as generals. Pericles ruled Athens as general in command for some 30 years. But although he ruled, he was no dictator. He was constantly reelected.

On one occasion, he was tried before the courts but won a victory .On another occasion, Aspasia, the woman with

whom he lived, was brought before the court by his enemies.

Pericles defended her himself. He was a man famous for his gravity of deportment, but on this occasion, Aspasia was so hard pressed that he broke down and cried. The jury was so astonished at seeing this, that it played an important role in the acquittal of Aspasia. Can you imagine this happening to a modern ruler? Whether democratic or otherwise?

The Greek populace elected Pericles year after year because they knew that he was honest and capable. But he knew and they knew that if they were not satisfied with him, they were going to throw him out. That was the temper of the Greek Democracy in its best days.

This democracy was not established overnight. The early Greek cities were not governed in this way. The landed aristocracy dominated the economy and held all the important positions of government. For example, rich and powerful noblemen, for centuries, controlled a body known as the Areopagus and the Areopagus held all the powers which later were transferred to the council. The magistrates in the courts were a similar body of aristocrats who functioned from above with enormous powers such as modern magistrates and modern judges have. The Greek Democracy had had experience of expert and bureaucratic government.

It was not that the Greeks had such simple problems that they could work out simple solutions or types of solutions which are impossible in our more complicated civilizations.

That is the great argument which comes very glibly to the lips 26 of modem enemies of direct democracy and even of some learned Greek scholars. It is false to the core. And the proof is that the greatest intellectuals of the day, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others (men of genius such as the world has rarely seen), were all bitterly opposed to the democracy.

To them, this government by the common people was wrong in principle and they criticized it constantly. More than that, Plato spent the greater part of his long life discussing and devising and publishing ways and means of creating forms of society, government and lay which would be superior to the Greek Democracy. And yet, Plato owed everything to the democracy.

He could think and discuss and publish freely solely because he lived in a democracy. We should remember too that the very ideas of what could constitute the perfect society he was always seeking, came to him and could come to him only because the democracy in Greece was itself constantly seeking to develop practically the best possible society. It is true that Plato and his circle developed theories and ideas about government and society which have been of permanent value to all who have worked theoretically at the problems of society ever since. Their work has become part of the common heritage of Western Civilization.

But we make a colossal mistake if we believe that all this is past history. For Plato’s best known book, The Republic, is his description of an ideal society to replace the democracy, and it is a perfect example of a totalitarian state, governed by an elite. And what is worse. Plato started and brilliantly expounded a practice which has lasted to this day among intellectuals — a constant speculation about different and possible methods of government, all based on a refusal to

accept the fact that the common man can actually govern. It must be said for Plato that, in the end, he came to the conclusion that the radical democracy was the best type of government for Athens. Many intellectuals today do not do as well.

They not only support but they join bureaucratic and even sometimes totalitarian forms of government.

The intellectuals who through the centuries preoccupied themselves with Plato and his speculations undoubtedly had a certain justification for so doing. Today there is none. What all should study first is the way in which the Greeks translated into active concrete life their conception of human equality. The Greeks did not arrive at their democracy by reading the books of philosophers. The common people won it only after generations of struggle.

How the Democracy Was Won It would seem that somewhere between 650 and 600 B.C., the first great stage in the development of Greek Democracy was reached when the laws were written down. The people fought very hard that the law should be written so that everyone should know what it was by which he was governed.

But this was not accidental. As always, what changed the political situation in Greece were changes in the social structure. Commerce and (to a degree more than most people at one time believed) industry; the use of money, played great roles in breaking down aristocratic distinctions, and over the years, there was a great social levelling, social equality, due to the growth of merchant and trading classes, to the increase of the artisan class, of workmen in small factories and sailors on the ships. With these changes in Greek society, the merchants made a bid for power in the manner that we have seen so often in recent centuries in European history and also in the history of Oriental countries. Solon was the statesman who first 28 established a more or less democratic constitution and, for that reason, his name is to this day famous as a man of political wisdom. We see his name in the headlines of newspapers, written by men who we can be pretty sure have little sympathy with what Solon did. But the fact that his name has lasted all these centuries as a symbol of political wisdom is significant of the immense change in human society which he inaugurated. A few years before the end of the 6th Century B.C., we have the real beginning of democracy in the constitution of Solon.

Solon’s Constitution The citizens of the city-state were not only those who lived in the city, but the peasants who lived around. Solon was supported by the merchants and the urban classes, and also by the peasants. The growth of a money economy and of trade and industry, as usual, had loaded the peasants with debt and Solon cancelled the burden of debt on them. So that in a manner that we can well understand, the growth of industry and trade, and the dislocation of the old peasant economy provided the forces for the establishment of Solon’s great constitution. It was the result of a great social upheaval.

To give you some idea of the state of the surrounding world when Solon was introducing his constitution, we may note that 30 years after Solon’s constitution, we have the death of

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Nebuchadnezzar, the king in the Bible who was concerned in that peculiar business of Shadrack, Meshak and Abednego.

And this is the answer to all who sneer about the greatness of Greek Democracy. You only have to look at what the rest of the world around them was doing and thinking.

But although Solon’s constitution was a great and historic beginning, the democracy that he inaugurated was far removed from the radical democracy, the direct democracy of later years. For at least a century after Solon, the highest positions of the state could only be filled by men who had a qualification of property and this property qualification was usually associated with men of noble birth. The constitution in other words, was somewhat similar to the British constitution in the 18th Century. The real relation of forces can be seen best perhaps in the army. In cities like Athens, the whole able-bodied population was called upon to fight its wars. Political power, when it passed from the aristocracy, remained for some decades in the hands of those who were able to supply themselves with armor and horses.

Power of Rowers About 90 years after Solon, there was another great revolution in Athens. It was led by a radical noble, Cleisthenes by name. Cleisthenes instituted a genuinely middle class democracy. As in Western European history .the first stage in democracy is often the constitution. Then later comes the extension of the constitution to the middle classes and the lower middle classes. That was what took place in Greece.

The great masses of the people, however, the rank and file, were excluded from the full enjoyment of democratic rights.

The ordinary citizen, the ordinary working man, the ordinary artisan, did not have any of the privileges that he was to have later. The way he gained them is extremely instructive.

The development of commerce gradually transformed Athens first into a commercial city, and then into a city which did a great trade in the Mediterranean and the other lands around it. But a few years after the establishment of this middle class democracy by Cleisthenes, we have the period of the great Persian invasion. In 490 B.C., we have the battle of Marathon, in 480, the battle of Salamis, and in 479, the battle of Plataea, in which the whole population fought. Much of this war was fought at sea. Thus, commercially and militarily, Athens became a naval power. But the ships in those days were propelled by the men who rowed them. Thus the rowers in the fleet became a great social force. The Greeks always said that it was the growth of democracy which had inspired the magnificent defense of Greece against Persia. But after that victory was won, the rowers in the fleet became the spearhead of the democracy and they were the ones who forced democracy to its ultimate limits.

Proletarians or Piraeus The port of Athens was, as it is to this day, the Piraeus. There, for the most part, lived the sailors of the merchant fleet and the navy and a number of foreigners, as takes place in every great naval port. The leaders in the popular assembly were sometimes radical noblemen and later were often ordinary artisans. But the proletarians of the Piraeus were the driving

force and they were the most radical of the democrats.

The struggle was continuous. The battle of Plataea took place in 479 B.C. A quarter of a century later, another revolution took place and power was transferred definitely from the nobles who still retained some of it, to the radical democracy. Pericles, an aristocrat by birth, was one of the leaders of this revolution. Five years after, the lowest classes in the city gained the power of being elected or chosen for the Archonship, a very high post. It was Pericles who began to pay the people for doing political work. From 458, the radical democracy continued until it finally collapsed in 338 B.C. Class Struggle The struggle was continuous. The old aristocratic class and some of the wealthy people made attempts to destroy the democratic constitution and institute the rule of the privileged. They had temporary success but were ultimately defeated every time. In the end, the democracy was defeated by a foreign enemy and not from inside. One notable feature of Athenian democracy was that, despite the complete power of the popular assembly, it never attempted to carry out any socialistic doctrines. The democrats taxed the rich heavily and kept them in order, but they seemed to have understood instinctively that their economy, chiefly of peasants and artisans, was unsuitable as the economic basis for a socialized society. They were not idealists or theorizers or experimenters, but somber, responsible people who have never been surpassed at the practical business of government.

How shall we end this modest attempt to bring before modern workers the great democrats of Athens? Perhaps by reminding the modern world of the fact that great as were their gifts, the greatest gift they had was their passion for democracy. They fought the Persians, but they fought the internal enemy at home with equal, if not greater determination. Once, when they were engaged in a foreign war, the antidemocrats tried to establish a government of the privileged. The Athenian democrats defeated both enemies, the enemy abroad and the enemy at home. And after the double victory, the popular assembly decreed as follows: Athenian Oath If any man subvert the democracy of Athens, or hold any magistracy after the democracy has been subverted, he shall be an enemy of the Athenians. Let him be put to death with impunity, and let his property be confiscated to the public, with the reservation of a tithe to Athena. Let the man who has killed him, and the accomplice privy to the act, be accounted holy and of good religious odor. Let all Athenians swear an oath under the sacrifice of full-grown victims in their respective tribes and demes, to kill him. Let the oath be as follows: “I will kill with my own hand, if I am able, any man who shall subvert the democracy at Athens, or who shall hold any office in the future after the democracy has been subverted, or shall rise in arms for the purpose of making himself a despot, or shall help the despot to establish himself. And if anyone else shall kill him, I will account the slayer to be holy as respects both gods and demons, as having slain an enemy of the Athenians. And I engage, by word, by deed,

and by vote, to sell his property and make over one-half of the proceeds to the slayer, without withholding anything.

If any man shall perish in slaying, or in trying to slay the despot, I will be kind both to him and to his children, as to Harmodius and Aristogeiton and their descendants. And I hereby dissolve and release all oaths which have been sworn hostile to the Athenian people, either at Athens, or at the camp (at Samos) or elsewhere.� Let all Athenians swear this as the regular oath immediately before the festival of the Dionysia, with sacrifice and full-grown victims; invoking upon him who keeps it good things in abundance, but upon him who breaks it destruction for himself as well as for his family.

That was the spirit of the men who created and defended the great democracy of Athens. Let all true believers in democracy and equality today strengthen ourselves by studying what they did and how they did it.

C L R James Archive Source: Correspondence, Vol. 2, No. 12. June 1956; Transcribed: by David Harvie, 2003.

FOR MORE WORKS BY CLR JAMES SEE:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ james-clr/

NAKED PUNCH SUPPORTS:

Global Women’s Strike International network for recognition & payment for all caring work, and the return of military spending to the community starting with women the main carers.

Demands: � Payment for all caring work - in wages, pensions, land & other resources. What is more valuable than raising children & caring for others? Invest in life & welfare, not military budgets & prisons.

� Pay equity for all, women & men, in the global market. � Food security for breastfeeding mothers, paid maternity leave and maternity breaks. Stop penalizing us for being women. � Don't pay 'Third World debt'. We owe nothing, they owe us. � Accessible clean water, healthcare, housing, transport, literacy.

Non-polluting energy & technology which shortens the hours we work. We all need cookers, fridges, washing machines, computers, & time off!

�

� Protection & asylum from all violence & persecution, including by family members & people in positions of authority. � Freedom of movement. Capital travels freely, why not people?

Some current campaigns: � Bolivia Indigenous women demand justice vs racist authorities who kill with impunity � England Women asylum seekers fight detention & deportation. Women with disabilities oppose cuts � Guyana African, Asian & Indigenous women join together to save communities from floods & racist violence � Haiti International vigils against US/UN occupation, & for the return of disappeared human rights activist, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine � India Dalit & Tribal women unite vs bonded labour, low wages & rape by landlords � Ireland Fighting corporate takeover of historical sites � Peru and Trinidad & Tobago Domestic workers fight exploitation by employers � Spain Carers win financial recognition for caring work in the family � Uganda Trying to feed communities in the midst of military violence � USA Low income mothers organise to get children back from social services. Sex workers campaign for safety & decriminalisation � Venezuela Defending the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution. � Refusing to Kill – an initiative of Payday men's network (part of the Global Women's Strike) defends women and men who refuse to serve in the military.

www.globalwomenstrike.net www.refusingtokill.net International Co-ordination: Crossroads Women's Centre, 230ª Kentish Town Road, London, NW5 2AB, England Tel: +44-20-7482 2496 Fax: +44-20-7209 4751, Email: womenstrike8m@server101.com

Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison Nazim Hikmet If instead of being hanging by the neck Your are thrown inside For not giving up hope In the world, your country, and people.

If you do ten or fifteen years Apart from the time you have left, You won’t say, ‘better I had swung from the end of a rope Like a fly’ – You’ll put your foot down and live.

It may not be a pleasure exactly, But it’s your solemn duty To live one more day To spite the enemy.

Part of your may live along inside, Like a stone at the bottom of a well.

But the other part must be so caught up In the flurry of the world That you shiver there inside When outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.

To wait for letters inside, To sing sad songs,

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Or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling Is sweet but dangerous.

Look at your face from shave to shave, Forget your age, Watch out for lice And for spring nights, And always remember To eat every last piece of bread – Also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.

And who knows, The woman you love may stop loving you.

Don’t say it’s no big thing It’s like the snapping of a green branch To the man inside To think of roses and gardens inside is bad, To think of seas and mountains is good.

Read and write without rest, And i also advise weaving And making mirrors.

I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass Ten or fitteen years inside And more – You can, As long as the jewel On the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!

From the Communards

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