Peeping into Pakistan

Jemima Khan's broken country

The day I’m leaving for Pakistan a round-robin e-mail pings into my inbox from an address I don’t recognise, Wise Pakistan. The message reads: “It is important you watch this to see what’s coming.”

Ten men are lined up and each one is filmed talking inaudibly to camera. The first man is pinned to the ground by four others. His throat is slit like a goat at Eid and his head held aloft by his hair. The Urdu subtitle reads: “This is what happens to spies.” It's a Taliban home video — to jaunty music — of serial beheadings. There are plenty of these doing the rounds nowadays.

I’m off to Pakistan for the children’s half-term. They visit their father there every holiday. I lived in Pakistan throughout my twenties. Now it’s a different place — the most dangerous country on Earth, some say — and my friends and family are worried.

For my last four years in Pakistan we lived at the quaintly named House 10, Street 1, E7. Two months ago a bomb exploded 100 yards from the house, killing four people; about 1,500 have been killed this year in terrorist attacks.

It’s hardly a tourist destination these days so I’m surprised to find that the flights are all full. I am an aerophobe; my real fear is getting there. The only direct flight is on PIA, otherwise known as Please Inform Allah. British Airways stopped flying there after the Marriott bomb attack in Islamabad last September.

As I’m packing, my London neighbour, the comedian Patrick Kielty, drops off a parcel containing The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook with a note pointing out the pages on how to escape when tied up, how to take a bullet and how to survive if you wake up next to someone whose name you don’t remember.

I arrive in Islamabad at 3am on a Sunday. With everything that’s going on in Pakistan these days — violent civil war in the northwest, 2.5m internally displaced people, a separatist uprising in Baluchistan, a hostile neighbour, corruption, recession, inflation, unemployment — I’m surprised anyone has the energy for swine flu paranoia, particularly as Pakistan is strictly a pork-free zone.

Yet before disembarking we are obliged to fill out two forms. Recent proximity to pigs and/or Mexicans will result in an obligatory spell in quarantine. It must be the name of the virus that’s causing alarm. Pakistanis dislike pigs. Until quite recently my children thought the word for pig was “gunda-pig” (dirty pig). The wild boar in Lahore zoo is squished into a cage so minute it can’t scratch its own back and people throw stones at it.

I’m staying with Imran, my ex-husband, and our children in the house I helped to design but which we never lived in together. It's on top of a hill outside Islamabad. The courtyard fountain is a reminder of the insanity of political life in Pakistan, even on the periphery. It’s covered in the exquisite blue and white Multani tiles that almost landed me in jail in 1999. I bought them as a present for my mother but, before they reached the port to be shipped to England, they were impounded and I was charged with smuggling antiques (they weren’t, according to Bonhams and other experts here), a non-bailable offence.

I was pregnant and scarpered to England until there was a military coup six months later by the then friendly dictator, General Musharraf. The case was dropped, the tiles were released and I returned to Pakistan with an extra child in tow.

Had I been an aspiring politician, I’d have stayed put in Pakistan. A spell in jail is a prerequisite for anyone wanting to be taken seriously in politics. My ex-husband, who heads a political party, was jailed two years ago for treason and his popularity soared, according to Gallup polls. I should have considered this when campaigning vigorously for his release.

Islamabad was once considered an ideal family posting for foreign diplomats, green and clean and offering an easy life, if a little dull. Now, to get to my friend Asma’s house in an affluent area of the city, I have to go through four security checkpoints manned by armed police. We drink chai, feast on samosas and gupchup (gossip); but we mostly discuss the political situation and how dire it all is.

The next day I set off for the refugee camps close to the Swat valley, where the army is fighting the Taliban. Before I leave, Imran’s chowkidar (watchman) tells me that the newspapers in Pakistan are all funded by Yehudis (Jews). His Kalashnikov-toting commando — it’s the first time Imran has felt the need to have security — nods, adding that there are no Taliban. They are a fabrication by Jews and Hindus to destabilise Pakistan. He adjusts his belt of bullets.

Pakistan pulsates with conspiracy theories. One, which has made it into the local newspapers, is that the Taliban when caught and stripped were revealed to have been “intact, not Muslims”, a euphemism for uncircumcised. (Pakistanis are big on euphemisms.) Their beards were stuck on with glue. “Foreign elements” (India) are suspected.

Jalala camp between Mardan and Mingora is the first point of refuge for those escaping the military operation in Swat. It’s full to capacity: 80% of internally displaced persons are children. Thousands have been separated from their parents when fleeing their homes.

Two children are fighting over coloured crayons when I arrive. A girl with blistered burns on her face from the sun shouts at a small boy who turns out to be her brother: “If you don’t give them back to me I’ll tell the Taliban and they’ll cut your throat.”

According to the teacher in the camp, every child has witnessed public beheadings. Eight-year-old Amina explains quietly from behind her teacher how she saw her uncle’s stomach gouged out by the Taliban. Another girl’s mother was shot for not being in purdah. And another was shot at with her family when she was walking outside during the curfew. Seven-year-old Bisma, I’m told, has seen all the male members of her family hanged in what has become known as Bloody Square. She doesn’t speak.

The children are equally afraid of the army. There’s a joke going round: “What’s worse than being ruled by the Taliban? Being saved by the Pakistani army.” When the chief minister landed in a helicopter next to the camp a few days ago, I’m told, the children fled screaming in terror to their tents.

A group of small children are drawing pictures, part of an art therapy programme run by Unicef in its child-friendly spaces within the camps. Here traumatised children can play volleyball, sing songs and be read stories in shaded safety.

A boy called Salman hands me a precisely drawn and signed picture of a Kalashnikov. A shy eight-year-old girl sitting cross-legged next to him, with her grubby green dupatta half obscuring her smile, offers me hers of a helicopter shelling a village. “That’s my house,” she says, pointing to some scribbled rubble.

Their schools and homes have been destroyed. All have had relatives killed. An orphanage in Mingora was caught in the crossfire when soldiers based themselves on the roof of the building with 200 children trapped inside.

After an hour and a half in the camp we are asked to leave for security reasons. Apparently the Taliban have been infiltrating, trying to recruit supporters.

There’s certainly support for the Taliban in the camps. They represent, for many, an opposing force to an army that “drones” (it's now a verb here) its own people. America’s war on terror, supported by the Pakistani army, is unanimously viewed here as a war on Islam. Newborn twins have been named Sufi Mohammad and Fazlullah after the two militant leaders in Swat.

The following day I drive to Lahore. We take the M2 motorway. (There is no M1.) It’s expensive to take this route and lorries are banned. As a result it must be the most underused motorway in the world.

As I approach Lahore I get a text from Imran: “Don’t panic. There’s been a big bomb blast just now.” The Pakistani Taliban claim responsibility for the deaths of 30 people. The next call is from my mother who has converted worry into crossness.

Compared with the tranquillity and solitude of Imran’s mountain-top idyll, Lahore is mayhem. The sky is a tangled mess of electrical wires, the buildings are half built or half falling down. There is no respite from the 42C heat or the incessant traffic noise, which worsens at night. My mobile phone stops working and I complain that it has melted, but everyone laughs at me. Lahoris are the most telephonically dependent people I’ve met.

It’s the first time I’ve been to Lahore since I left Pakistan six years ago; and it’s where I shared a house for the first five years of my marriage with Imran’s father, his two sisters, their husbands and their children, 16 of us in total.

Imran’s father died last year and I’m here to offer condolences, a cultural imperative. It involves visiting the bereaved, in this case my former sisters-in-law, and offering a formal prayer in Arabic, arms extended, palms open, for the deceased.

I’m nervous as I haven’t had any contact with them — bar my Facebook friendship with the children — since getting divorced, but everyone is exceptionally warm and welcoming. I cry when I hug Imran’s niece, who was 13 when I first arrived in Lahore but is now married with a baby.

I’m staying at the haveli (mansion) of Imran’s old schoolfriend, Yousaf Salahuddin, in Lahore’s old city. He is known mostly by reputation, although that’s not necessarily an exclusive club in this conservative city.

You need only to read Salman Rushdie’s Shame to understand how important honour (izzat) and reputation are — although I shouldn’t really write that. The last time I admitted to having read Rushdie (for my university dissertation on post-colonial literature), I had a thousand placard-waving beards outside my door and adverts in the papers, calling me an apostate and demanding that my citizenship be revoked.

Yousaf is Lahore’s best host, tirelessly generous and entertaining. His house is a dusty jewel hidden in a tiny alleyway in what was once Lahore’s red-light district, known as the Heera Mandi. It is now inhabited mostly by cobblers and paan sellers. The haveli is one of the few existing traditional houses built in red brick around a central courtyard. Cherie Blair, Mick Jagger and Elizabeth Hurley have all been guests here.

Once a politician in Benazir Bhutto’s government, Yousaf is now a music producer and fashion aficionado. He has girlfriends — plenty and young — he smokes, he serves alcohol in his home, he loves music and models and he parties with Lollywood’s glitterati. He also has a deep knowledge of Sufism and is a passionate supporter of restoration work in the old city.

Like everyone here he likes to opine: where Pakistan has gone wrong, where politicians have gone wrong, where the interpreters of Islam have gone wrong, where Imran has gone wrong and, by the end of our stay, where I’ve gone wrong. He also loves to eat, usually after midnight.

JP, a film-maker friend, is here to research a film about Pakistan. We head for tea with Iqbal Hussein, who paints dancing girls from the red-light district for a living. His mother was a prostitute.

As we arrive he is packing up his paints. His models, two gypsy sisters, one clutching a baby, are sitting quietly motionless on a mattress in a dark, windowless back room in his studio. Every half an hour in Pakistan there’s “load shedding”, when the electricity cuts out.

We sit in candlelight in the thick, still heat and the girls sing classical songs, using upturned metal cups as instruments. Chewing betel nut, they giggle and reveal red-stained teeth. We cheer and clap and chuck rupees in appreciation.

I’m starting to feel sick and dizzy from the heat. Everyone’s face is coated in sweat, strands of hair stick to the girls’ faces as they sing, but nobody else seems bothered. Finally they take pity on me and we retreat prematurely to the dark, fabric-swathed, air-conditioned inner sanctum of Yousaf’s haveli and stay there until nightfall when the old city begins to wake up.

Yousaf has invited a qawwali singer, Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, a huge star, to perform privately for us in his smoky underground music chamber.

Rahat’s family have been qawwali singers for 600 years, the skill passed down from generation to generation. He shows me a video on his mobile phone of his five-year-old son performing qawwali. He has been training the child since he was two. The little boy sits cross-legged on a chintzy sofa, raises his tiny palms to heaven imploringly, closes his eyes and starts to sing, smashing his hands back down on make-believe tublas and throwing his head back in mock ecstasy with all the passion and panache of his ancestors.

We’re joined by Iman Ali — or “monster” as Yousaf calls her — one of Pakistan’s most famous models/actresses. She’s dressed in tight jeans, a sleeveless top and kitten heels. I’m in what I’d always thought was the obligatory billowing white cotton.

She’s extremely opinionated even for this ready-steady-rant society, prefacing each pronouncement with, “Well what would I know? I’m just a dumb model but . . .” She’s very bold and at times perspicacious, especially about religion.

She tells us that Indians are all “cry babies” and Muslims would do better to be cry babies, too, and that way gain equal levels of sympathy abroad. I like her forthrightness. She says things others wouldn’t dare to say here, albeit euphemistically.

She questions how it is that she is the most successful celebrity in Pakistan and yet the poorest. Then she answers herself: “They must have other sources of income.” JP looks perplexed. “Illegit,” she enlightens. Pakistani actresses and models have traditionally emerged from the red-light area. They must have “friends”, she adds for good measure. Dosti (friendship) is a euphemism for client, while shadi (marriage) means sex with a client.

I return to the calm of the capital, scoop up my cricket-fatigued boys at 2.30am and head to Islamabad airport — now renamed Benazir Bhutto International by her widower, the president. We join the end of a 20-coil queue that snakes from the car park towards the distant terminal.

The airport was the first glimpse I had of Pakistan all those years ago. It’s the country I feel I grew up in and was a part of, arriving at 20 and emerging a decade later a more questioning and conflicted person. I am still maddened by its faults but I bristle and become defensive if others criticise.

As we’re jostled along towards the check-in area, I think about Pakistani society. It is an endless contradiction — hostile and hospitable, euphemistic and unambiguous, spiritual and prescriptive, aggressor and victim. Nothing sums up its topsy-turvy nature quite like the Heera Mandi in Lahore, one of the most conservative cities, where the prostitutes wear burqas and girls with honour dress like Wags.

From
The Sunday Times

June 7, 2009

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6446446.ece

CALL OF THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

Randhir Khare journeys into the Nilgiris and is mesmerised by the Longwood Sholas and its environs. He writes that he can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like a few hundred years ago. This is the first part of an essay on the southern mountain ranges and its indigenous peoples. Exclusive to Tehelka

Stripped of their myths and stories, the lands sacred to the native peoples…became real estate. A new symbolic landscape was superimposed on the old. But whereas the old one was animistic, related to the spirit of the place, the new one symbolised the imposition of a rational order upon the untamed wilderness and its division into private property.” Rupert Sheldrake.

It was early evening, I remember. Light was pale honey. The air heavy with the overwhelming aroma of damp vegetation. The rain had let up in Kotagiri, and the mountains of the Nilgiris, clothed in mist, gradually revealed their contours. The respite drew us out of New Rickford, the bungalow where we had been staying, and lured us on for a walk up the high road between a line of trees which gave way to brilliant green expanses of tea bushes. Usually dotted with leaf-plucking women, the gardens seemed unusually empty that evening. To our left the tight spread of shrubs carpeted the land which sloped off down to a fairly deep valley. To our right, the green climbed a gradual slope and met the borderline of Longwood Shola an ancient forest.

The Nilgiri Laughing Thrush and the Red Spur Fowl that had been painting the air with their gurgling raucousness, suddenly fell silent. Two cars drove up along the road past us and slipped out of sight, their rumble echoing a while after they had gone.

And then we saw him. A shiny black gaur bull, emerging from among a tangle of torn barbed wires that fenced off Longwood Shola. Head down, cropping tufts of grass between tea bushes, tail flicking flies, light flowing across his two thousand pound body, six feet from the shoulder, muscles rippling. He stamped his white socked hooves and snorted, the cloud of flies obviously irritating him.

When he had covered a few yards, he seemed to step aside from the path he had taken, turning his head to watch his herd emerge from the Sholas. There were fourteen of them -- his cows, a few young bulls and two calves trailing behind. They headed towards the road, crossed over to our left and followed the slope downwards.

We moved on after the herd was out of sight, turned off the road far ahead and sank into Longwood Shola, the dense foliage closing in around us. Leaf, wood, bark, stone, mud, insect, animal, bird, reptile and human flowing energies along a spiral. Moving along the line of the spiral, we went deeper till we reached the edge of a marsh in the sunken lowland of the forest. A giant heart beating.

Around us were profusions of butterflies – Blue Admiral, Great Orange Tip and Striped Tiger – above us Scimitar Babblers and Blue Throated Barbets, amid the expanding echoes of Giant Squirrel cries.We were forced to draw ourselves out of the Sholas as evening hauled in shadows and Great Horned Owls began hoo-hooing from high boughs. Back on the road, the mist had descended and we slow walked back to the bungalow.

That night, as the rain and wind and distant cry of monkeys circled the house, I savoured the throbbing energy that coursed through me.

Vanished Greens

If in the year 2002 Longwood Shola and its environs could evoke such powerful feelings I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like a few 100 years earlier when the entire region of the Nilgiris was covered in forests and grasslands.

Since I can’t travel across time I’ve listened to the voices of tribal elders – narrating accounts that they had heard from their forefathers, re-telling folk tales, myths, legends, trekking through shrinking wilderness, reading the spoors of vanished green on the changing body of the land. And of course pouring over old accounts by travellers, explorers and administrators of the Raj.

According to the Nilgiris District Gazetteer, because of its altitude and equatorial nearness, the region offered ideal conditions for a variety of forest cover and grasslands which existed in four tracts. The first stretched across parts of the plains and low hills of the Madras Presidency -- moving from dry deciduous to tropical foliage. There were a lot of valuable trees like White Cedar, Satinwood, Puva, Blackwood or Rosewood, Teak, Sandalwood, Amla and others.

The second was made up of moist evergreen forests which were a spectacular sight if viewed from the western slopes, between the heights of 3,000 and 4,000 feet. The taller trees there shot up to between 200 and 250 feet forming domes and umbrellas of variegated leaves. Beneath their shades and from the ground below, a riot of epiphytic orchids, mosses, balsams, tree ferns, climbing ferns and creepers thrived. Heavier woods like Poon Spar, Ironwood, Red Cedar, Ebony. On the Malabar side of the district, the forests trailed down to the plains. In other places, at about altitudes of 1000 feet from the low lands, they were outgrown by deciduous forests and reed bamboos.

As one climbed higher, the third tract became apparent as the ‘shola’ or ‘woods of the plateau’ were experienced. Though the trees there were somewhat like moist evergreen forests, they differed in that they didn’t grow tall but remained stunted, some rising to about 70 feet. The ‘timber’ trees were fewer and of less value, but there was a surfeit of ferns and mosses and of course orchids, reed bamboo, scrubby balsams and begonias.

The fourth tract was carpeted by grasslands spotted with numerous herbaceous plants that bloomed in the first showers of March. The trees were mainly Rhododendron arboreum, Saliux tetrasperma, Celtis tetrandra, Pittosporum, Dodonaea viscose, Wendlandia Notoniana. As for shrubs there is a list of about 35 to 40 varieties, the most visible being the Strobilanthes Kunthianus (or the Kurunji) which covered many acres with its flowers – forming as it were, a sheet of blue.

Authored by W Francis, this Gazetteer goes on to say that 78 species of ferns had been discovered in the hills, specifying that two, Lastraea scabrosa and ferruginea had not been found anywhere else in the world.

This green-mantled mountainous region which rose to a height of 6,000 feet on an average along the plateau lands with more than 20 peaks crossing a height of 8,000 feet, was watered by the Bhavani, Paikara, Avalanche, Moyar, Coonoor and innumerable seasonal and perennial streams.

Forest cover provided home and hunting ground to tigers, leopards, black panther, sloth bear, sambar, spotted deer, barking deer, black buck, bison (or gaur), wild boar, Nilgiri ibex, elephant, wild dog, Nilgiri langur, the lion tailed Macaque, Flying Squirrels and Giant Squirrels, birds, reptiles and insects.


INDIGENOUS SETTLERS

And the early human inhabitants? Well, there were several tribal communities living in the region at that time, each in environments that best suited their way of life. Records reveal that the lower reaches of the Nilgiris which were covered by deciduous and moist evergreen forests were home to hunting and gathering tribes such as the Irulas, Katunaickens, Paniyans and Kurumbas whereas the upper regions like the temperate forests and grasslands were home to the artisan Kotas and the buffalo herding Todas.

Evidenced by their lore, rivers, mountains, sacred groves, trees, creatures and spaces were invested with special powers, were of significance or epitomised as deities. Todas, for instance, believe that their places of creation and afterlife are located in the Nilgiris.

Records show that through the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, various religious, quasi-religious and political European expeditions, mostly unfruitful, were made into the Blue Mountains. It was the early Nineteenth century that the adventurous and pioneering John Sullivan, Collector of Coimbatore, finally broke the spell and opened up the region to growth and development. The initial expedition cost the Company Rs 300 and the survey another 800. Not long after, a notice appeared in the Gazetteer of India,

“We trust that future reports of the salubrity of this spot will remove all the apprehensions that have been entertained, and that it will become a place of resort for those whose state of health may require that change of temperature which it unquestionably affords. Should a continued residence in these regions prove that the climate is favourable to the European constitution, it may perhaps be deemed expident hereafter to form a military establishment for pensioners and invalids, with a regular hospital; and if it should become a military station, with Medical Officers attached to it, houses would soon become erected and conveniences would be provided for those who might be compelled to seek the benefit of the climate…”

With the growth of the Raj Establishment in the highlands, more and more plainspeople migrated into the blue mountains as labour or work force and to stake their claim to pieces of the wilderness that they could lay their hands on. A land once fecund with life that had a cultural geography uniquely its own was opened up, laid bare and ‘developed’. The region was, as Sullivan’s progress report summed up, ‘gradually approximating to a state of comfort and civilisation.’

Forest lands gave way to the cultivation of tea, coffee, spices and other plantation crops, grasslands were transformed into organised forests and the complex food chain of the blue mountains was snapped, destroying in the process a multitude of dependant plants, shrubs, creepers, grasses and the innumerable creatures who relied on them for their survival and growth.

Many of the indigenous trees were forced out to make way for trees like the numerous varieties of Australian Eucalyptus and Acacia, fast growing woods that were nurtured to fuel expanding settlements and to meet the demands of a growing empire.

The tribal communities living in the Nilgiris witnessed the ‘civilising’ process which destroyed much of their lands, their sacred places and spaces and irrevocably made them refugees in their own homes.


COLONISING PROCESS

To the ‘civiliser’, people from tribal communities were either unrefined, cunning, uncouth and backward or innocent primitives who could be manipulated and used as workhorses. The orientalists studied them, highlighting the exotic and outrageous aspects of their community practices, cultures and religious beliefs. The so-called learned treatises that they churned out did a distinct disservice and perpetuated stereotyping and communal discrimination. Their influence spread not merely abroad but through time into contemporary Indian thought and response in relation to marginal and traditional communities. I am horrified to report that much of those skewered treatises (anthropological and socio-cultural) that were penned during those times are still quoted and referred to as authoritative works (even by a number of Indian academics), indicating that the processes of colonialism continue alive and well in the bloodstream of a free and independent nation. In the same strain, ‘development’ approaches exercised and established during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth century are still being perpetuated.

Here are some classic examples of the ‘civiliser’ attitude –

Towards the Kotas:

“(Kotas) actually court venereal disease, and a young man who has not suffered from this before he is of a certain age is looked down upon as a disgrace.”

“The Kotas are looked down as being unclean feeders, and eaters of carrion; a custom which is to them no more filthy than that of eating game when it is high, or using the same toothbrush week after week, is to a European…An unappetising sight, which may be witnessed on roads leading to a Kota village, is that of Kota carrying the flesh of a dead buffalo, often in an advanced stage of putridity, slung on a stick across his shoulders, with the entrails trailing on the ground.”

Towards the Todas:

“The daily life of a Toda woman has been summed up as lounging about the mad or mand (Toda settlement), buttering and curling her hair, and cooking. The women have been described as free from the ungracious and menial-like timidity of the generality of the sex in the plains. When Europeans (who are greeted as swami or god) come to a mand, the women crawl out of their huts, and chant a monotonous song, all the time clamouring for tips. Even the children are so trained that they clamour for money till it is forthcoming.”

“It is an oft-repeated statement that the women show an absence of any sense of decency in exposing their naked persons in the presence of strangers.”

“Some of the young women are distinctly good looking (but they) speedily degenerate into uncomely hags…a race of superb men coupled to hideous women.”

But then, let me pick up the threads of this story and move on and examine the manner in which the very survival of people from tribal communities was threatened.

The Todas who lived in the high grasslands which provided them adequate grazing grounds for their immense herds of buffaloes were witness to the degradation of indigenous varieties of grass as a result of ecological interference. The new varieties of grass introduced were hardly nutritious for milch animals and so the yields decreased. In addition to this, the fact that grasslands had been converted into forests by planned forestry programmes meant that grazing grounds had shrunk and the threat of a growing number of protected predators increased.

The buffalo occupies a sacred place in Toda family, community, cultural and religious life and as herds dwindled, their very survival was in question. Today, the population of these people has been reduced to far less than 2000.

The Kotas, artisans working in metal, wood and clay, were the blacksmiths, carpenters, house builders and potters who not merely used these skills for the development of their own community but extended themselves to others too. In fact they were respected for their art and industriousness. The influx of settlers into the region and the phenomenal acceleration of markets made Kota skills and products redundant.

The hunting and food gathering Kurumbas, Irulas, Kattunaickens and Paniyans, were perhaps the worst hit. The forests which they once depended upon for their sustenance and cultural, community and religious identity were either replaced by plantations, altered by the introduction of new species of tree cover (seriously affecting bird and animal life and the growth of edible and medicinal roots herbs and bulbs) or made out of bounds by forest laws which chose to protect wild life and exclude humans who had traditionally been forest dwellers.

Most of the Kurumbas and Irulas became casual labourers on the plantations and fields of the settlers, the Kattunaickens reduced in numbers were pushed to the periphery of forests to eke out a living from minor forest collection and casual labour, the Paniyans became bonded labour.

TIMELESS ENCOUNTERS

But the story of the Blue Mountains does not end there. The tribal spirit is far too strong, well-founded and resilient to be dispensed with. It has survived through the centuries and will continue to do so. I have encountered this spirit wherever I have travelled in the Nilgiris.

In the little Alu Kurumba village of Sengalpudhur, high up on the shoulder of bare land wedged between tea estates and reserve forests, in the shadow of God Rock Hill, a young man by the name of Nagaraj, tells me, “no one wants us here, but we will hold on and remain. This is our land. This is Alu Kurumba land. We will protect it with our lives and with our culture. That is our strength – our culture, our songs, stories, music, our prayers, our gods, the power of our spirits.” He has lost most of one leg and hobbles around from village to village with a crutch, organising his people, inspiring them.

Five young Toda men and women sitting with us over tea in Ooty, strike the same chord, “Our culture is our identity, it makes us who we are.”

The Kotas are putting up a valiant resistance, using higher education and other tools of ‘civilisation’ to keep going. As the Kota CK Raju, President of the Nilgiris Adivasi Welfare Association, put it, “education is the key. It leads to empowerment.”

Shanmugam who is a Kalketti Irula and Secretary of the same Association, standing in the heart of his village lands says, “This is Semmanarai, my village, it was always here and it will remain. This is our land.”

His colleague, O Balan, a Moolukurumba from Gudalur looks at me intensely, and says, almost choking, “we were great hunters once, an ancient people but now our lands have shrunk, most of the forest is gone…but we hold on to what we believe in, our customs, our community identity. They make us what we are.” Ramaswami, the Irula from Semmanarai gave me a small packet of sambrani incense resin that he had collected from the forests near his home. Tonight I shall light some charcoal and burn a little of the sambrani and fill our study with the wild and beautiful fragrance of Semmanarai, think of all my friends in the Nilgiris, their families and the people of their villages and those who live in the many villages and hamlets of the Blue Mountains, holding on to what they believe in.

When you and I encounter each other again, I’ll take you on a journey into their lives.

ROLE OF US GOVT. IN KATRINA DISASTER

Small-minded government

Last week's debacle in New Orleans highlights failings not just in the Bush administration, but in how the United States chooses to govern itself.

The term 'natural disaster' doesn't really do justice to the scenes that unfolded in the southern United States last week. For a start, the main cause of death in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will have been drowning as a result of the flooding in New Orleans that sprang from a widely anticipated failure of the city's flood defences. There is an overwhelming sense that the human calamity that befell the city was avoidable and represents a failure of the US government to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

Much of the blame for the painfully slow reaction to the hurricane has fallen on President George W. Bush, and for good reason. His belated and uninspiring personal response to the crisis has invited widespread criticism. The Department of Homeland Security, the newly created government department that fumbled the early rescue efforts, is viewed as Bush's creation and is ineptly staffed by the president's appointees.

Yet as criticism rains down on the administration, it should be pointed out that several contributory factors that led up to this fiasco preceded Bush's arrival in the White House. These include rampant poverty among African-Americans in New Orleans and other US cities; a systematic failure to build public infrastructure commensurate with America's vast wealth; the habitual creation of dysfunctional government agencies by congressional fiat; and the failure of scientists to successfully convey their concerns to policy-makers.

Previous US flood disasters — notably in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889 and in the New Orleans area in 1927 — prompted major political upheaval. It is not inconceivable that Katrina will force America's leaders to confront poverty and support public investment in infrastructure. But short of such far-reaching change, the disaster should lead to an immediate re-examination of how the federal government is organized, and how it responds to scientific advice.

The Department of Homeland Security was originally conceived in Congress as a response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. After initially opposing the idea, Bush co-opted it, removed its most potent aspect (the incorporation of the intelligence agencies) and implemented what was basically an amalgamation of existing government departments, including the once-admired Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

According to many observers, the reorganization has weakened FEMA and focused its attention on such scenarios as bioterror attacks. The public face presented by FEMA has been diminished, and the agency seems to have retreated from its traditional position at the forefront of disaster response. This weakening has left city and state governments in Mississippi and Louisiana bereft of leadership from the federal government at their moment of greatest need. The lesson is that sweeping reorganizations of government agencies in response to particular crises can have severe adverse consequences.

Knowledge of the risk of a storm-induced flood in New Orleans has been widespread in the scientific community for years, and researchers have sought to improve our understanding of it. Much of this work has taken into account stubborn facts such as the propensity of the poor, the elderly and the sick to ignore evacuation orders.

There seems to be a disconnect, however, between the process that identifies such risks and the people who make the decisions that might manage them. There are indications that many senior politicians — not just President Bush — were simply unaware that the New Orleans flood risk even existed.

River management, meanwhile, has developed into something of a scientific backwater in the United States, some of its practitioners complain. It has also been a subject of bitter political contention — generally between the supporters of the Army Corps of Engineers, which likes to build levees, and environmentalists, who favour marshland conservation and more 'natural' river flow. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this dialogue-of-the-deaf must end, and the assessment and management of natural risks should be genuinely embraced as a national priority.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial
Nature 437, 169 (8 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/437169a
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7056/full/437169a.html

DALITS IN INDIA..........

Burri nazar walle, theri ghar mein ladki paida ho (You
evil-eyed people, may girls be born in your homes).

SCRAWLED ON the back of a lorry in Gohana, those words
capture the soul of casteism in Haryana. Even while taking a
crack at Dalits whose houses they had reduced to rubble, their
oppressors couldn't fail to proclaim women to be a
curse. (A view many of them clearly act upon. You can see that
from Haryana's appalling sex ratio of 861. That was the
worst among major States in the 2001 census.)

About the time 50 Dalit houses were set ablaze in
Gohana, the country marked 50 years of a law giving effect to the
Constitution's abolition of untouchability. As if to rub in
the irony, 25 more Dalit homes have been torched in
the same week. This time in Akola, Maharashtra.

Of course the Constitution banned untouchability. It
was to give effect to Article 17 that Parliament passed the
Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955. This was later
made more stringent and renamed the Protection of Civil Rights
Act,1955. Still the crimes went on. So, along the way, we
brought in quite a few other vital laws. Like the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of
1989. Crimes under this Act invite harsher penalties than
similaroffences would under the Indian Penal Code. Half a
century into the process, we grapple with the very crimes the
first of these laws sought to end.

Was Gohana 2005 a one-off aberration? We could then
say: awful, but these things happen. And get on with life.
The catch of course is that they happen every so often.
And to the same people. Even a show of mandatory anguish —
"what an atrocity" — doesn't begin to meet the problem. Not
when the crime is systemic, societal, and structured. Not when
a state disables its own citizens.

The countless reports on the subject over the years do
not show discrimination against Dalits to be dying away.
The many volumes of the National Commission for the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes make grisly reading. Crimes
against Dalits and Adivasis have risen by the decade. By as
much as 25 to 28 per cent in some periods. Yet the number of such
cases ending in conviction of the criminals is dismal. Less
than one per cent in some courts.

The events in Gohana and Akola are just a part of an
ongoing crime against humanity. For that's what caste-based
discrimination is. (But I'm still sure you'll see
editorials that tell us these things are wrong because `they send
bad signals to investors.')

In Gohana, the dominant castes, the police, the state,
all did their bit in bringing terror and ruin to the Dalit
basti. (The police say that after a Jat died in a clash with some
Dalits, the Jats `retaliated.') Fearing an attack, over 1,000
Dalits fled the basti. The police steered clear of the
village while a mob of some 1,500 people burned around 50 Dalit
houses to the ground. A thousand people had fled knowing an
attack was coming. Yet the police claim they were clueless about
it.

The Dalits here are Balmikis. That group is possibly
the worst off within the Scheduled Caste fold. More so in terms
of the humiliation it bears. In caste society's eyes, the
Balmikis embody the worst forms of "impurity." They are `manual
scavengers.' They handle and dispose of "night soil."(That's
polite society's term for human excreta.)

Gohana's Balmikis had tried to climb out of that
caste-imposed rut. They had educated their children. Got jobs
outside their traditional role. Some even landed low-level
government posts. And over years the Balmikis fought off the efforts of
the Jatsto extract begar — or forced labour — from them.
Their relative improvement was itself a major provocation.
This is consistent with attacks on Dalits in other parts of
thecountry too. Doing better is a crime.

The mob in Gohana did not kill any Dalits. Partly
because they had already fled. The focus, though, was on looting
and on destruction of property. Dalits owning decent houses?
With fridges and television sets? They had to be shown
their place.Houses having gas connections were destroyed using the
absent owner's LPG cylinders. The relatively good houses of
the Dalits were an eyesore to their enemies.

Gohana's Balmikis had, against daunting odds, emerged
from the depths of deprivation. They had created these houses
and assets over decades. With a kind of effort that much
of society might never understand. In these, they
invested not just their money but their emotions, passion, dreams,
and the future of their children. The death of those dreams,
the destruction of those assets, was achieved in hours.
Petrol cans and police connivance were all it took.

The State now offers each home Rs. 1 lakh as
compensation. A fraction of its losses. Forget tending to the trauma.
Note the manner in which the Dalits were `punished.' In true
feudal tradition, an individual offence became a collective
crime. A Dalit is alleged to have killed someone. All Dalits in
his basti must pay the price. The due course of law gets
dumped.The caste panchayat reigns higher than the courts.

It was in the same State a few years ago that police
battered little Usha, also a Balmiki, in Jind. The girl, not
yet in her teens, was helping her mother clean a local school.
The school headmistress accused her of stealing a gold chain. Not
content with thrashing the frail child herself, she called in
the Haryana police. Meanwhile, the chain was found. The
headmistress had merely mislaid it. The family got the
girl back, unconscious, badly bruised and with teeth
broken.

We could, of course, say "that's Haryana." And there
would even be an element of truth in it. Except that the
same prejudices work in many ways across most of the
country. Chunni Lal Jatav, a survivor of the Kumher massacre in
Rajasthan, once put it famously. "All the judges of
the Supreme Court do not have the power of a single police
constable. That constable makes or breaks us. The
judges can't re-write the laws and have to listen to learned
lawyers of both sides. A constable here simply makes his own
laws. He can do almost anything." With state and society winking at
him, he pretty much can.

And those committing crimes against Dalits know they
have a great chance of getting away with it. State
Governments have dropped countless cases filed against upper caste
offenders under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
(Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989. Kalyan Singh's BJP Government
in Uttar Pradesh dropped such cases in thousands. A move
quickly emulated by the Shiv Sena regime in Maharashtra. Later
governments did not reinstate these cases.

In Tamil Nadu, Dalits have been forced out of elected
office even in reserved panchayats. In Melavalavu, the Dalit
panchayat president's head was severed and thrown into
a well. Dalits in Dravidian Land, an excellent book by
Frontline's S. Viswanathan, paints a powerful picture of Dalit life
in that State.

Oddly, whether it's Gohana, or Jhajar before it, discussion on
these issues seldom links up to those other, ongoing
debates. For instance, that on reservation. No link is seen
between any of this and the debates on social justice. On present
SC / ST quotas. Or on the call for quotas in the private
sector. Gohana actually has people who gained, if modestly,
from reservation.

Against huge odds, Gohana's Balmikis snapped their
chains. They educated their children. This is not easy. In
schools, their boys and girls face the taunts of `upper' caste
peers. (Across the country, large numbers of Dalit pupils
drop out of school to escape such humiliation.) First, society
places them under inhuman handicaps. Then we demand a "level
playing field" against them in jobs and education.

The children of manual scavengers and other poor
people return each evening to homes without electricity. And so
cannot study in the way other kids can. They go back to homes
without good books. They cannot afford "tuitions." They have no
"connections" to land them jobs or seats. In the face
of these odds, their achievements are admirable. A true level
playing field could actually tilt the balance in their favour.
For it would start by ending their handicaps. But look at the
fury stoked by the mere idea of private colleges setting
asideseats for such people. (Never mind that the Supreme
Court judgement allows such colleges to create quotas for
rich NRIs.)

Yet, Gohana's Dalits have achieved something more.
Dalits in Haryana are now stepping into the public space in a
way not seen too often. And Dalit women appear to be in the
forefront of the protests. There is a lot of pressure on the
government to act. The Congress' own Dalit MLAs are in the hot
seat. All this is good. Yet there is a much larger house on
fire. If only we could see it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
P.Sainath

this article appeared in THE HINDU,Sept. 6, 2005
http://hinduonnet.com

THE TWO AMERICAS

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered
the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds.
More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher
ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane
destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret?
According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor
at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in
Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in
the community to begin with. People know ahead of time
where they are to go."

"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said
Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction
to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the
Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three
days to make a TV appearance and five days before
visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on
Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the
president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual
to the point of carelessness - suggested that he
understood the depth of the current crisis."

"Merely sticking people in a stadium is
unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have
medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have
family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the
neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs
insulin."

They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV
sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't
reluctant to leave because people might steal their
stuff," Valdes observed.

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations
International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited
Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR
director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could
easily be applied to other countries with similar
economic conditions and even in countries with greater
resources that do not manage to protect their
population as well as Cuba does."

Our federal and local governments had more than
ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in
intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New
Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush
set about to prevent states from controlling global
warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of
Engineers' budget for levee construction in New
Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction.

Bush sent nearly half our National Guard troops
and high-water Humvees to fight in an unnecessary war
in Iraq. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief
for Jefferson Paris in New Orleans, noted a year ago,
"It appears that the money has been moved in the
president's budget to handle homeland security and the
war in Iraq."

An Editor and Publisher article Wednesday said the
Army Corps of Engineers "never tried to hide the fact
that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as
well as homeland security - coming at the same time as
federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain,"
which caused a slowdown of work on flood control and
sinking levees.

"This storm was much greater than protection we
were authorized to provide," said Alfred C. Naomi, a
senior project manager in the New Orleans district of
the corps.

Unlike in Cuba, where homeland security means
keeping the country secure from deadly natural
disasters as well as foreign invasions, Bush has
failed to keep our people safe. "On a fundamental
level," Paul Krugman wrote in yesterday's New York
Times, "our current leaders just aren't serious about
some of the essential functions of government. They
like waging war, but they don't like providing
security, rescuing those in need or spending on
prevention measures. And they never, ever ask for
shared sacrifice."

During the 2004 election campaign, vice
presidential candidate John Edwards spoke of "the two
Americas." It seems unfathomable how people can shoot
at rescue workers. Yet, after the beating of Rodney
King aired on televisions across the country, poor,
desperate, hungry people in Watts took over their
neighborhoods, burning and looting. Their anger, which
had seethed below the surface for so long, erupted.
That's what's happening now in New Orleans. And we,
mostly white, people of privilege, rarely catch a
glimpse of this other America.

"I think a lot of it has to do with race and
class," said Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "The people
affected were largely poor people. Poor, black
people."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reached a breaking
point Thursday night. "You mean to tell me that a
place where you probably have thousands of people that
have died and thousands more that are dying every day,
that we can't figure out a way to authorize the
resources we need? Come on, man!"

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had
boasted earlier in the day that FEMA and other federal
agencies have done a "magnificent job" under the
circumstances.

But, said, Nagin, "They're feeding the people a
line of bull, and they are spinning and people are
dying. Get off your asses and let's do something!"

When asked about the looting, the mayor said that
except for a few "knuckleheads," it is the result of
desperate people trying to find food and water to
survive.

Nagin blamed the outbreak of violence and crime on
drug addicts who have been cut off from their drug
supplies, wandering the city, "looking to take the
edge off their jones."

When Hurricane Ivan hit Cuba, no curfew was
imposed; yet, no looting or violence took place.
Everyone was in the same boat.

Fidel Castro, who has compared his government's
preparations for Hurricane Ivan to the island's
long-standing preparations for an invasion by the
United States, said, "We've been preparing for this
for 45 years."

On Thursday, Cuba's National Assembly sent a
message of solidarity to the victims of Hurricane
Katrina. It says the Cuban people have followed
closely the news of the hurricane damage in Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama, and the news has caused pain
and sadness. The message notes that the hardest hit
are African-Americans, Latino workers, and the poor,
who still wait to be rescued and taken to secure
places, and who have suffered the most fatalities and
homelessness. The message concludes by saying that the
entire world must feel this tragedy as its own.

Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h
o u t, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of
Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers
Guild, and the US representative to the executive
committee of the American Association of Jurists.

----------------------------------------------------------
By Marjorie Cohn

t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 03 September 2005

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090305Y.shtml

NEW ORLEANS and HURRICANE KATRINA

The Politics of Displacement
Will the "New" New Orleans be Black?

By GLEN FORD

One of the premiere Black cities in the nation faces catastrophe. There
is no doubt in my mind that New Orleans will one day rise again from its
below sea level foundations. The question is, will the new New Orleans
remain the two-thirds Black city it was before the levees crumbled?

Some would say it is unseemly to speak of politics and race in the
presence of a massive calamity that has destroyed the lives and
prospects of so many people from all backgrounds. But I beg to differ.
As we have witnessed, over and over again, the rich and powerful are
very quick to reward themselves as soon as disaster presents the opportunity.

Remember that within days of 9/11, the Bush regime executed a
multi-billion dollar bailout for the airline industry. By the time you
hear this commentary, they may have already used the New Orleans
disaster to bail out the insurance industry one of the richest businesses on the
planet. But what of the people of New Orleans, 67 percent of whom are
Black?

New Orleans is a poor city. Twenty-eight percent of the population
lives below the poverty line. Well over half are renters, and the median
value of homes occupied by owners is only $87,000.

From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city's
housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may
get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home
owners will get very little even if they are insured. The renting
majority may get nothing.

If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the apocalyptic dimensions
towards which it appears to be headed, there will be massive
displacement of the Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the
fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to
accommodate them back to the jurisdiction.

And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to
get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this
model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding
the city and its infrastructure.

In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be
alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding
effort. But this is George Bush's federal government. Does anyone believe that
the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood,
mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans
is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor.

What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black
New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we
must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision,
and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again.

---------------------
Glen Ford is Co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Black Commentator,
where this editorial originally appeared.