Month: February 2009

When Brother Fights Brother

By Ajit Sahi

YOU WOULD bet on any screenshot of Singaram village to clinch a picture postcard contest. There is a surfeit of National Geographic moments here. As the sun warms up behind the thick forested hills, sinewy village acrobats glide up the toddy trees to tap their day’s white poison; someone hurries to the monthly cockfight 12km south, a throaty fat bird with an angry frown pinched tight in his underarms; the tireless granny shifts cots about and noisily sweeps her mud hut’s porch. Teenagers here guess their ages by when they broke their moustache or began menstruating. Older, they forget even that. Asked for a past event’s time, people wave at the sky to show where the sun had been that moment. As night falls, a hushed darkness cloaks the village, which has never known electricity. Embers of firewood glowing in faraway huts round off the idyllic picture. For backpacking trekkers ever on the lookout for an off-the-beaten track, this should be it.

It isn’t. Singaram’s tragedy lies in the ruins of its school that no one has entered in years, in the abject terror of forest officials who turned their backs on its development a decade ago, in the roads destroyed by the raging Maoist insurgents, the Naxals, to stop the “others” from coming in ever. It seems utterly unbelievable on a visit, but the singular truth about Singaram and hundreds of such villages across thousands of square kilometres in south Chhattisgarh is the overwhelming and brutal violence that rules them, matching some of the worst militia-ravaged parts of the world such as in Colombia, Sudan and Iraq.

If anything, this is CNN country twentyfour seven, not that India’s news organisations are much interested in the rural violence here. Locals say heavily armed Naxal women and men boldly roam the region in battle fatigue and freely swoop on villages for nightly rests and daytime meals, but especially for their signature monthly meetings. They levy taxes on trades such as on the tendu plant leaves used for rolling bidis. They also kill “traitors” — anyone they think is a police informer or an ideological opponent, or the worst: a double agent — often by beating them for hours and slashing their throats in full view not just of hundreds of villagers but even the dying woman’s or man’s spouse, children and parents.

THE NAXALS control 40 percent of Dantewada, basically its remote areas,” says Rahul Sharma, Superintendent of Police (SP) of this district in south Chhattisgarh. “The government controls a similar size. Both are fighting on the rest 20 percent.” Human rights activist Himanshu Kumar, who runs the NGO Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in Dantewada’s villages, laughs at Sharma’s figures. “The Naxals control everything except the few towns in this region,” says Kumar, whose organisation helps those it believes are innocent victims of police brutalities or are falsely accused as Naxals. To be precise, says Kumar, the Naxals control three-quarters of the 1,350 villages in Dantewada and the adjacent Bijapur district, which was carved out of the larger Dantewada in August 2008.

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BDR Rebellion

“Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) a paramilitary force responsible for policing the borders of bangladesh and maintenance of internal security affairs. has mutinied and the rebellion is currently underway. Gunfire and casualties have occurred The BDR Hq in Peelkhana is located in the city centre of Dhaka adjacent to Dhanmandi and Azimpur areas.
“For Photos and live stream go to the Shahidul Alam’s blogspot. Mr. Alam is an internationally renowned photographer based in Dhaka.”

(The above comments and the following submission are by a reader.)

BDR Rebellion

By Shahidul Alam
Am at Zia International Airport heading for Amsterdam. My main attackers here are the numerous mosquitoes that liven up the long wait at immigration. Will hopefully post more pictures when I arrive in Amsterdam. Made a small detour on the way to the airport. The soldiers at the junction of road 8A and 13A in Dhanmondi weren’t there this morning. However truckloads of soldiers and what looked like Ak Aks were positioned in Satmasjid Road nearer the BDR gate. The junction of rd 13A and rd 15 (old road 27) had RAB on standby. Further along rd 16 were more truckloads of army personnel (no heavy artillery this time). Things looked quiet. No further violence appears to have taken place. Surviving hostages are said to be OK. Their mobile phones have been taken away. Probably no further updates from me after this (I will try and post the pictures I took this morning if I can), until I return to Dhaka on 8th March.
With LOTS of help from Michel, am slowly migrating this blog to shahidulnews.com Most of the material is already up there. Wasn’t familiar enough with the new system to quickly blog last night, but it is a much more easily navigable site. See you at http://www.shahidulnews.com
Shahidul
http://shahidul.wordpress.com/breaking-news

Second International Faiz Peace Festival

A note from Barrister Hamid Bashani Khan

The second International Faiz Ahmed Faiz Peace Festival will take place in Toronto [Canada] on April 26, 2009.Writers, poets and activists from the Greater Toronto Area and from around the world will gather to oppose the culture of war and violence and to promote in their stead, peace, democracy, and social justice. The gathering will include participants attending the concurrent First International Festival of Poetry of Resistance, Toronto, and the South Asian Peoples Unity Conference, Toronto. The Festival is being sponsored by the South Asian Peoples Forum.

The Festival programme includes poetry and paper readings, presentations, dance, and music. International and local personages expected to attend include Muneeza Hashmi, daughter of Faiz Ahmed Faiz from Pakistan, Nancy Morejon, Poet Laureate of Cuba, Allison Hedge Coke, the Reynolds Chair at the University of Nebraska, USA, Gary Geddes, Lieutenant-Governor Award winner in B.C., Canada, Marilyn Lerch, President of the New Brunswick Writers’ Federation, Canada, Jorge Etcheverry, Ambassador in Canada of Poetas del Mundo. Published poets from France, Brazil, and other countries will also attend. The South Asian writers and activists expected to attend include Hamid Akhtar, Muno Bhai, and Abid Hussain Minto from Pakistan and Soma Marik from India. Rekha Suria from India will be the lead singer along with local Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian artistes. Community and youth groups will participate through audio visual presentations and cultural performances.

The Festival will take place at the Port Credit Secondary School Auditorium, in Mississauga, from 6 pm. Around 600 people are expected to attend.

Twenty years on: internalising the fatwa

When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, it had been expected to set the world alight, though not quite in the way that it did. Salman Rushdie was then perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. His reputation had been established by Midnight’s Children, his sprawling, humorous mock-epic of post-independence India, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, and went on to win the Booker of Bookers, as the greatest of all Booker Prize winners.

Two years after Midnight’s Children came Shame, which retold the history of Pakistan as a satirical fairytale. And then came The Satanic Verses. Almost five years in the making, and supported by a then almost unheard of $850,000 advance from Penguin, there was something mythical about the novel even before it had been published. But the real myths about it have grown up since its publication.

Within a month The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie’s native India. By the end of the year, protesters had burnt a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, England. And then on 14 February 1989 came the event that transformed the affair – the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. The fatwa transformed the Rushdie affair from a dispute largely confined to Britain and the subcontinent into a global conflict with historic repercussions, from a quarrel about blasphemy and free speech into a matter of terror and geopolitics.

For many, the controversy seemed to come out of the blue. For many, too, especially in the West, the image of the burning book and the fatwa seemed to be portents of a new kind of conflict and a new kind of world. From the Notting Hill riots of the 1950s to the Grunwick dispute in 1977 to the inner-city disturbances of the 1980s, blacks and Asians had often been involved in bitter conflicts with British authorities. But these were also, in the main, political conflicts, or issues of law and order. Confrontations over unionisation or discrimination or police harassment were of a kind that was familiar even prior to mass immigration.
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6-year-old boy has an IQ that’s off the charts

By Joe Danneman –

LOVELAND, OH (FOX19) – Like a lot of kids, Pranav Veera is good at video games. But unlike a lot of kids, he can name all the United States presidents and their birthdays.

He also knows the planets and how long it takes for them to go around the sun.
He knows the states in alphabetical order, and the alphabet – backwards. Name the date, and he’ll name the day.

Pranav is in kindergarten at McCormick Elementary. His class is learning the ABC’s while he’s learning to multiply.
His IQ is 176, which is one in a million intelligence. He can’t explain how he does it. He just does it.
“Our approach is let’s treat him like a normal child,” said Pranav’s father, Prasad Veera. “Yet leverage the skills and talents that he’s got.”
His parents noticed Pranav’s special talents when he turned four years old.
“I think the dates, particularly, are impressive,” said Prasad. “He can remember the dates and recall them in just a fraction of a second.”
Pranav uses posters, toys and books to exercise his gifted mind, a mind with a photographic memory.
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