A portrait of Vinayak Savarkar on the 133rd anniversary of his birth, on display at the Central Hall of Parliament House, New Delhi. 28 May 2016.IMAGE/Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times/Getty
To understand Narendra Modi’s India, it is instructive to grasp the
ideas of the Hindu Right’s greatest ideologue, the world of British
colonial India in which they emerged, and the historical feebleness of
the present regime.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a polymath who read law in London,
enjoyed Shakespeare, admired the Bible, wrote important historical
works, and became an accomplished poet and playwright. His lifelong
obsession was politics.
Savarkar took up political activity in his teens and became a
cherished anti-British revolutionary. While serving a long prison
sentence for inciting violence against the British, he transformed into a
Hindu supremacist bent on dominating Indian Muslims. His pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva
(1923), written secretively in jail, remains the most influential work
of Hindu nationalism. In this and subsequent works, he called for
Hindus, hopelessly divided by caste, to come together as one homogeneous
community and reclaim their ancient homeland from those he considered
outsiders, primarily the Muslims. Savarkar advocated violence against
Muslims as the principal means to bind antagonistic lower and upper
castes, writing:
Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.
Savarkar has proven prescient if not prescriptive. Over the past four
decades, the Hindu Right’s violence against Muslims has indeed helped
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to cement a degree of Hindu
political unity long considered unattainable.
Some of Savarkar’s views on Hindus and their religion embarrass the Right. An agnostic, Savarkar declared that Hindutva – his
construction of Hindu nationalism – was bigger than Hinduism, the
actual religion of the Hindus. Later in life, he railed against Hindus
and urged them to become more like Muslims (or his perception of them).
Writing about Muslims in the medieval period allegedly raping and
converting Hindu women any chance they got, Savarkar characterised it as
‘an effective method of increasing the Muslim population’ unlike the
‘suicidal Hindu idea of chivalry’ of treating the enemy’s women with
respect. He wrote disparagingly about cow worship and other Hindu
practices, and refused to discharge the funeral rites for his devout
Hindu wife. Although Savarkar’s Hindutva helped inspire the
launch of the BJP’s parent organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), a century ago, he was disdainful of its decision to avoid direct
political participation. ‘The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that
he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing
anything,’ he reportedly said.
Until Modi became prime minister in 2014, Savarkar was known to few
Indians, and those few knew him as a minor freedom-fighter. Since then,
the BJP-RSS have placed Savarkar at the centre of their efforts to
rewrite Indian history from a Hindu supremacist perspective. Today’s BJP
positions Savarkar as a nationalist icon on a par with Jawaharlal Nehru
and Mahatma Gandhi, if not greater. If Savarkar’s ‘repeated warnings
against the Congress’s appeasement politics’ had been heeded, India
could have avoided Partition, the separation of Pakistan from India,
writes Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief.
Madeleine Albright, Seretary of State in Clinton administration
Twenty-five years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack
on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999,
it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve
differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different
scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials
wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they
planned to use as a pretext for war.
The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France.
Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of
U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, European Union envoy
Wolfgang Petritsch, and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky. All decisions
were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the
Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and
routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.
Ibrahim Rugova, an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated
nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian
secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani, a
fellow member of Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined
Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the
hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered
Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or
opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA
spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization’s vision of a
future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure: “The independence of
Kosovo is the only solution…We cannot live together. That is excluded.” [1]
Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with
Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt
precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role.
Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komneni? accompanied the Yugoslav
delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls, “With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it
was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader
Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast.” [2]
There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were
the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the
KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years
later.
The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position
that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement arrived at
should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo’s
major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari,
one of the ethnic Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was
president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the
Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia’s government in
Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the
composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went
against the U.S. propaganda narrative. Throughout the talks, Albright
displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation’s Albanian, Roma,
Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members. [3]
U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as “the
Serbs,” even though they constituted a minority of the members. The
Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic
binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence
of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while
some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in
multiethnic Yugoslavia.
After a long wait, Mughal-e-Azam, the epic film (mired in so many problems), was finally released in 1960 in Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir Cinema hall. At its premier, some Pakistanis, including Nazir and Swaranlata (famous actor couple), were also invited. The most expensive movie of its time – it cost over a crore rupees – had Madhubala, Prithviraj Kapoor, and Dilip Kumar in the lead roles. The especially-built set of Shish Mahal had many visitors, including poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and politician Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
One other film that created similar expectations was Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeeza, released in the early 1970s, with Meena Kumari, Ashok Kumar, and Raj Kumar. That movie also took many years to complete and with a huge budget. It was an epic film, too. Both were excellent movies with memorable songs and music.
Another epic, i.e., the year’s most awaited and the most expensive South Asian movie of all time – made at an exorbitant price of 60 crore rupees or 12 million dollars – with Madhuri Dixit, Aishwarya Rai, and Shahrukh Khan was released on July 12, 2002.
The film is based on Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s (1876-1938) famous Bengali novel Devdas: a tragic love story that revolves around the younger of the two sons of an aristocratic family. Devdas’ carefree and loving nature doesn’t fit well with his class conscious and authoritarian father, and so he is sent off to London (in the novel it is Calcutta, though it was not unusual for the wealthy to go to London then) to study.
He returns after a decade and again starts seeing his childhood girlfriend Paro. Both have individual pride, however, both love each other too. On a family level, there is a big class difference; so the marriage proposal from her family is rejected. Paro risks her honor to pursue her goal, but a couple of wrong moves on part of Devdas sealed their fate. She is married off to a wealthy but older landlord. Thus begins a thirst never to be quenched – always to be intensified. He ends up an alcoholic and befriends a courtesan, Chandramukhi, whose profession he is never comfortable with, but he sympathizes with her plight. She makes life somewhat bearable. Nevertheless, his heart yearns for Paro.
Many versions of the story have appeared on celluloid: one during the Silent Era in 1928; then by Promatesh Chandra Barua in 1936 with Kundan Lal Saigal in the lead; Bimal Roy’s in 1955 had Suchitra Sen, Vyajantimala, and Dilip Kumar; and the Pakistani (1964) version had Shamim Ara, Nayyar Sultana, and Habib. About seven other depictions exist in regional languages, including the 1935 Bengali version by P. C. Barua (also in lead role), and the current Bengali one, by Shakti Samanta, (“Amar Prem” fame).
It has been long since the last Hindi/Urdu version was made. Director Sanjay Lila Bhansali in one of his interviews said this was his interpretation for the present generation; to an extent one has to agree with him keeping in mind the changed times.
However, too loose an interpretation runs the risk of becoming a misinterpretation. After seeing “Devdas,” it is difficult to brush off that impression. There are scenes, songs, and situations he could have avoided:
The first scene is too long and superficial (similar to Hum Aap ke Hain Koun and Bhansali’s own Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam). Devdas’ mother’s anxiety could have been conveyed in much reduced time.
Kiran Kher’s (Sardari Begum fame) dramatic dialogue and dance number is not only unnecessary, but is out of place. The novel had no such scene.
The heated encounter between Madhuri and Milind Gunaji at Aishwarya’s place is irrelevant to the movie. Maybe Bhansali wanted to show a strong female. However, there was no need, because the scene where Paro goes to meet Devdas at 2:00 AM at night conveys that message. (“Devdas” was written in early 1900s. Much more radical, and more feminist, was Bengal resident Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s, “Sultana’s Dream” written in 1905 that shows women as rulers and men as domestic workers.)
The catchy “Dola re, dola re…” could have been shown as Devdas’ fantasy when he was in one of his drunken state rather than a real meeting and a dance between Paro and Chandramukhi. The novel mentions that images of both women came alternately and sometime together in his mind. He fantasized that both have become close friends.
Another unnecessary song is “Chhalak chhalak.”
Was this much expense necessary?
Even if the film were about rajas and maharajas or nizams and nawabs, so much expense cannot be reasonably justified. The class clash is only in the beginning, otherwise the movie is basically about Devdas’ longing for Paro. Even the lower class Paro’s haveli is huge. Only in one scene – may be the director realized it – Paro’s father discusses their financial condition, and afterward when Paro’s mother goes to bed, it breaks. Paro’s new haveli is the biggest one – probably to make her run longer in the end. However, in the novel Paro comes to know about her beloved’s demise in the evening – hours after his corpse was taken away by chandals or men of low-caste to the samshan or burning ground. The fire didn’t burn too long and so they left. His “half- burnt body” became food for the vultures, and then for dogs and jackals. (V. S. Naravane’s English translation.) (Yes, realistic literature and art have their own ways to interpret unlike the “Bollywood” way – or for that matter Hollywood or “Lollywood,” i.e., Lahore, Pakistan.)
The movie should have been more Devdas oriented – Bhansali should have tried to bring out the antagonist’s psyche more forcefully. It is two childhood scenes, his whipping by his father, and Paro’s yelling and running after him that are repeated a few times. Bhansali could have shown:
His lack of interest in studies; his running away from school; his fighting with his classmates; his occasional violence with Paro; her bringing of food for him.
(The same flash back technique could have been used for the above scenes too.)
After saying all these things, I would say that anybody who watches films should see this movie at least once. One nice thing is to introduce a generation to good South Asian music. The sets are spectacular, photography is brilliant, camera work is done in such a manner that things look much bigger and grander, dialogues are good but such as “I don’t like anyone touching you” reminds of Bombay films’ anti-heroes, or “This kind of advise even a pimp won’t offer to his daughter” is a bit too crass. In acting, Shahrukh Khan is very good. On the commercial Hindi/Urdu cinema scene in South Asia, after Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan, it is Shahrukh Khan who can be truly regarded as both an actor and a star.
Aishwarya is good, still in few scenes the director could have extracted more from her. Madhuri is nice. Jackie Shroff as Chuni Babu is not constant. In at least one scene his voice sounds like that of Motilal (Bimal Roy’s Chuni Babu), but a little later he is back to his own voice. Additionally, in some scenes he over-acts.
One cannot dismiss “Devdas” as Bhansali’s expensive fantasy or belittle his talents to make a grand epic film. He can be considered an heir – as far as grandeur is concerned – to K. Asif and Kamal Amrohi. (When young, he was asked by his father to go and see “Mughal-e-Azam.”) (Those who have seen “Pakeeza” would be reminded of “Inhi logon ne le liya dupatta mera,” when Madhuri is shown dancing with other nautch girls dancing in background.) British film director David Lean was once asked to give his opinion about Mughal-e-Azam’s epic-ness: he was not very kind. If he were alive today, one can’t say whether he would have openly appreciated the technical excellence of “Devdas,” but probably he would have grudgingly thought about it.
The film’s grand that cannot be denied; but may not be regarded as great. Paro’s beauty is marred when she got hit. One wishes the same were true for the movie too – in a sense that so many avoidable things did not mar it.
A song’s couplet in the movie says: The scar that you gave me has enhanced my facial beauty
But with too many scars, it just doesn’t work.
(Devdas was reviewed in 2002.)
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Devdas: a critique
Sammi Deen Baloch and other women protesting the abductions of their loved ones by the state. Baloch’s father disappeared 15 years back when she was just 10.Sammi Deen Baloch
For some people, activism is optional. For Sammi Deen Baloch, it
isn’t. Her father was abducted when she was 10 years old, and since
then, she’s marched from Quetta to Islamabad, protested in frigid
weather, repeatedly challenged the state and put her safety secondary to
her cause countless times, all so she can close a chapter in her life
she didn’t choose to write.
Anyone who has shared her fate knows Sammi Deen Baloch as a household name —she’s been a beacon of hope in their darkest hour.
She recently took centre stage when the plight of enforced
disappearances finally became a part of the national discourse as
hundreds of Baloch women marched to Islamabad to protest the extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances in Pakistan.
It is difficult to believe that at just 25 years of age, Sammi has
become a beacon of raising one’s voice against the unimaginable tragedy
of losing loved ones to enforced disappearances, caught up in an endless
cycle of protesting the violence against her people and being
threatened into oblivion.
Clearly, no amount of threats has silenced her; if anything, she has emerged stronger, louder, and more fierce.
Well-thought-out words and fiery interviews may never do justice to describing who she is. One needs to see her in her element as an activist, a true paladin, to understand her tragic brilliance. Simply put, when Balochistan has plunged into darkness and despair, Sammi has been the light.
If circumstances hadn’t brought her to this junction, Sammi might
have been an ordinary girl who never left her village. Her activism was
born from the death of any sense of normalcy her family had, which, she
gradually learned, was the tragic reality of hundreds of Baloch
families.
“That’s when I knew I had to play this role, not just for myself but for them as well,” she told me.
For years now, she’s counselled these families on how to protest in
the streets, which lawyers to contact and made them aware of the rights
they’ve been denied.
Her selflessness comes from recalling the cluelessness and isolation
of navigating activism at the tender age of 11; bus rides alone from
Karachi to Quetta, where her court cases to locate her father were being
heard; harassment and awkward stares, people shunning her mother for
going against the grain.
As her fearlessness increased, so did the threats
to her safety and what she said were attempts at hacking her phone. And
this is in addition to the mental torture she’s had to endure for more
than half her life.
“The way I’ve suffered, I don’t want other families to go through the
same ordeal,” she said. “I want to show them how to resist.”
Enduring a living death
Sammi has always been vociferous in maintaining that women’s rights
are central in the conversation surrounding enforced disappearances, a
painstaking reality she knows all too well.
“If you want to make a woman endure a living death, kidnap someone
from her household. I have lived it firsthand. My smartness, my
creativity level, everything vanished when my father was kidnapped.”
Women bear the brunt of enforced disappearances when the men in their
household are abducted, losing their source of income and sense of
stability.
“They’ve taken away a husband from his wife, a son from the parents, a
father from his children. Father, son, brother — these aren’t just
words, there’s so much more tied to them. The memories, the
remembrances, the cravings, the needs, the love — it’s all tied
together. And it’s all taken away from us.”
She is particularly vocal about Baloch women’s lack of rights, which
they are often unaware of as a result of being deprived of an education
and basic resources.
Sammi has championed women’s rights for as long as she’s been vocal
about enforced disappearances, and she’s grateful for the support lent
by local women’s rights organisations.
It is the silence from their international counterparts she finds questionable.
“People talk about women’s rights all the time, do research studies,
bag awards for their work. And yet, we haven’t seen any international
organisations come to Balochistan and do research here,” Sammi said.
Balochistan has one of the highest maternal death rates, and the highest rate of children out of school.
Hundreds of Baloch women are forcibly displaced, their children
missing, Sammi laments, and yet international women’s rights
organisations have not brought these issues to attention.
“The people of Balochistan are also human, please think of them as human too.”
She doesn’t believe in championing one cause over the other; she only wants that they don’t turn a blind eye to the plight of Baloch women. If anything, she’s repeatedly invited them to Balochistan to get a better sense of ground realities.
Last summer, my kids and I spent a month in Greece,
where their grandfather lives. Time and again, I was struck by a public
attitude toward children I seldom encountered in America: unequivocal
support.
On Athenian buses, women older than myself frequently gave up their
seats for my 5- and 8-year-old daughters. On one trip, an older woman
hauled my younger child up next to her and tucked her hand underneath my
daughter’s elbow to prevent her from being thrown forward with every
sudden stop. She held on to her like this for the whole ride.
In
America, we socialize our children to see strangers not as helpers but
as threats. Worried parents scour Nextdoor for loiterers and miscreants;
neighbors routinely call the police when parents let their kids explore
outside. And when kids aren’t being treated as endangered, they’re
often viewed as a nuisance. How many articles have I read about whether
children should be allowed on airplanes, or at weddings, or in
restaurants?
Every country has its share of adults who pose a threat to children.
But the difference in how America treats its kids goes far beyond the
“it takes a village” attitude that prevails in countries like Greece.
Virtually every other industrialized nation provides more government aid
for their children than America does. Of the 38 countries that belong
to the leading Western trade alliance, the US ranks No. 32 in spending
on early childhood. In Sweden, which offers single parents a staggering
480 days of paid parental leave, preschool costs no more than 3% of a
family’s gross income. America, by contrast, has no mandated paid
parental leave. It has no universal childcare. Only one-third of
American families can afford childcare, which consumes 27% of their income on average. Parents are being forced to leave big cities because they can’t absorb the costs of childcare, while those in rural areas often can’t find care at all.ADVERTENTIELees meer
America’s rampant child neglect doesn’t stop with its lack of day
care. Infants are more likely to die in childbirth in America than in
any other rich nation, and US newborns are more likely to grow up in
poverty. Millions of children attend public schools that are literally falling apart.
Children who are neglected — a loose term inextricably tied to poverty —
are thrown into a foster-care system known for its propensity to harm children.
The shortage of foster families is so critical that many kids wind up
being temporarily housed in settings like casinos, office buildings, and
juvenile detention facilities. The US is the only member of the United
Nations that hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child, which includes the right to be free from violence and labor
exploitation. In Oregon, where I live, children as young as 9 are
allowed to do agricultural work, and many states are trying to loosen their already flimsy child-labor protections so teenagers can be forced to work longer hours. The leading cause of death for American children and teens is gun violence.
All of which raises the question: Why does America hate its children?
On the surface, America has always professed to love its children, and those who raise them. Women are told from birth that being a mother is “the most important job in the world,” that “children are our future.” “All I am I owe to my mother,” George Washington is said to have declared. And every May, when Mother’s Day rolls around, we are inundated with soft-focus advertisements celebrating the family as the core unit of American life.
But in practice, the rhetoric exalting motherhood has served not as a
means for supporting children but as a tool for keeping women at home —
while fending off demands for a broader and more supportive system of
child-rearing. Even as women have become vital participants in the
American workforce, the opposition to expanding childcare has remained
remarkably persistent. In 2021, state Rep. Charlie Shepherd of Idaho
made the connection explicit when he explained why he voted against
state funding for early childhood education. “I don’t think anybody does
a better job than mothers in the home,” Shepherd said. “And any bill
that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the
home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good
direction for us to be going.” (He apologized after an outcry, but
everyone heard him loud and clear.)
America has often invoked the Red Scare as an excuse for abandoning
its children. In 1971, the country was one signature away from having
universal childcare. A bill had passed the House and Senate that would have created federally funded childcare centers across the US.
But
a rogue’s gallery of Republicans persuaded President Richard Nixon to
veto the measure, citing the threat of communism to the American family
unit. Nixon wrote that he opposed committing “the vast moral authority
of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child
rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Kids needed to be
raised by their mothers — without any help from the state.
The one time America extended a form of universal childcare,
tellingly, was during World War II, when men were not around to perform
critical manufacturing jobs. The Lanham Act created a
patchwork system of childcare provided by churches, community centers,
and large employers. But as soon as the war ended and men returned to
the workforce, the program was shuttered, even as many women took to the
streets to call for its continuation.
The situation is worse for people of color; racism is baked into the
paradigm of family life in America. The earliest cohort of American
caregivers in white homes were enslaved Black women.
When President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, he
specifically exempted domestic workers, who were more likely to be women
of color, from receiving Social Security benefits and labor
protections. Women who took care of other people’s children were
stripped of the economic power they needed to take care of their own
kids, let alone pay someone else well to do it. As a consequence,
childcare is still one of the lowest-paid American professions, even
while the overall cost of providing this essential service has soared.
We end up with a broken system where the majority of American families
are unable to pay a caregiver, while many childcare workers can’t live on what they are paid. Nearly one-third of childcare workers have experienced food insecurity, and more than 100,000 have sought other forms of employment since the start of the pandemic, desperate for better pay.
For a brief moment, the pandemic threw America’s grim provisions for children into stark relief. Teachers, leery of returning to classrooms before the advent of vaccines, called out their schools for subjecting kids to deplorable conditions: inoperable or toxic water fountains, widespread mold, sweltering, unventilated spaces with windows rusted shut. Administrators and politicians, meanwhile, unironically pointed out that schools needed to be open because they were the only place where many children could be sure of a regular meal. In 2021, as childcare costs soared by more than 40%, Congress provided a massive cash infusion to states to stabilize childcare and supplied parents with both cash and an additional tax refund to support their kids. Seemingly overnight, child poverty dropped by 40%.
Budi Hernawan
said it ten years ago: “torture in Papua … has become a mode of
governance.” It hasn’t stopped. It’s got worse. It’s got worse precisely
because it’s a mode of governance accepted and blessed by the
international “community” whose neoliberal politics of extraction means
extermination of anything and anyone getting in its way.
It’s got worse just now because Israel’s genocide, ecocide,
starvation, and torture in Palestine isn’t only distracting attention
from these practices in smaller and more remote places but also showing
that it’s okay, it’s part of our system, you can do it with impunity
because it’s all part of a bigger plan, and even the US presidential
elections might have something to do with decisions being made to let
Israel get on with its murderous work. It’s okay because
91-times-indicted US presidential candidate Trump
is given his electoral stump and media loudspeakers to warn,
Hitler-style, that his enemies are “vermin”, that immigrants are
“poisoning the blood of our country,” and promising the largest ever deportation operation in U.S. history. Not that Europe
is much better. Of course it’s not. It’s part of the same system. Just
wearing different masks. One result is that, since 2014, some 29,000
people from empire-damaged parts of the world have died trying to
migrate to Europe, and rejected by Europe. Many “could have been
prevented by prompt and effective assistance to migrants in distress”.
And it’s okay to have former Suharto son-in-law, mass murderer, war
criminal Prabowo Subianto,
former head of US-trained Kopassus “Special Forces” (special at
torturing and kidnapping) as the new president of Indonesia. He’s our
ally against China.
But what about torture itself? What about the human beings who are
routinely called “moneys”, “dogs”, “pigs”, “rats” and “stone-age idiots”
and thus harmed and mutilated by their fellow human beings? What about
the place where it happens? Who allows it to happen? West Papua was
handed to Indonesia (and international corporations) by the United Nations
in a trumped-up referendum in 1969, but the brutality actually began in
1963 after Indonesia was given control of West Papua in the (Cold War)
New York Agreement concocted by the United States, Holland, and
Indonesia. What happened next? To start with, more than 500,000 people have been murdered. Institutionalised torture was part of that.
The latest example to come out of West Papua is from a highlands
place called Yahukimo (named for the Yali, Hubla, Kimyal, and Momuna
tribes in the area) with a population of about 362,000 (but more than
half the population of Melanesian West Papua consists of Indonesian
transmigrants—another slow but effective mechanism of genocide). Look at
the videos,
if you can stomach them. Look anyway, even if it makes you want to
throw up, because this affects everyone who has something called
humanity.
Here we see young Indonesians having fun as they joke about taking
turns to thrash, stab, slash, and kick the “animal flesh” of a West
Papuan man they have made to stand in a drum of freezing water. Seeing
the suffering of the shivering, wounded man is unbearable. Seeing young
men amused about what they’re doing to him is also unbearable. What
world raised them to do this with their young lives? This is nothing new
in Yahukimo. Last month two teenage boys were arrested and tortured by
grinning Indonesian soldiers, who took trophy photos of their victims.
Another five teenage boys were murdered by Indonesian soldiers in September 2023. Two women were raped and murdered last October. Some 40% of woman torture victims are raped. Illegal gold mining is killing people with mercury, precious metals, and in the name of security for the miners. Dozens of people have died in a recent famine in Yahukimo. That didn’t make world headlines either. Famine also happened in 2006, 2009, also unheadlined. It’s normal there. But who knows or cares about Yahukimo?
Unlike torture perpetrated in the infamous black sites, it isn’t
secret in West Papua. Well, it isn’t and is, depending on the audience.
On the one hand, it’s a show for Indonesian and Papuan audiences within
West Papua and, on the other hand, in the international domain, it’s
under wraps because Indonesia effectively seals the borders, and the
international powers-that-be are happy with it for their own
geopolitical reasons. It’s an international secret because Indonesia is
“our” ally against China, not to mention easy legally untrammelled
plunder of its natural resources.
Budi Hernawan describes ten aspects of torture in West Papua.
1) Most victims are village people, subsistence farmers, either accused of supporting the independence movement or “collateral” victims. The collateral crime doesn’t matter because, since West Papuans are described as animals and primitive, they’re innately members or sympathisers of “armed criminal groups” and, in their occupied land non-citizens, and therefore a threat by their very existence. So, they can all only be disciplined by the harshest of measures. Extreme Indonesian nationalist views dating back to Sukarno’s “Sabang to Merauke” (an Indonesia encompassing all the former Dutch East Indies) slogan, is an expression of sovereignty and a licence to kill the “animals” that get in the way of Indonesian settler colonial projects. Torture proves their subhuman nature.
Rest of World analyzed 3,000 AI images to see how image generators visualize different countries and cultures.
In July, BuzzFeed posted a list of 195 images of Barbie dolls produced using Midjourney, the popular artificial intelligence image generator. Each doll was supposed to represent a different country: Afghanistan Barbie, Albania Barbie, Algeria Barbie, and so on. The depictions were clearly flawed: Several of the Asian Barbies were light-skinned; Thailand Barbie, Singapore Barbie, and the Philippines Barbie all had blonde hair. Lebanon Barbie posed standing on rubble; Germany Barbie wore military-style clothing. South Sudan Barbie carried a gun.
The article — to which BuzzFeed added a disclaimer before taking it
down entirely — offered an unintentionally striking example of the
biases and stereotypes that proliferate in images produced by the recent
wave of generative AI text-to-image systems, such as Midjourney,
Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion.
Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images,
Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles
featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most
professional roles were male-dominated.
A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI
systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when
it comes to national identities, too.
Using Midjourney, we chose five prompts, based on the generic
concepts of “a person,” “a woman,” “a house,” “a street,” and “a plate
of food.” We then adapted them for different countries: China, India,
Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. We also included the U.S. in the survey
for comparison, given Midjourney (like most of the biggest generative AI
companies) is based in the country.
For each prompt and country combination (e.g., “an Indian person,” “a house in Mexico,” “a plate of Nigerian food”), we generated 100 images, resulting in a data set of 3,000 images.
“Essentially what this is doing is flattening descriptions of, say,
‘an Indian person’ or ‘a Nigerian house’ into particular stereotypes
which could be viewed in a negative light,” Amba Kak, executive director
of the AI Now Institute, a U.S.-based policy research organization,
told Rest of World. Even stereotypes that are not inherently
negative, she said, are still stereotypes: They reflect a particular
value judgment, and a winnowing of diversity. Midjourney did not respond
to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story.
“It definitely doesn’t represent the complexity and the heterogeneity, the diversity of these cultures,” Sasha Luccioni, a researcher in ethical and sustainable AI at Hugging Face, told Rest of World.
The accessibility and scale of AI tools mean they could have an
outsized impact on how almost any community is represented. According to
Valeria Piaggio, global head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at
marketing consultancy Kantar, the marketing and advertising industries
have in recent years made strides in how they represent different
groups, though there is still much progress to be made. For instance,
they now show greater diversity in terms of race and gender, and better
represent people with disabilities, Piaggio told Rest of World. Used carelessly, generative AI could represent a step backwards.
“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”
IMF chief Christine Lagarde protested her innocence through tears on Friday IMAGE/Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty/Independent
Christine Lagarde is one of the strongest proponents of gender equality amongst the global elite. President of the European Central Bank, she is also a former International Monetary Fund Managing Director and French finance minister. The former lawyer was the first woman to chair global law firm Baker McKenzie, the first woman to serve as a finance minister from any G7 country and then the first to lead the IMF.
I have had the opportunity to attend meetings between Lagarde and the
head of Oxfam a few times over the last 10 years or so. She is always
very impressive. The first time was in her office in France’s ultra-modern Ministry of Economy and Finance in
Paris, overlooking the Seine. The office was incredible; it had a red
sofa and a zebra skin rug. It felt like we were in a Duran Duran video
from 1985. We were here to talk about French support for a Financial
Transaction Tax.
As we filed in and took our seats opposite her at a long table, she
took one look at us, smiled, and said: “are there no women in Oxfam
then?” We were indeed two Frenchmen, an Englishman (me), and an
Australian — very pale and male indeed.
I think there is no doubt that Lagarde would describe herself as a
feminist, and a very strong advocate of gender equality. She is also
without a doubt a big fan of the current neoliberal economic system. She
thinks it is far from perfect and could be a lot fairer, but
nevertheless very much thinks that this is broadly the best way to
organize capitalism.
An interview we did with feminist and decolonial political economist Bhumika Muchhala on our EQUALS podcast this week about feminist economics made me reflect on whether it is in fact possible to be both these things — a champion of feminism and a champion of the current economic system. Or is a “neoliberal feminist” an oxymoron? A contradiction in terms?
The gale force neoliberal headwind
Lagarde in her speeches draws
attention to the progress women have seen over the last 50 years,
something others too have highlighted. She points out that there is no
doubt that in terms of cultural norms, legislation, and participation in
the workforce, the life of women in most countries is much improved
compared to 50 years ago. That there is still a very long way to go,
yes, but that genuine progress has been made.
Muchhala’s argument, by contrast, is that what little progress there
has been for women globally is overwhelmingly counteracted by the deeply
sexist nature of the global economic system, particularly its
neoliberal version. By squeezing workers’ wages and rights, by squeezing
the ability of governments to build universal welfare states through
seemingly permanent austerity, and by allowing corporations and the
richest to increase their wealth at astounding rates, the current system
is like a gale force wind blowing in the face of any attempts to take
steps in the direction of gender equality.
Particularly, Muchhala felt that women’s participation in the workforce should not be taken as a proxy for women’s empowerment — something that is definitely often done by Lagarde and others.
Young women fighting for their rights in Myanmar
I remember a few years back meeting young
women working in the garment industry in Myanmar. They were working
12-hour days in unsafe factories, dismissed for the smallest
infringements, or sacked as soon as they got pregnant.
Yet many of these young women felt they were more economically
empowered, far freer than their mothers and grandmothers, far more in
charge of their own destinies. Their situation was both terrible and
better than the past. The point, it seemed to me, was whether this was
the best we could — or should — expect. Was the only way to get more
women in the workforce globally to accept this appalling level of
exploitation, too? Those young garment workers certainly didn’t think
so, which was why they were organizing their first trade union, at huge
risk.
It seems to me there is little doubt that the main beneficiaries of
greater participation of women in the workforce are the owners of
wealth. I just look around me here in the UK, where two salaries are
needed now to support a household, when one was once enough. Where the
huge subsidy of unpaid care is still exactly that: a subsidy to the
formal economy (to the tune of at least $10.8 trillion a year). But now women are expected to work and care, too.
In a different system, a fairer system, the huge increase in women’s
participation in the workforce should have led to everyone having to
work less. The huge boost to productivity and growth, instead of
building billionaire bank balances, if fairly distributed could have
eliminated poverty and enabled the universal provision of public
services, including care services like childcare, eldercare, and
healthcare. It could have built a care infrastructure that would further
increase both gender and economic equality, as well as well-being.
I think there is a parallel with the broader discussion of poverty
and the neoliberal period. It is a fact that extreme poverty has fallen
dramatically in the last 40 years, with over a billion less people
living on less than $2 a day. Equally, it is true that there has been
progress in terms of women’s empowerment and equality. But progress on
both has, I think, been a tiny fraction of what it could have been if
the global economy was organized on different lines. Instead, the
neoliberal economic air we breathe, the neoliberal sea we swim in,
constantly and structurally undermines much greater progress. I would go
further, in fact: I think it makes a permanent end to poverty and to
gender-based discrimination impossible.
Nowhere is that truer than in terms of inequality. As long as 66 cents in every dollar of new wealth goes directly to the top 1%, and as long as the global economy is organized in such a way to ensure that continues happening, women’s oppression will continue. Indeed, as Muchhala points out, women’s oppression is absolutely fundamental to this unequal system continuing, as so much wealth is extracted from their unpaid care work and underpaid work.
Nasimjon Sharipov has not been seen in public since late February 2023. IMAGE/Group 24
‘He just vanished’ ? missing activists highlight Tajikistan’s disturbing use of enforced disappearances
“He just vanished; left his apartment for a meeting and disappeared.
We’ve checked all the police stations, jails, the hospital and migration
centers. We don’t know what to do.”
These were the words Tajik opposition leader Suhrob Zafar uttered to me in late February 2023, days after Nasimjon Sharipov, his colleague in the political movement Group 24, went missing.
The two of them had lived for almost 10 years in Turkey, having fled
Tajikistan in 2014 because of the government’s repression of opposition
groups, including the banning of Group 24. Zafar told me that both men
had recently received anonymous threats on their phones, warning that
they would be kidnapped and sent back to Tajikistan, where the
government routinely uses torture and lengthy jail sentences to suppress opposition.
Zafar and I stayed in touch until March 10, 2024, after which he stopped responding. I later learned that on that day Zafar too went missing. An unconfirmed report in independent Tajik media on March 20 suggested that both men had been seen in handcuffs exiting a plane at an airport in Tajikistan’s capital on March 15 – but to date, there has been no official word on the two activists’ whereabouts.
Drawing on primary interviews and profiling 31 cases of incommunicado
detention or enforced disappearances over a 20-year period, I traced
how enforced disappearances have become a mainstay in Tajikistan’s
playbook for suppressing dissent in this nation of over 10 million
people.
A particular terror
Enforced disappearances occur when a government detains, captures, imprisons or kills
while refusing to acknowledge a person’s whereabouts or their grave. In
2010, the U.N. General Assembly adopted The International Convention
for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which expressly states: “No one shall be subjected to enforced disappearance.” But Tajikistan has never been a signatory.
The practice unleashes a particular terror on both victims and their
families: removing someone entirely from the access of their loved ones,
while inflicting anguish and uncertainty that may continue for years,
even decades.
“Disappearances” entered the popular lexicon after becoming the
hallmark of brutal juntas that violently took power in Latin America 50
years ago, such as in Argentina and notably Chile, where at least 1,248 people were disappeared on the orders of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Half a century later, my research indicates that this pernicious
practice is being committed with disturbing regularity by Tajikistan
under the repressive rule of authoritarian President Emomali Rahmon.
Under Rahmon’s rule since 1992, Tajikistan has consistently been ranked among the “worst of the worst” when it comes to its political rights and civil liberties records.
The use of enforced disappearances by the Tajik authorities dates back to the 1992-97 civil war that ravaged the republic following the Soviet Union’s collapse, leaving anywhere from 20,000 to 150,000 dead.
Arriving at an accurate estimate of the number of Tajiks disappeared is extremely difficult.
Attempts by scholars and the United Nations working group on enforced disappearances, which visited the country in 2019, have been thwarted by Rahmon’s resistance to allow any critical examination of his troops’ potential abuses.
The U.N. team was unable to get official figures, noting an “unprecedented” indifference in shedding light on the matter in Tajikistan.
Nonetheless, they estimated that thousands of people were unaccounted for from the civil war period.
