Musharraf’s self-coup regime has put Benazir Bhutto under house arrest. 5000 of her supporters were rounded up too. The judiciary protests continue as well. Before her house was surrounded by military, Bhutto had announced her intention to reinstate the ousted judiciary that was the main target of the coup. The general announced that he intends to allow elections by February 15, but there is no reason to take that seriously.
Category: India and Pakistan
Politics and wars in India and Pakistan
Pakistan reacts!
Let no one say that the people of Pakistan took this coup lightly. Let no one say that the courts and the human rights activists in the cities, who were the coup’s principal targets, went gently. They are taking incredible risks in the streets and their courage has already forced Musharraf’s regime to back off somewhat and the international community to say a few obvious things. Lawyers have been rounded up en masse, beaten and gassed, not for the first time. They are boycotting court proceedings, which will make it difficult for this government to run.
There is a chance the US might exert some genuine pressure on Pakistan if this can keep up. The Americans have suspended defense talks with Pakistan and are threatening more. Some European countries have suspended aid. Pakistan’s government is still fighting, and not very effectively, against militants on the border with Afghanistan, using artillery. Meanwhile the Taliban in Afghanistan itself is succeeding militarily, capturing parts of western Afghanistan and taking on defectors from the Afghan military. NATO is relying increasingly on a combination of Afghan forces and airstrikes to hold territory because they don’t want to take casualties on the unpopular mission. The result is Afghan civilian casualties from the airstrikes and Afghan military casualties from battles with the insurgents, which of course feeds the insurgency.
As I mentioned before, part of the reason Musharraf may succeed (though if the Pakistani people can hold on and the international pressure increases, he could still fail) is because of a lack of alternative to the series of unsolvable problems that he and the Americans have entered into in his country and Afghanistan.
Even those who seek an Islamic revolution in Pakistan can’t believe that that would be a way out – such a regime would kick off first the total isolation and then the possible disintegration of the country.
Any military officer who overthrew Musharraf would then find himself in the same impossible situation Musharraf is in. He can line his pockets, he can control some of the army, but there are still the Americans, there are still the Indians, there are still the Islamists, there are still the insurgents, and there are still the constitutional, political, and economic problems. On the other hand, the military is plenty strong enough to prevent a civilian politician like Benazir Bhutto from holding power without their sufferance.
There is an unlikely path to genuine democratic reform and transition, which is what the people are on the streets of Lahore getting beaten and gassed and rounded up and probably tortured to fight for. They will need help from the outside in the form of political pressure, pressures that are making noise of possibly starting, and they need much more of that and fast.
More on the Pakistan self-coup
Interesting isn’t it, given that Musharraf took power claiming that he needs the power to deal with “threats” and alluding to Islamic extremism, how the post-coup roundups are of human rights activists and supreme court justices. These regimes just aren’t that scared of what they say they’re scared of, are they?
Musharraf strikes
In trying to decide where to focus some of my analysis in the coming weeks and months, the interface between South and West Asia keeps coming up. Readers may have seen that Musharraf has made his move in Pakistan, declaring a state of emergency, and dismissing the Chief Justice. Presumably this is to pre-empt a political process in which he might lose power.
1857: An Internationalist Pespective; The Lessons Of Chartism
by Badri Raina
First published in People’s Democracy, September 30, 2007
Epigraph
“I am one of the unemployed, but if I was in India, I
would say the same thing that Mr Gandhi is saying.”
(A Lancashire mill worker to Gandhi, 1931)
Continue reading “1857: An Internationalist Pespective; The Lessons Of Chartism”
We become what we hate
by Badri Raina
first published on June 1, 2007
Pet Panacea of India’s Ruling Classes
by Badri Raina
first published May 22, 2007
India’s ruling think gurus are forever on the lookout for a smart panacea for what they perceive the country’s ills. In arguing for a two-party political system, the idea seems to be to subdue the proliferation of organic discontent among the lower orders of the polity by imposing a mechanical structural arrangement from the top.
Pakistan in the region
http://www.zcommunications.org/pakistan-in-the-region-by-zia-mian
Zia Mian directs the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton University. He is a writer and filmmaker on South Asia and nuclear issues. Previous interviews are here:
February 2004
February 2003
I caught up with him by phone on April 27, 2007 – just as the current crisis was beginning.
Recasting India as a vassal state
by Badri Raina
first published in Mainstream Weekly, November 22, 2005
I t is now obvious that the neo-imperialists in America—and their apologists at home here—wish to hard sell the thesis that the Westphalian bedrock (sovereign nation-states, and the principle of non-interference), upon which international relations have been based for over two centuries, must be deemed to have slipped with finality from under the countries of the world.
Art and Activism
[GUEST BLOG BY MANDISI MAJAVU]
The other night, the KZN Society of the Arts Gallery invited me to share a panel with Thembinkosi Goniwe — one of the foremost leading art curators in the country, to discuss art and activism in South Africa. It was an exciting exchange.
Below are some of the points that I argued around that night.
As we celebrate 10 years of democracy in South Africa, mainstream intellectuals and critics constantly reminds everyone that we now need to move away from the race question. We are told class analysis is the useful intellectual tool if one is serious about understanding South African society.
In the “art-world”, as Goniwe has argued somewhere, critics dismiss black artist’s work as predictable, monotonous, exhausted, and that black artists are accused of not wanting to go beyond the “comfort zone” of what they have explored over the past ten years.
What is it that makes economists and white critics who can be categorized as progressive not want to acknowledge, and therefore, give legitimacy to the continuing and the necessary race struggle in South Africa?
bell books, an African-American feminist, has this to say about this phenomenon: “Critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality.”
What bell hooks is saying is that it is silly of us black people to expect white critics to compliment us on “subject-matters” we decide to explore. Instead, we should expect the kind of debilitating criticism that white critics are ever ready to dish out every time we mention race.
If one looks at the South African social movements today, one finds that the word racism to the people in these movements is a taboo. There are a lot of reasons behind this. One reason is ideology. Another reason is the factor of donors. In most cases, donors and ideology tend to go hand-in-hand.
The same logic applies to artists. Artists find themselves compelled to produce what sells. Economic pressure is real for artists, especially black artists in South Africa. As a result of these economic pressures, most artists are forced to make sure that their way of looking at reality corresponds with market forces. And right now the market forces do not really appreciate anything that explores the social construction of race in the new South Africa. This is why we have to applaud those artists who continue to explore this terrain in spite of economic pressures.
In the South African context, it would be foolish of us to ignore race. Given our economic present situation which is informed and shaped by race, it is only honest and it is necessary to address race issues.