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Obama’s talisman
>> Thursday, January 22, 2009
BARACK Obama is an avowed admirer of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. That their fanatical compatriots murdered both his heroes represents a deep and unyielding battle-line that ought to weld South Asia and America into a common struggle against racial and religious bigotry.
This resolve was evident in the inaugural speech the new American leader delivered in Washington DC on Tuesday.
Gandhi’s killers accused him of appeasing Muslims, while Pakistani ideologues slandered him as their dangerous enemy. In fact, the founders of Pakistan accused Gandhi of being a leader of Hindus so as to deprive him of his secular credentials. This was a canard and ironical too. Gandhi was assassinated by an upper caste Hindu.
King’s killers structured a similar mythology to justify his cruel death. By 1967, the civil rights leader had become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall US foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,” and the Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” The fact that Barack Obama’s inauguration as America’s first black president was conducted under unprecedented security flowed from the fear of white su premacist plotters stalking him.
American TV commentators acknowledged the threat to Obama (and, with him to the syncretic idea he symbolised) came as much from within the national boundaries as from outside the United States. This in spite of the fact that the venue of his oath was jam-packed with the widest range of cheerleaders and ordinary fans, who included “Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and nonbelievers”, a bouquet the new president celebrated as the cultural patchwork that made America strong.
This is the mantra that India publicly celebrates too, both as a legal contract and as moral precept. In translating the ideal into practice, however, the state can be perceived as using underhand methods of tokenism and democratically veneered subterfuge to perpetuate an inequality, which may not be too different from what its colonial equivalent was. Election campaigns brazenly champion a Hindu card or a Muslim card, the Dalit card and so forth. At least since 1991, the cumulative outcome is then handed over to the highest corporate bidder.
It is hardly a surprise that Indian tycoons today are able to openly bid for their favourite politicians, the front-runners being those that most vehemently denounce the tenets of democracy. In this they have mentors in the American business behemoths. The nexus between American industry and Nazi Germany is all too well known. Naturally, they would be uncomfortable with both of Obama’s heroes or the influence they wield on him.
But Obama offered hope. His inaugural speech showed glimpses of Gandhi’s musings that he had scribbled as a “talisman” in 1948, days before being killed at a prayer meeting in Delhi. The “tal isman” says: “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.” Obama’s vision looked similarly eclectic in its appeal to “all other peoples and governments” who watched him the other day. “From the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more… To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.” The new president rejected the false choice between America’s “security” and America’s core “ideals”. It is tempting to see it as a critique of the Bush regime’s “Guantanamo Bay policy”, or as a veiled tribute to Martin Luther King’s anti-war speech he gave exactly a year before his death. “Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home,” said King.
“It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Obama talked of inadequacy, if not uselessness, of “power” to provide “security”. He talked of criticality of “justness” of cause, of global “peace” linked to “dignity”, of engaging the “allies” and “former enemies” alike.
There was perhaps one critical issue missing from his speech: Israel’s bestiality in Gaza. Gandhi’s major statement on the Palestine and the Jewish question, on the other hand, appeared in his widely circulated editorial in the Harijan of Nov 11, 1938.
He started by sympathising with the Jews, who as a people were subjected to inhuman treatment and persecution for a long time. But Gandhi asserted, “My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?” It was also an implied critique of the nascent idea of Pakistan as a religion-based state. Obama may be no Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. It is good enough that he has emerged as the best bet on offer in a long, long time. ¦ The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi. jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Israel’s myopic self-interest
DURING Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and just after the gruesome Sabra and Shatila massacres were exposed, one of us was a visiting lecturer at a southern US university.
One afternoon an administrator phoned to ask if we would care to host a high-ranking Israeli politician as a speaker in our international relations course.
We welcomed the chance. It was near the end of term and by then most of the 50 or so undergraduates had acquired a basic reading background in the grim complexities of the madhouse of world politics. Given a few days’ notice, they could be assigned additional material addressing the Israeli action, including testimony by amazingly brave Israeli dissenters.
The great day arrived and in strode the burly Israeli politician, leader of a small religious party forming an essential component of the ruling Likud coalition, and also head of the Israeli equivalent of the American Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The format was that he would speak in defence of Israeli activities for 30 minutes and take questions over the remainder of the session. The students, with very few exceptions, ranged from conservative to centrist. Most were inclined to think alarmingly well of then President Ronald Reagan.
When the class commenced our visiting dignitary behaved remarkably like a Chicago machine politician (only more articulate), the blunt kind accustomed to calling in favours or putting the squeeze on wayward constituents. His case for Israeli policy was brute simplicity itself: pure unapologetic realpolitik. His aim was not so much to justify Israeli decisions as to persuade what he regarded as naïve young Yanks that Israel was a vital US asset in the Middle East, operating way out there on “on the front line” for their sakes, and therefore it required their unquestioning support. It was plainly in the average Americans’ self-interest to do so, he argued, so why quibble with how Israel acted?
Such ruthless honesty, or honest ruthlessness, though, failed to stir the desired response. A glaring contradiction in his argument is that if everyone is motivated only by self-interest then the Israeli government must do whatever it does for itself and not for the US. No need to be grateful for that. The students spotted this flaw and barraged him with challenging questions and ripostes. On reflection, this rough and tough fellow was utterly indifferent to perceptions that differed from his own, and could not imagine any other way of appraising matters. Everything boiled down to myopic self-interest and crude power.
Read more...Schools in Swat
THIS has been happening for a while that schools in Swat have been destroyed one after another. It has been a ‘watch and see’ situation for quite some time. The situation is so uncontrollable that schools now do not open anymore for children in Swat.
These days Pakistan is in the news all over the world. News such as the one above creates many doubts in people’s mind: is there any government in Pakistan? Does Islam call for seeking knowledge? Simply said, answers to such questions satisfy nobody. It is well said: “Actions speak louder than words”. It is good news that, according to the information minister, schools in Swat will reopen on March 1. This news is like some one seeing light at the end of the tunnel. SAEED AHMAD via email
Read more...Imran Khan versus Charles Darwin
IT is unfortunate that Irfan Husain launched a diatribe against PTI Chairman Imran Khan in his column, ‘Imran Khan vs Charles Darwin’ (Jan 17). To begin with, the article, ostensibly emailed by a reader, was over a decade old and not a 2008 publication.
But more to the point, Mr Husain quoted Imran Khan out of context clearly at a time when the PTI leader is gaining support by rationally challenging the servility of successive governments of Pakistan to US diktat.
When Imran Khan wrote that Darwin’s theory was ‘half-baked’ and led to much debate over its veracity even in the West, the idea was not to start a debate on recreation or evolution of mankind, but to emphasise why educated people have moved away from religion.
The main point that Imran Khan was making and continues to make is that we should not be bowled over by all things and thoughts emanating from the West, but should challenge them with our own logic and religio cultural influences.
After all, logic and reason is not the sole purview of the West — and irrationality and extremism are as much a part of western civilisation as of any other.
Ironically, it was Darwinism that was used by the propounders of the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, which was a central theme of extremist racist doctrines like Nazism and the Apartheid notions of the Afrikaans.
Not only was Mr Imran Khan quoted out of context, it seems Mr Husain’s western-obsessed think ing could not tolerate Mr Khan being seen in the company of the JI leader or Gen Hamid Gul.
But Mr Khan also interacts with the Sharifs and Mahmood Achakzai and has also conferred with the present government. After all, Pakistan is a diverse and heterogeneous society and political leaders must talk to all shades of opinion in the country.
I fail to understand what Mr Husain exactly has in mind when he writes about extreme views voiced by Mr Khan in TV talk shows. Whereas at every fo rum Mr Khan has emphasised the importance of an independent judiciary and rule of law, these views do not classify as “extreme views”.
The truth is that Imran Khan has always exposed western duplicities and hypocrisy and has had the strength of being rooted in his own indigenous traditions, not to be overwhelmed by western thought but to look at it rationally and questioningly. OMAR S. CHEEMA Central Information Secretary Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf
Zimbabwe talks fail
ZIMBABWE’S power-sharing talks are close to collapse after Robert Mugabe’s refusal to relinquish control over the key security ministries that played a leading role in rigging the last election and suppressing political opposition.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, described the failure of 12 hours of talks brokered by regional leaders as “probably the darkest day of our lives” for his Movement for Democratic Change and for the nation, which is hit by mass hunger, cholera and hyperinflation.
Tsvangirai, who won the last broadly free election in March before being robbed of victory by a bloody campaign and vote rigging in a second round of balloting weeks later, stuck by his insistence that power-sharing had to mean his party also controlled key ministries, particularly home affairs, which is responsible for the police and finance. The MDC proposed Mugabe took defence, national security, justice and foreign affairs. Tsvangirai said: “For us, as the MDC, this is probably the darkest day of our lives, for the whole nation is waiting.” Regional leaders have called a summit for next Monday to try to break the deadlock but after months of wrangling there is no immediate prospect of a breakthrough. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has been reluctant to press the Zimbabwean president to fulfil his commitments under a power-sharing agreement signed in September.
The MDC’s secretary general, Tendai Biti, said he was “not hopeful” the SADC summit would change anything. “You can have a million extraordinary summits but as long as no one [in the SADC leadership] has the courage to look at Mugabe in the face and tell him ... logic has to prevail, it will be meaningless.” Biti said that if the SADC summit failed to deliver a solution he expected the African Union would take over.
Zimbabwe’s new parliament opened on Tuesday in preparation for a constitutional amendment that would establish a prime minister’s post for Tsvangirai under the power-sharing deal.
But after the failure of the talks, parliament’s agenda was limited to a debate on the collapse of Zimbabwe’s health and education systems amid cholera that has killed more than 2,200 people.
Although the power-sharing agreement has been criticised for permitting Mugabe to remain as president, it marked an unusual admission of defeat by a man who said he would not talk to Tsvangirai, let alone share power with him.
Since then, Mugabe’s principal power has been to obstruct rather than govern. He has produced no solutions to reverse the economic implosion that has seen a devaluation so rapid that the central bank last week introduced a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill that had approximately the sterling value of GBP20. ¦ — The Guardian, London
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