The Wire
Cultural indoctrination has led to the belief that reservations go against merit, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
People who are born with caste privilege often ask a set of questions whenever caste is discussed. And somehow, in spite of the fact that these questions have been answered over and over again, they just never seem to go away.
Therefore, we have brought all the questions together and answered them. We hope this will create greater awareness and understanding among people with caste privilege.
King Abdullah II accused his half brother and others of plotting with “foreign parties” to “destabilise Jordan’s security.”
Over the weekend, King Abdullah II accused his half brother Hamzah bin Hussein and others of plotting with “foreign parties” to “destabilise Jordan’s security.” More than a dozen people were arrested, including the fellow royal Sharif Hassan bin Zaid and former finance minister Bassem Awadallah, deputy prime minister Ayman Safadi said on Sunday.
Until he signed a letter on Monday pledging to “place myself in the hands of His Majesty the King,” Prince Hamzah had said he was being held under house arrest. In an audio message shared Sunday evening on Twitter, he had continued to strike a defiant tone, saying he would not permit authorities to curtail his movement. Hamzah said he would “obviously not comply when they say I may not go outside, use Twitter and communicate with others.”
The prince is the oldest son of the late King Hussein bin Talal with his widow, Nur. He had been groomed for the throne by his mother. King Hussein I often publicly expressed his admiration for Hamzah and had planned to name him as his successor.
Shortly before King Hussein I died in 1999, he changed his mind, naming his first-born son, Abdullah II, the heir to the throne instead. At the time, Hamzah was still considered too young and inexperienced to take over from his father. In keeping with his father’s wish, King Abdullah II made Hamzah crown prince of Jordan. In 2004, however, King Abdullah II surprisingly rescinded this position, instead conferring it to his eldest son: Hussein.
Abdullah had justified this by arguing that he wanted to preserve the liberty of the then-24-year-old Hamzah to pursue careers for which he was more qualified. This move effectively barred him a second time from ascending to the throne.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Photo: Reuters
Jordanian opposition figure
Prince Hamzah attended London’s Harrow School for boys and later graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He studied at Harvard University. And he served as a pilot in Jordan’s air force.
Hamzah became popular with Jordan’s various ethnic groups, whom the monarchy regards as the pillars of its power. His popularity is in part thanks to the physical resemblance he has to his late father.
Before his arrest and subsequent pledge, Prince Hamzah had previously criticized Jordans government. When Jordanians took to the streets in 2011 and 2012 as part of the Arab Spring uprisings, opposition figures considered him a viable alternative to King Abdullah II. Ultimately, however, Hamzah was not regarded as a serious rival to the king.
Prince Hamzah has five daughters and one son. He is married to Princess Basmah Bani-Ahmad.
“We are in a paradigm where the institutions that are supposed to protect us do not protect us anymore,” the Congress leader said.
New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday alleged that the BJP has overseen a “wholesale capture” of India’s institutional framework, changing the paradigm in which opposition parties operate post-2014 and that the institutions that are supposed to support a fair political fight do not do so anymore.
In a conversation with Harvard University professor and former US undersecretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns, Gandhi said in order to fight elections, there is a need for institutional structures, protection by the judicial system, a reasonably free media, financial parity and a set of institutional structures that allow his party to operate as a political party, but all of this is not there.
“In Assam, the gentleman who is running our campaign (for the Assembly polls) has been sending me videos of BJP candidates running around with voting machines in their cars.
“He is screaming at the top his voice saying look, I have got a really serious problem here, but there is nothing going on in the national media,” the former Congress chief said.
He said this “wholesale capture” of the country’s institutional framework, which allows the BJP to have “absolute financial and media dominance”, could explain why opposition parties such as the Congress, BSP, SP and NCP are not winning elections.
“To fight elections, I need institutional structures, I need a judicial system that protects me, I need a media that is reasonably free, I need financial parity, I need a set of institutional structures that allow me to operate as a political party. I do not have them,” Gandhi said.
He said the way the BJP is behaving, a lot of people are getting discontented very fast and there is a need to unite them.
“We are no longer in the same paradigm we were before 2014, we are in a different paradigm. We are in a paradigm where the institutions that are supposed to protect us do not protect us anymore,” the Congress leader said.
The institutions that are supposed to support a fair political fight do not do so anymore, he alleged.
He also alleged that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of the ruling BJP, is filling various institutions of the country with its people.
Gandhi and Burns had a similar conversation in June last year, during the coronavirus lockdown. In that instance, Gandhi said that the “DNA of openness and tolerance” that India and the US were known for has “disappeared”, and those creating divisions and weakening their country are now claiming to be nationalists.
‘US silent on developments in India’
According to Scroll, Gandhi said that the US has been “silent” about the developments in India. “I don’t hear anything from the US establishment about what’s happening in India,” Gandhi said during the discussion. “If you are saying partnership of democracies, I mean what is your view on what is going on here.”
On China, Gandhi said both the US and India need to put together an economic strategy that can take the country on.
“The Chinese are currently occupying our territory, their troops are in our territory and there is not a peep about it in our media.
“Why they are able to do this is because they see a weakened India. They see an India that is internally divided, an India that is not acting strategically, an India that is not seeing the larger picture,” he said, adding that the need of the hour is a strong and united India to take on China.
“You need an economic strategy and a sound production strategy and not just a military strategy to take on China,” he noted, adding that the Quad alliance between the US, India, Japan and Australia also needs to put up an economic strategy and a clear economic vision.
Asked whether the current efforts to reduce tension between India and Pakistan would work, Gandhi said, “They are trying, but I do not think it is going to be easy. India and Pakistan are going to find it difficult to go beyond a point.”
Job-centric economy
Asked what would be his priority if he was the prime minister, he said he would move from a growth-centric idea to a job-centric idea of the economy.
The only way to start the economy now is to jumpstart production and put a huge amount of money in the hands of people, he added.
The former Congress chief noted that the growth of the economy is meaningless if it does not create enough jobs and that jobs creation and value addition need to be put on a “mission mode” in the country in the next few years.
Asked by Burns about the farmers’ protests, he said it is again about how one runs the country.
“I remember when we were in government, we had constant feedback. What amazed me was how effective, quick and powerful it was. The model that the government uses and some of the ideas that it projects have shot down that feedback.
“You see it when Gauri Lankesh gets assassinated, you see it when people are beaten up, you see it when people are attacked…you are shutting down the feedback,” he said.
What has happened is that the government has shut the feedback route, so the farmers have no other way except to come out on the streets, Gandhi argued.
“It is absolutely necessary to reform agriculture, but you cannot attack the foundation of the agriculture system and you certainly cannot do that without having a conversation, because they are going to react,” he said.
(With PTI inputs)
In the annals of the Dalit archive, West has created an admirable place for himself. For, very few people have held our hand just to be with us and for the sake of giving us company, at a time when many abandoned and betrayed us.
One can easily feel intimidated about commenting on the reputation of Professor Cornel West, the globally renowned scholar who has just been denied tenure at Harvard University. The body of his work speaks for itself and hardly needs the endorsement of those he has inspired to hope for a better world.
West is an intellectual who riffs on the themes of justice and inequality. He wrestles with the challenge of violence and the promise of resistance – a fine balance to walk if one does not want to fall off the cliff. In his life, he has faced many setbacks. But he has ricocheted back like a bullet of roses. That is why he is hunted, vilified and even feared.
The world owes much to prophets who turned their back on material values and greed and walked a path bearing compassion and an insistence on morality. West’s prophets are the poor people from the barren deserts of a contested land. A Jesus-loving, free Black man honours the complexity of the world by partaking of it, instead of obfuscating its hidden prejudices.
Balancing humility and love is not an easy art. West does it like it is meant to be, a natural quality of a human being. His mission to endow the next generation with wisdom and courage. He has given the world a percentage of what is good out there, be it in the universities, or the human street – Wall or walled.
Listen to his words on the joy of struggle, delivered as a commencement address to the Harvard Divinity School in 2019:
“I come from a tradition that says lift every voice. It doesn’t talk about echoes. It talks about voices. It’s tied to vocation and has everything to do with what it means to straighten your back up in the face of 400 years of being terrorized and still teach the world something about freedom; of being terrorized for 400 years and still teach the world something about healing; of being hated for 400 years and still teach the world something about love—love of Veritas.”
The Westian pedagogy serves the poor and identifies the oppressed as precious. He manages to brighten a common person’s humanity by creating a shrine of faith and rebellion in their house. One doesn’t lose the spirit to fight, no matter how weak. And West assures you that it is alright to be rebellious in the service of humanity. In a world when actions are policed and ideas are incarcerated, West adds his bass to the melodies of free-thinking, freedom-loving, nature-worshiping people fighting for ownership of the only planet we share. There is hardly any progressive cause that doesn’t carry West’s endorsement. His hug is therapeutic and his pat on the back has fired up the energies of workers everywhere.
It would be unjust to say that West has inspired a generation. He has done much more than that. Living true to his words and never closing the door of accountability for his actions, West has exemplified the truth-telling legacy of his ancestors whose names were not meant to be remembered. Their life had a price tag that carried no value. The cruel European white slaveholder ensured their dignity was crushed and their life shamed. West lives his history in every word he lyrically composes. He is a proud descendant of his people. Dashing out of the pressures of prejudice and mendacity, West crafts a stylish aura and sartorial rap dressed in philosophy, religion and yet-to-be-named disciplines of enquiry.
West’s sincere investment in the vulnerabilities of every oppressed person around the world has put a lot on his shoulders. He has the task of correcting the past and chaperoning the unfinished work of his ancestors. That is why he wants to cast the net of the African American legacy as wide as possible.
Our life experiences are hidden in inexperienced, philosophical abstractions. Therefore, we seek urgent care in the form of spiritual diagnosis. In this quest, we confidently turn to West, whose Shiloh Baptist Church in Oak Park, Sacramento and loving parents shower blessings on our condition through the cooling metaphors launched by their able son – in the classroom, from the daises of congregations and television studios.
West is a great friend of 300 million Dalits whose story, definition, recognition and admiration are not yet known to the American public. After the 1950s, America forgot Ambedkar. Ambedkar is as much a son of America as Martin Luther King Jr and W.E.B. Du Bois are. It is to West’s credit that he proudly reclaimed his agency on Ambedkar and didn’t hesitate to walk with him – one of the most controversial yet truth seeking scholars of the past century. West was courageous enough to correct his position on Gandhi and go fully with the Dalit people and their epochal cause.
In the annals of the Dalit archive, West has created an admirable place for himself. He is immortalised in our cherished stories. For, very few people have held our hand just to be with us and for the sake of giving us company, at a time when many abandoned and betrayed us.
West has taught the world that to be courageous is to take risks. After all, not all have the spirit to bear witness to the truth. Let the sun sink and rise again, it will honour its duty to keep track of the world. The question for us is shall we betray the night from which arises mountains of hope? Time is the only arbiter and staying true to it is the only option some of us have.
Suraj Yengde is the author of the bestseller Caste Matters and is a Senior Fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability at Harvard Kennedy School, Massachusetts.
At Harvard, she started the Led By Foundation, a social enterprise that provides mentorship to young Muslim women.
Ruha Shadab is a doctor and a graduate from the Harvard Kennedy School, USA.
At Harvard, she started the Led By Foundation, a social enterprise that provides mentorship to young Muslim women, to inspire the next generation of female change-makers.
She speaks to The Wire about her journey and what inspired her to lead change among young Indian Muslim women.
A flurry of lawsuits were filed challenging the rule including one brought by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another by a coalition of state governments.
New York/Washington: In a stunning reversal of policy, the Trump administration on Tuesday abandoned a plan that would have forced out tens of thousands of foreign students following widespread condemnation of the move and pressure from colleges and major businesses.
US officials announced last week that international students at schools that had moved to online-only classes due to the coronavirus pandemic would have to leave the country if they were unable to transfer to a college with at least some in-person instruction.
The government said it would drop the plan amid a legal challenge brought by universities. But a senior US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said the administration still intended to issue a regulation in the coming weeks addressing whether foreign students can remain in the United States if their classes move online.
There are more than a million foreign students at US colleges and universities, and many schools depend on revenue from foreign students, who often pay full tuition.
The July 6 move by the administration blindsided many universities and colleges that were still making plans for the fall semester, trying to balance concerns about rising cases of the novel coronavirus in many US states and the desire to return to classes.
A flurry of lawsuits were filed challenging the rule including one brought by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another by a coalition of state governments. Dozens of big companies and colleges and universities filed “friend-of-the-court” briefs opposing the rule.
Harvard planned to hold all of its classes online for the upcoming academic year.
President Donald Trump, who is pushing schools across the country to reopen in the autumn, said he thought Harvard‘s plan not to hold in-person classes was ridiculous.
The universities argued the measure was unlawful and would adversely affect their academic institutions.
In a highly anticipated court hearing on Tuesday in the case brought by Harvard, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts said the U.S. government and the two elite universities that sued had come to a settlement that would roll back the new rules and restore the previous status quo.
The hearing lasted less than four minutes.
The controversy began after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said it would re-instate rules for international students on F-1 and M-1 visas that limit the number of online courses foreign students can take if they want to remain in the United States. Those rules had been temporarily waived due to the public health crisis. Many academic institutions assumed they would be extended, not rolled back.
The DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the details of any future regulation on this issue remain under discussion.
In particular, DHS officials are still deciding whether to treat students already in the United States differently than students seeking to enter the country for the first time, according to the official.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led a separate lawsuit challenging the visa rules, said in a written statement Trump’s “arbitrary actions” put the health of students and communities at risk.
“In the midst of an economic and public health crisis, we don’t need the federal government alarming Americans or wasting everyone’s time and resources with dangerous policy decisions,” Becerra said.
ICE and the US Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reuters)
The country is set to overtake the UK’s confirmed tally within the next 24 hours to become the fourth worst-hit nation.
New Delhi: For the sixth consecutive day, India registered just under 10,000 new cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as the country’s tally is soon set to overtake the UK’s to become the fourth-worst hit nation.
According to the health ministry’s latest update on Thursday morning, India’s confirmed cases of COVID-19 climbed to 2,86,579 after registering the highest single-day spike of 9,996 cases in the 24 hours since 8 am on Wednesday. During the period, a record 357 deaths were recorded due to the viral infection, with the total death toll now rising to 8,102. It should be noted here that not all the deaths occurred during the 24 hour period.
As of Thursday morning, the country has 1,37,448 active cases, while 1,41,028 people have recovered and one patient has migrated to another country. “Thus, around 49.21% patients have recovered so far,” an official said. The total number of confirmed cases include foreigners.
Of the 357 new deaths reported since the previous day’s update, 149 were in Maharashtra, 79 in Delhi, 34 in Gujarat, 20 in Uttar Pradesh, 19 in Tamil Nadu, 17 in West Bengal, eight in Telangana, seven each in Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, four in Rajasthan, three each in Jammu and Kashmir and Karnataka, two each in Kerala and Uttarakhand, one each in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh.
Out of the total 8,102 fatalities, Maharashtra accounts for 3,438 deaths followed by Gujarat (1,347), Delhi (984), Madhya Pradesh (427), West Bengal (432), Tamil Nadu (326), Uttar Pradesh (321), Rajasthan (259) and Telangana (156). The death toll reached 78 in Andhra Pradesh, 69 in Karnataka and 55 in Punjab, 51 in Jammu and Kashmir, 52 in Haryana, 33 in Bihar, 18 in Kerala, 15 in Uttarakhand.
Suspected COVID-19 patients outside Delhi’s LNJP hospital. Photo: PTI
India set to overtake the UK
With India reporting close to 10,000 cases for the past week, the country is set to overtake the UK’s tally of confirmed cases within the next 24 hours. India’s tally of 2,86,579 cases is around 5,000 fewer than the UK’s 2,91,588. But the latter has only been reporting around 1,500 new cases for the past few days, according to Johns Hopkins University.
When the cases in India move past that of the UK, only three other countries will have reported more cases than India. These are the US with over 2 million cases, Brazil with 7,72,416 cases and Russia with 4,93,023 cases.
Globally, there have now been over 7.36 million cases of the viral infection reported. The disease has also resulted in the deaths of 416,201 people. Here too, the US accounts for the most, with 112,294 deaths. The UK has reported 41,213 deaths, followed by Brazil (39,680), Italy (34,114), France (29,322) and Spain (27,136).
India’s death toll of 8,102 makes it the 11th highest in the world, behind Iran with 8,506.
US’s COVID-19 death toll could be 200,000 by September
The total death toll in the US from the novel coronavirus pandemic could hit the grim figure of 200,000 by September and expecting a dramatic decrease in COVID-19 cases in the country will be “wishful thinking”, an eminent Indian-American professor has warned.
Ashish Jha, the head of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, told CNN on Wednesday that he is not trying to scare people to stay at home rather urged everyone to wear masks, adhere to the social distancing rules and called for ramping up testing and tracing infrastructure.
Representative image of a New York paramedic being helped with protective gear. Photo: Reuters
“Anybody who’s expecting a dramatic decrease in cases is almost surely engaging in wishful thinking. And if it (COVID numbers) stays just flat for the next three months, we’re going to hit 200,000 deaths sometime in September and that is just awful,” Jha said.
Jha said his estimate is not just a guess, adding that currently 800-1,000 people are dying daily in the US from the virus. All data suggest that the situation is going to get worse, he said.
“We’re gonna have increases, but even if we assume that it’s going to be flat all summer, that nothing is going to get worse… even if we pick that low number of 800 a day, that is 25,000 (deaths) a month in three and a half months. We’re going to add another 88,000 people and we will hit 200,000 sometime in September,” Jha said, according to news agency PTI.
Thailand reports no new cases
Thailand on Thursday reported no new coronavirus infections or deaths, maintaining the total of 3,125 confirmed cases and 58 fatalities.
It was the first time in nearly three weeks that no cases were reported and the 17th day without a local transmission. All recent cases have been found in quarantine among Thais returning from abroad.
There are 2,987 patients who have recovered, said Panprapa Yongtrakul, a spokeswoman for the government’s COVID-19 Administration Centre.
(With agency inputs)
There are no photos of Mubashir Hasan and Dr Bernard Lown together, but their mutual affection and respect is apparent when they speak of each other.
Among the many wide circle of activists, politicians, intellectuals and scientists who mourn the passing of Dr Mubashir Hasan, the respected Pakistani engineer-turned politician-turned-peacemaker who died at his home in Lahore on Saturday aged 98, is his old friend Dr Bernard Lown, 99, in Boston.
Dr Lown was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with fellow cardiologist Dr Yevgeny I. Chazov of the then Soviet Union, with whom he co-founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
There are no photos of Dr Mubashir and Dr Lown together, but their mutual affection and respect is apparent when they speak of each other.
Dr Bernard Lown signing an India-Pakistan peace petition in 2017. Photo: Beena Sarwar
In one of our phone conversations after my move to the US some years ago, Dr Mubashir tells me that he has a friend in the Boston area, a big peace activist who has written some remarkable books. Dr M, as I refer to him in our emails, insists I get them. I comply. The Lost Art of Healing (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) particularly is essential reading for medical health professionals. Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey to End Nuclear Madness (Berrett-Koehler, 2008) with a foreword by Howard Zinn, details the story behind the formation of the IPPNW – essential lessons in activism relevant even today.
When I meet Dr Lown with Dr Mubashir’s reference, he talks about Dr Mubashir in glowing terms – “one of the most beautiful, noble, refined human beings” he has ever met. He says he and his wife Louise were honoured to host Dr Mubashir and his wife Dr Zeenat at their home years ago. Dr M’s own modest living room is sparsely furnished, its walls decorated only with framed photos of birds – his passion besides politics. But I can imagine him here, in Dr Lown’s drawing room with its sofas, wood panelling and paintings.
Dr Lown, born June 7, 1921, in Lithuania, is a little over a year older than Dr Mubashir, born January 21, 1922, in Panipat, India.
I get to know Dr M., in the early 1990s after moving from Karachi to Lahore. I am starting out as a young journalist. He is a stately elder clearly used to authority.
§
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party was famously launched at a 1967 convention at the expansive back lawn of Dr M’s modest, single-storied house on Lahore’s Main Boulevard in Gulberg. Many of the discussions leading up to this, I heard, took place in Dr M’s Volkswagen Bug. In the 1971 elections, Dr Mubashir Hasan won a seat from Lahore and was elected to the National Assembly.
As Bhutto’s finance minister, he oversaw the controversial nationalisation of private industries and educational institutes. He left the party sometime later, disillusioned by the realisation of how tightly Pakistan’s civil and military bureaucracy held power. He shared his insights in his book The Mirage of Power: An Inquiry Into the Bhutto Years, 1971-1977 (OUP, 2000).
His journey led Dr Mubashir to become one of the founders of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan that I began volunteering with, although he always deferred to its founder Asma Jahangir as his leader. She had launched it in 1987 during the General Zia-ul Haq military government, together with several of Pakistan’s top intellectuals, jurists and journalists, all known for their courage and credibility.
It was after 1993, when Asma pushed me into running for HRCP Council elections that I got to know Dr Mubashir on a personal level. To my surprise, I was elected and found myself at the table with other Council members, luminaries like not only Dr M and Asma, but her sister Hina Jillani, legendary journalists Aziz Siddiqui, Nisar Osmani and I.A. Rehman, Justice (Retd) Dorab Patel, Air Marshal (Retd) Zafar Choudhry, to name some. I was perhaps the youngest, least experienced among them. The Council’s twice-yearly meetings were a great learning experience perhaps for all of us.
Dr Mubashir was a driving force behind the formation of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy the following year. This was, and remains, the largest people-to-people lobby group between the two countries. He invited me to the first convention in Delhi, and also to my first South Asian meeting. It was from him that I first heard about the vision for a South Asian Union.
“The respect he enjoyed on both sides of the India-Pakistan border enabled him to engage the leaders of both countries and bring them round to the ideas of understanding until the whirlwind of religious reaction made peace a dirty word”, writes his old friend and comrade I.A. Rehman.
I.A. Rahman and Dr Mubashir Hasan in January 2019. Photo: Beena Sarwar
Dr Mubashir was a very private person who thought and breathed politics, his mind always working on how to strengthen a democratic, people-fuelled system. But he was also an ardent birdwatcher and photographer. The walls of his living room were covered with framed photos he had taken of birds, many of which feature in his book Birds of the Indus (2001), co-authored with Tom J. Roberts, who has several books on Pakistan’s birds, butterflies, and animals to his credit.
Behind Dr M’s reserved, almost autocratic demeanour was an affectionate mentor and guide. Over the two decades since leaving Lahore, I would call and speak to him on the phone sporadically and make it a point to visit him whenever I was in the city. Often I’d find myself picking up a pen and scribbling down the points he was making. Movements, he said, always take people forward even if there are some steps back.
Once, he confessed that he had been a hawk in his earlier years, gradually coming to his present position of ardent peacemaker. This was the man who helped establish Pakistan’s Ministry of Science in 1972, as well as the Kahuta Research Laboratories and was assigned to find funding for Pakistan’s nuclear project.
Dr Mubashir’s “remarkable transformation” took place in the late 1980s, around the time he joined HRCP. “From a hardline nationalist he developed into a campaigner for peace in the world and peace in the subcontinent”, writes Rehman Saab.
His later work for peace connected him with Dr Lown, who had begun his activism much earlier, catalysed by the rising menace of nuclear war between the US and USSR. In 1961, Dr Lown formed the Physicians for Social Responsibility, and in 1980, he co-founded IPPNW with a small group of physicians, including his friend and fellow cardiologist in Moscow, Dr Yevgeny Chazov. They had collaborated in researching sudden cardiac death, each heading teams in their respective countries.
When India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, Dr Mubashir and the two organisations he played a leading role in, PIPFPD and HRCP, stood firmly in the anti-nuclear lobby. By then, Dr Mubashir had parted ways with the original PPP and joined the Shaheed Bhutto faction of the party, led by Murtaza Bhutto’s widow Ghinwa. His imprint was clear on the strong anti-nuclear statement that the PPP-SB issued at the time.
Dr Mubashir Hasan in Lahore in 2013. Photo: Beena Sarwar
§
Dr Lown lets me in when I ring the doorbell at his home Newton near Boston in the summer of 2017. As we sit and talk in his sitting room, he tells me that he now works primarily on climate change, which he considers the biggest threat to the world today. Our time is cut short because he double-booked – should have gone through his secretary. Some senior politicians from an African country are coming to see him, fellows at the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan thinktank he set up at Harvard University. Its focus was initially on improving healthcare and reducing overmedication, but it has expanded to climate change issues. He seats his other guests and sees me out, promising to make time again.
When I visit again, Dr Lown is waiting for me with a thoughtfully signed copy of his memoir about IPPNW. I also get him to sign my copy of The Lost Art of Healing.
I ask if he will endorse a statement for peaceful relations between India and Pakistan, signed by Dr Mubashir and over 1,000 other eminent persons of India, Pakistan and elsewhere. The statement calls to “make dialogue uninterrupted and uninterruptible”. Dr Lown is sceptical about the good this would do, but good-naturedly agrees. There’s no way of knowing if it has an effect but perhaps it is like a pebble causing ripples in a pond, helping counter the war hype-narrative.
When I email to thank him, Dr Lown replies, “It was good to meet up. The result was immediately positive, a more than one-hour conversation with Mubashir and Zeenat in Lahore. Regrettably, Mubashir’s mood was pessimistic. I am surprised that Pakistan does not have a magazine that could unify the voices on the Left and lead to an effective movement. Without the Progressive, The Nation, The Monthly Review and a host of others there would not have been the Bernie Sanders phenomenon.”
Pakistan has several leftist magazines in various languages, I respond. But the low literacy level and different languages make unity more difficult. I add that I also spoke to Dr M. “He shared his pessimism. I shared my cautious optimism and he laughed and said I was sounding like I.A. Rehman”.
In Lahore after New Year 2019, I tie up with I.A. Rehman to visit Dr M. He is sunning himself on the back porch of his bungalow overlooking the lawn where the PPP was launched. We talk about Asma Jahangir and Pakistan politics. He asks about my family as always, particularly my daughter. I show him photos of Dr Lown and take one of him for Dr Lown. He wants to sit up for it, but I won’t let him.
Over the past year, direct contact between Dr Lown and Dr Mubashir becomes more sporadic. Dr Lown and his wife Louise both have health issues. Dr Mubashir is getting weaker. He stops checking email and then also stops picking up the phone that he always used to answer himself.
In May 2019, I visit Dr Lown again, this time taking along the senior Indian journalist Prem Shankar Jha, who is on a fellowship at Harvard working on climate change issues. After an update about Dr Mubashir and Pakistan, Dr Lown asks Jha about his work on alternative energy sources. He shows us the historic photos in his foyer, including Dr Lown with Gorbachev, Castro, and other political personalities.
Dr Lown’s secretary emails me with the sad news of Louise Lown passing away at home in November 2019. I send my condolences and try to call Dr Mubashir to let him know. He doesn’t pick up the phone. I hear he has been very ill but is recovering.
When I visit Lahore this past winter, I find him frailer. He still has visitors every day. An attendant brings tea and biscuits. Dr Mubashir holds court from his bed, listening to the political conversation. When he participates occasionally, his voice sounds surprisingly strong. On one visit, I get some time with him alone until another friend Khalid Mehboob, comes in. I share with them a statement on India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act, drafted by our friend Kanak Dixit in Kathmandu. Tea arrives.
Dr M says he will sign the statement, probably his last public endorsement. I am conscious this may be our last meeting. But I manage to get one more visit in, shortly before leaving for Boston in February. I return to a coronavirus-hit America.
On March 14, I wake up to the news of Dr Mubashir’s passing. I want to tell Dr Lown. I call and break the news to him gently, conscious of his own recent loss. He talks about Louise Lown in loving terms. “So much has happened… It’s upset the whole apple cart”.
He also expresses his sadness about his friend’s departure. “Mubashir was the ultimate human being with a profound commitment to human values. I will never forget him”.
Beena Sarwar is a journalist, editor and filmmaker. She tweets @beenasarwar. Her website can be found here.
Two demonstrations involving Indians and Pakistanis in Massachusetts once again foregrounded the common issues that the people of the two countries face.
The round red brick pit at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a favourite venue for street musicians, meet-ups, and demonstrations. Two recent demonstrations there involved Indians and Pakistanis, on February 29 and March 8 respectively, shortly before the coronavirus scare limited public gatherings.
The Indian demonstration was a multi-faith prayer and a protest against the violence in Delhi targeted against Indian Muslims. The Pakistani one was in solidarity with the women’s demonstrations, Aurat March, held in cities around Pakistan for International Women’s Day.
Having just returned from Pakistan, I attended both demonstrations. Winter still eclipsed spring. In below freezing air dissecting gloves, boots, hats and coats, people stood their ground doggedly with placards calling for peace and justice.
“Dravidians against Brahmanism” read a placard at the first event. Other placards proclaimed the word “peace” in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Hebrew.
A Wellesley College student at the second event said her mother asked her not to go because of the now-infamous slogan ‘Mera jism meri marzi’ (my body, my choice). She wrote it in Urdu on a placard she was making as we waited for people to show up.
I wrote ‘Mubarak ho, larki hai’ (Congratulations, it’s a girl) on my placard, a slogan used by a young woman and her husband at the Islamabad Aurat March. She has been putting off getting pregnant because she’s an athlete. The couple held up this placard celebrating a daughter’s birth in a society that pressurises women to start families but doesn’t rejoice if the baby is a girl.
Another mantra, ‘Dil mein beti, will mein beti’ (daughter in heart, daughter in the will) sounded good so I added that to my placard too. Then drew a clenched fist with bangles and came up with this slogan: ‘ChooriyaN hain, beri nahi’ (they’re bangles, not shackles). A familiar taunt flung at men perceived to be behaving in a ‘feminine way is ‘Chooriyan pehni hain?’ (wearing bangles?)
Beena Sarwar’s poster.
At the Indian event, I was one of the few Pakistanis, standing in solidarity with activists fighting the menace of retrogressive forces in India. Pakistanis have been fighting the mirror images of these forces for the past three decades or more. Yet many on either side prefer to point fingers across the border, looking away from oppression at home. It’s a matter of degrees, at different times.
The rights movements are inclusive, for and by people of different faiths, professions, ethnicities, genders, and socio-economic classes. In a broader sense, they counter injustice, oppression and fascism in various guises.
In India, rights activists stand not just for Muslims but also Dalits, Kashmiris, and other oppressed communities. One activist, born a South Indian Hindu, posts a countdown of the days since the Kashmir lockdown to WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages. He does this on a daily basis despite “warnings” (the platforms are now accessible to people in Kashmir). A couple of years ago, he got a little girl in Kerala to sing Pakistan’s national anthem, and a little girl in Lahore to sing India’s national anthem. How subversive can you get?
In Cambridge, two women at the February 29 demonstration recite the powerful poem ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’ (Everything Will Be Remembered). Aarti Sethi and Rajita Menon are not Muslim but they passionately owned the words written by the Indian Muslim poet Aamir Aziz after the mob violence against Jawaharlal Nehru University students in January 2020.
“This violence is anti-Muslim but it’s also anti-people,” says Dalit rights activist Suraj Yengde, author of the recently published bestseller Caste Matters.
Hypernationalists in India call rights activists traitors and “Pakistan-lovers” (that’s a bad thing?). There is similar propaganda against rights activists in Pakistan, including the Aurat March organisers.
An Indian woman I meet at the Pakistani demonstration could relate to the Aurat March agenda – equal rights for women, equal pay for equal work, end violence against women, end sexual harassment. But this agenda gets overshadowed by the ‘Mera jism meri marzi’ slogan, MJMM, from last year’s Aurat March, bandied out of context on social media and picked up by mainstream media. In much of public perception, the controversial slogans define the demonstrations for women’s rights. Hence the Wellesley student’s mother’s concern.
Controversial the slogan may be, but it was visible at Aurat Marches in several cities around Pakistan. The cheeky rallying cry recently inspired a rap song by the Chitrali-origin singer FiFi.
This defiance through music, humour and peaceful collective action is up against the status quo everywhere, including patriarchal systems of injustice and hypernationalist, militarist narratives. The upholders of these narratives like to point fingers at the ‘other’ while ignoring excesses and injustices at home.
And now they are in denial about the coronavirus outbreak. Whatever their religion, each claims their faith gives them immunity from the illness.
Lol. We have our version, you have yours. At the end of the day they’re the same. Science–deniers, misogynists, racist, homophobic, anti-democracy. Did I miss out anything?
— beena sarwar (@beenasarwar) March 16, 2020
The coronavirus doesn’t discriminate between religion, gender or other divisions. It has brought home a universal truth: Human beings are created equal. It is the power elites and the power structures they create that oppress. At the end of the day, it is this Goliath of oppression that the Davids of the world are up against.
David won that battle. The struggle continues.
Beena Sarwar is a journalist, editor and filmmaker. She tweets @beenasarwar. Her website can be found here.
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is funded by rival billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch from both sides of America’s ideological-political divide.
America’s newest foreign policy thinktank threatens to radically realign the politics of US national security. At a conference on Capitol Hill in late February, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft showcased what it calls its “transpartisan” left-right alliance of “realists”. Their goal is to drop democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention and stop the US from fighting “endless wars”.
Quincy, which launched in December 2019, has announced its intention to America’s political class that it will challenge the mentalities that have ruled US foreign policy since the 1991 Gulf war. Quincy favours what it calls “strategic restraint”, prioritising diplomacy, the US as a military backstop not as a global enforcer of first resort.
In many ways, but with important qualifications, it’s an approach that systematises elements of the gut instinct driving President Donald Trump’s approach to the world.
Revolving doors
Elite thinktanks normally keep a low profile but can radically shift American foreign policy, particularly during periods of crisis. They incubate big ideas and build elite networks that connect knowledge to political power. They also help shape a supportive public climate of opinion.
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Such institutions are peculiarly influential because America lacks a significant permanent civil service tradition. Thinktanks train future secretaries of state, assistant and deputy secretaries and the broader national security bureaucracy. They provide a perch for out-of-office appointees, a remarkable revolving door between knowledge and elite power.
The emergence of a new elite think tank, funded by rival billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch from both sides of America’s ideological-political divide, could, therefore, inaugurate a revolution in American foreign policy. Quincy unites the Koch Foundation’s libertarian opposition to big government and state power with the more chastened liberal internationalism of Soros’s Open Society Foundation, chastened because of the failure of liberal interventions to promote democracy.
That such forces have now combined to found a new thinktank indicates the depth of the crisis of American power. It’s a crisis driven by repeated foreign policy failures, a more challenging global environment of competitors and rivals and the rise of anti-war sentiment in American public opinion.
The Charles Koch Foundation has recently invested around US$25 million (£19 million) in key university programmes at institutions including Harvard, MIT and Tufts, to promote “strategic restraint” and the end of US primacy, the obsession with maintaining US global domination. I’ve written about how those programmes are training a new generation of graduates committed to realism, ready for appointment by future administrations.
If it comes to pass, such a foreign policy transformation would warrant comparison with the shift from isolationism to globalism that happened in the 1940s. This shift was assisted by the thinktank of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
The CFR sits at the very heart of the US foreign policy establishment that built, and guards, the post-1945 US-led international order. It will mark its centenary in 2021.
So it’s highly significant that Foreign Affairs – the CFR’s influential quarterly magazine – published an issue in February 2020 entitled, Come Home, America? It features an article by Quincy’s deputy director of research and policy, Stephen Wertheim, arguing “why America shouldn’t dominate the world”. Foreign Affairs has rarely, if ever, entertained such views in its pages since its launch in 1922.
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Retrenchment
Quincy’s recent conference in Washington, entitled A New Vision for America, was jointly hosted with the prestigious and influential liberal internationalist magazine, Foreign Policy.
I watched as speakers from across the Democratic and Republican party political divide, including the Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders Democratic primary campaigns, took the stage. Former US General David Petraeus, who led US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, argued against US withdrawal from key military theatres. Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna challenged this as the failed old model of US power.
It’s rare for leading politicians and military figures who appear to fundamentally disagree on America’s global role to share the same stage. It indicates not just the depth of the legitimacy crisis in the US political and foreign policy establishment, but its determination to respond by radically reforming America’s global posture.
Other panelists discussed topics including ending endless wars in the Middle East, democratising foreign policy and promoting international cooperation in an era of American restraint. Peter Beinart, an academic and journalist, argued that US foreign policy towards China should be driven by the interests of ordinary people who, unlike foreign policy elites, do not fear the rising power.
This breakthrough inaugural event suggests that Quincy may not remain on the fringes of the foreign policy establishment for long.
If Sanders is catching a wave of rising socialist sentiment at home, the Quincy Institute is providing intellectual and political backing for anti-military interventionists, like Sanders and, to an extent, Trump. The ideas are taking hold on both the left and the right in the 2020 presidential election.
The crises of legitimacy triggered by the Iraq war and 2008 financial crash appear to have set the stage for potentially radical change. We may be witnessing the opening acts of a dramatic ideological power shift in America’s global role to match that of the Sanders political revolution at home.
Inderjeet Parmar, professor in international politics, visiting professor LSE IDEAS, City, University of London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
