A LONE BATTLE AGAINST WAR...Ipsitaa Panigrahi

WRITER-ACTIVIST BINALAKSHMI NEPRAM HAS NOT ONLY GIVEN WOMEN SURVIVORS OF GUN-VIOLENCE A NEW LEASE OF LIFE, BUT ALSO A NEW REASON TO FIGHT.......

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It was Christmas Eve, the year was 2004.  I still vividly remember the events of that day.  The tragedy that befell the Wabgai Lamkhai village of Thoubal district in Manipur left a deep and lasting impression on my mind.  I was witness to the coldblooded killing of 27-year-old Buddhi Moirangthem.  Three gunmen dragged Buddhi from his car-battery workshop, and just shot him.  The entire incident took place within a span of few minutes.  Nobody knew why, who and what led the gunment to kill Buddhi; even his visibly-shaken wife Rebika Akram was clueless.

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Northeast India has been facing the onslaught of ethnic-based armed conflict since the late 1940s.  In fact, Rebika is not the only victim of this ethnic-based violence, the lives of thousands of women have been cut short because of the gun killings of their beloved husbands, fathers or sons, be it by state, non-state actors or unidentified gunmen.

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During my formative years, I thought all this was quite normal.  But witnessing it at such a close range, shook me hard and led me to form the Manipuri Women Gun Survivor Network (MWGSN).  The formal launch of the Network took place on April 29, 2007, in Manipur's state capital Imphal.

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I guess I was born to do something like this.  I remember my father telling me that the day I was born, there was curfew in Imphal.  I now joke about it with my friends, saying that even an Army curfew could not stop me from coming out into this world.

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I grew up in the quaint little locality called Heirangoithong.  The Northeast is home to more than 70 major population groups and sub-groups, speaking approximately 400 languages and dialects.  Insurgency has for long engulfed this strategic region and has held development to ransom.  No other region of India, South Asia or the world must have seen such a proliferation and mushrooming of militant outfits and this region has.

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But it was only when I cam to New Delhi that I realise the enormity of the situation.  I then stumbled upon a UN document that was published in 1997 titled "Trafficking in Small Arms and Sensitive Technologies".  That document combined with a white paper on small arms written by the Canadian government inspired to research the origins of armed conflict and arms proliferation in my society.

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I conducted research for over two years and in 2002 published my research findings as a book titled South Asia's Fractured Frontier (New Delhi, Mittal Publications, 2002).  I found that 57 types of small arms had been identified, which have flooded Northeast India in the past few years.  The weapons came from China, Pakistan, Belgium, Thailand, Russia, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, Afganistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Burma and of late, Israel.  The effect of this small arms proliferation has been alarming.  Various young people have taken up the path of gun violence resulting in death, decay and destruction in various fields - Socially, politically and economically.  Every year 3,00,000 people are killed because of small arms.

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MWGSN attempts to lift women from the trauma.  It helps women survivors of gun violence find ways to heal the scars that decades of living under the shadow of guns has caused to the community.  It is the first initiative of its kind in India.  MWGSN assists women in small-scale entrepreneurial work.

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I owe it to my parents and the Manipuri society for what I am now.  I was born in Manipur's soil and despite the difficulties, my parents struggled to raise my siblings and me to do our best for the society.

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I am presently working as secretary-general of India's first civil society organisation working on conventional disarmament called Control Arms Foundation of India.  However, no achievement is enough till peace and development comes to Manipur and its neighbouring states.

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It pains me to see so much conflict, infighting and bloodshed.  I firmly believe that the youth of Manipur and the Northeast region can change the destiny of our region.  Each one of us can contribute in our own little way and to do that, I believe in working with women and the outh.  I spend time in our khungangs (locality) and far off villages to see in what ways we can all work together to help bring about a positive change.  This is true even when I am abroad, say in London or New York, where I keep meeting several Manipuris who live and work there.

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I firmly believe that youth and women have a powerful role to play in bringing about a world that is free from conflict.  Through my research, writing and committed work, I live my dreams of striving for a world that is free from hunger, want and war...  (as told to IPSITAA PANIGRAHI)

The Art Of Giving And Receiving_ PETER JONES

As the Governor of the Bank of England wades into the fray, it does not seem too much to ask of bankers to make it clear that they are spending a portion of their bonuses on the Big Society.  Those who already are must overcome their modestry and let us know about it.

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Euergesia - "benefaction, philanthropy" - was a virtue of the well-born Greek.  Many inscriptions and statues, erected by the euergetist to himself or by a grateful people, attest the practice.  The culture spread to Rome.  Over 11 years, Pliny the Younger spent two million sesterces on his home town in benefactions.

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Discussion about the theory of giving was intense.  In general, euergetism was personal and reciprocal: it served the interests of the giver - everything from patriotic display to political self-advancement - as well as that of the recipient.  But in fifth-century B.C.  Athens, radical democrats thought a lavish benefactor might be seeking political advantage.  So they invented the leitourgia (out "liturgy"), under which the 300 richest citizens in any years were ordered to subsidise state activities.  Greeks then started to argue that the generous man did not look for a return.  But this meant that, if one was done a good turn, one should refuse on principle to respond.  If so, did this make receiving the benefit a nuisance?  Some argued it did.  To get out of this bind, the Roman Stoic Seneca defined a beneficium as "an action which gives pleasure and finds pleasure in so doing, from a natural and spontaneous inclination".  Seneca does agree that "everyone who serves another has thereby served his own advantage" but goes on to insist that the advantage consists not in what one gets back, but from the fact that all virtue is its own reward.  Aristotle by contrast drew an analogy with the artist, who rejoices in something he has created.

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A famous Greek benefactor, T. Claudius Atticus, offered to hand over his vast fortune to the emperor Nerva.  "Keep it", said Nerva, "and use it well".  Come on, you bankers, do the same: prove you are a load of euergetists.  You can start with launch of www.classicsforall.org.uk.... By arrangement with the Spectator...

How Gandhi became Gandhi... GEOFFREY C. WARD

Some years ago, British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930.  French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.  A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

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But wasn't it a central tenet of the Mahatma's teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

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"We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji's birthday,"the secretary answered, "as a symbol to show that we understand his message."

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Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated.  Most Americans - many middle-class Indians, for that matter - know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley's Academy Award-winning screen portrayal.  His was a mesmerizing performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man.  Who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha, a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.

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It is this last avatar that interest Joseph Lelyveld most.  Great Soul  concentrates on what he calls Gandhi's "evolving sense of his constituency and social vision", and his subsequent struggle to impose that vision on an India at once "worshipful and obdurate".

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This is not a full-scale biography.  Nor is it for beginners.  Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi's life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is helpfully divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it's sometimes harder than it should be to follow the shifting course of Gandhi's thought.

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But Great Soul is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, naunced and clear-eyed.  The two decades Gandhi spent in South Aftrica are too often seen merely as prelude.  Lelyveld treats them with seriousness they deserve.

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"I believe implicitly that all men are born equal", Gandhi once wrote in the midst of one of his campaigns against untouchability.  " I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch".

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It actually took a long time for the Mahatma to turn that implicit belief into explicit action, lelyveld reminds us.  When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-0\old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in a dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics.

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Initially, Gandhi was simply affronted that discriminatory laws and bigoted custom lumped educated well-to-do Indians like him with "coolies", that impoverished mine, plantation and railroad workers who made up the bulk of the region's immigrant Indian population.  The non-violent campaigns he waged to bring about equality between Indians and whites over the next 20 years would lead him to advocate equality between Indian and Indian, first across caste and religious lines and then between rich and poor.

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Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the "four pillars on which the structure of swaraj would ever rest":  An unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of non-violence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India's approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the the evil concept of untouchability.  Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi's noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.  

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He made a host of enemies along the way - orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary.  But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader who saw the Mahatma's non-violent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best.  He even objected to the word - Gandhi coined for his people - "Harijans" or "children of God" - as patronizing; he preferred "dalits", from the Sanskrit for "Crushed", "broken".

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Sometimes, Gandhi said Indian freedom would never come until untouchablility was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after Independence was won.  He was unapologetic about that kind of inconsistency.

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As lelyveld has written in Move Your Shadow, "Gandhi had hoped to bring about India's freedom as the moral achievement of millions of individual Indians, as the result of a social revolution in which the collapse of alien rule would be little more than a byproduct of a struggle for self-reliance and economic equality".  Foreign rule did collapse, in the end, "but strife and inequality among Indians worsened".

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Gandhi is still routinely called "the father of the nation" in India, but it is hard to see what reamins of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his "nimbus".  His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned.  Hindu-Muslim tension still smoulders just beneath the uneasy surface.  Untouchability survives, too, and stand-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothes Mahatma wherever dalits are still crowded together.

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Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired.  The real tragedy of his life, lelyveld argues, was "not because he was assassinated, nor becuse his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer's heart.  The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his worlds."

......................... GEOFFREY C. WARD, a biographer and a screenwriter for documentary films, spent part of his boyhood in India and is currently writing a book about Partition....

GREAT SOUL CONCENTRATES ON WHAT HE CALLS GANDHI'S 'EVOLVING SENSE OF HIS CONSTITUENCY AND SOCIAL VISION', AND HIS SUBSEQUENT STRUGGLE TO IMPOSE THAT VISION ON AN INDIA AT ONCE 'WORSHIPFUL AND OBDURATE... IT IS A NOTEWORTHY BOOK... VIVID AND NAUNCED...........

The Blood Patriot... Shankar Roychowdhury

"Ittehad, Itmad, Qurbani" (Unity, faith, sacrifice) _ Motto of the Azad Hind Fauj (The National Army)

The 114th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose - recently commemorated on January 23, 2011  - is an appropriate occasion to remember him and the Azad Hindu Fauj.  On this occasion, the government of West Bengal declared that the day would henceforth be observed as Deshprem Diwas, or Patriotism Day.  The implied paradox that patriotism could be reduced to an annual one-day event seemed to escape notice.  If patriotism is not to be the last refuge of the scoundrel, it has to be a full-time job, without weekends or holidays.

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Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was a patriot, perhaps one of the greatest freedom fighters India's struggle for independence has produced.  He remains an unblemished and unchallenged icon for a cynical, disillusioned generation in search for role models.  On the international stage, Netaji keeps company in the pantheon of soldier heroes like Simon Bolivar, Jose de San Martin, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Ho Chi Minh, an aspect downplayed in India, especially by the ahimsa establishment, whose votaries claimed exclusive credit for non-violence for bringing Independence to this country.

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There have always been murmurings of an unspoken conspiracy of silence to keep Netaji at a profile lower than the "conformist" freedom fighters.  Earlier, the Indian Left had reviled Netaji during the 1940s as an Indian Quisling, heaping opprobrium upon him for collaborating with the Axis powers against their beloved spiritual homeland, the Soviet Union.  The Indian National Congress - India's Grand Old Party dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi duopoly - viewed Bose as a threat to the establishment and successfully manipulated his exit from the organisational hierarchy.

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Now, over the past few years, the very same political class which had earlier denigrated him or sought to sideline him is scrambling to retrace steps and re-appropriate Netaji for their political agendas, especially as the next Assembly elections in West Bengal looms closer.  Those who had done their best to consign him to oblivion after Independence, have now rediscovered his electoral weightage and are strenuously attempting to reconfigure Netaji as one of their own.

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Netaji's greatest achievement was the revival and revitalisation of the Indian National Army (INA) after the initial pioneering effort in 1941 by Capt. Mohan Singh failed to fructify.  Under his inspirational leadership the INA  became India's Mukti Bahini, seeking to confront the country's colonial overlords militarily for the first time since the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857.  "Chalo Dilli" was no street slogan for political processions, but a proclamation of grand strategic intent, though achievement of the objective had all the prospects of a hard long war.

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West Bengal has appropriated Netaji as its own illustrious son, though his birth place and initial education were in Orissa and the INA  has created had few, if any, exclusive linkages with Bengal, except in individual capacities.  The INA recruited extensively amongst the Indian diaspora in what is today Southeast Asia, but their core fighting strength was fashioned out of the wreckage of the British-Indian infantry battalions incarcerated in Japanese prison camps after debacles in Hong Kong, Malaya and the retreat from Burma.  These included illustrious entities like 1/14 Punjab (now 5 Punjab of Pakistan Army), and 2/17 Dogra and 2/18 Garhwal Rifles, both adorning the post-Independence Indian Arm.  These were trained professional infantry and there was thus a strong leavening of the traditional British martial classes in the INA.  But they were totally intermixed into what today's class-regimentalised Indian Army would designate as "all India, all class" units, while the Bahadur Group of the INA  commanded by Col. Shaukat Hayat Malik can lay strong claims to be the earliest ancestor of the special forces in the Indian Army, the Navy and the Air Force.

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The initial offensive of the INA was incorporated into Operation U-Go launched by the Japanese 15th Army under Gen. Renya Mutaguchi in 1944 in the Imphal-Kohima region on the Indo-Burmese border.  From this liberated zone inside India the INA planned to revert to a guerrilla mode and infiltrate into the strategic depths of India's eastern region in Assam and Bengal, to build up a low-intensity campaign in the interior exploiting anti-British sentiment fanned by the Great Bengal Famine raging at the time, while the Japanese hammered won the front door.  The ultimate outcome for India if Japan had emerged victorious can only be speculated on, but the history of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere which Japan sought to establish in Asia does not make, for comforting reading.

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The post-Independence Indian Army is the spiritual and temporal heir of two armies - the British Indian Army and the Indian National Army.  From the former, it has imbibed almost every aspect of its functioning, mannerisms and attitudes; from the latter, nothing.  Its principal opponent, the Pakistan Army, is a highly Islamicised military which uses terror as a weapon of state.  Is there any matching military and spiritual doctrine to provide sustenance for an avowedly secular Indian Army, now mired in moral distress as well?  In the 64th year of the nation's Independence, the modern Indian Army must introspect deeply upon its Azad Hind Fauj heritage which stressed patriotism as a way of life, something with far more substantial foundations than the mere regimental loyalties which have served so far.  The true heritage of Netaji and the INA, which goes well beyond the mere military and into the spiritual, ethical and emotional region of military motivation, will provide succour.  The teachings of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose must become required study material in its professional institutions, to motivate the Army and prepare it for the future in an increasingly turbulent environment..... 

............... GEN. SHANKAT, ROYCHOWDHURY is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament