Join the debate!

(Below is a discussion on the Muslims in India in light of the Sachar Committee Report that Manzoor Ali and Roshni Sengupta, Research Scholars at JNU had over Google chat. There is no end to a discussion or debate. Please join us!)

Roshni: hi...how are you?
Manzoor: yeah, i m fine, what about u?
Roshni: have you been able to get your hands on a printed copy of the Sachar report?
Manzoor: not exactly, thanks to BJP, they have held the whole parliament at ransom, yaar
Roshni: i know...they are disgusting...now advani is saying that he wants to become the PM...idiot...
Manzoor: i fear that Sachar report will soon meet the fate of the Gopal Singh report
Roshni: yes...unless the government takes a strong stand and does not give in to the BJP...they are always looking at opportunities to oppose and create a furore...the terrible thing is also that they are slowly but surely getting back into their hard hindutva line...after ‘India shining’ failed and they were toppled...not that they left it anyway...
Manzoor: Gopal Singh committee, was also formed by Congress, this time too looking at their past record of political unwillingness, i think Congress has no guts to do anything about this report too…
Roshni: absolutely...they are never willing to venture into troubled waters...but they have a great platform…you see the report has revealed that the charge of Muslim appeasement that the BJP has been charging them with is false...the report attests this fact...they can get back to the opposition and make their position clear...i don't know why they are not doing it...
Manzoor: this report is also against the Congress in some ways, if u look at it the other way round. they have ruled this country for 45 yrs, and Muslims get down to 3% from 35% in employment. .what they have done for Muslims is pretty clear.
Roshni: true...that is why i am saying that this is a good opportunity for them to clear their name....this is the time that they should get back to the BJP...tell them that see this is what has happened...and Muslims need to be helped...
and then they can get down to business...if they want to do it that is...
BJP has no locus standi on this at all...
Manzoor: communists should hold their own position. Even though performance in Bengal is not so encouraging. but we r accepting this fact and doing lot more in Bengal for the betterment of Muslims.
Roshni: that is exactly what i am saying...look there is no way for the Muslims in India if the concerned parties do not come together and form a consensus of some kind on their upliftment and development...and the BJP is not one of them...the Left has to take the lead...and try and do something...like what is being done in Bengal..
Manzoor: yes, consensus is pre-requisite for any political progress. I think major regional parties like SP, BSP, TDP, DMK, should and must come together, under the pioneership of the Left parties. definitely, left have to play a major role in that. but that should not be restricted to Bengal. when left can rise so extensively in Maharashtra against the Dalit killing issue, why not for Dalit Muslims in other parts of India? In UP, Bihar A.P etc.
Roshni: for the community as a whole...the leadership of the muslims cannot be left to sundry community leaders alone...what about the rest of the community...there will be no progress without political consensus. and for political consensus to be built the hindutva forces have to be kept out of power...that is the first pre-requisite....it has to be done...the next step would be to keep the coalition working...and then lead a sustained movement for equality and rights...very very clearly focussed on political, economic, and social rights ...similar to what Dr Ambedkar did in maharashtra...
Manzoor: but u know, left is not clear about dalit Muslim reservation. though they are opting a easy way out i.e. affirmative action. I know that reservation is not a solution to all the problems. but why there should be discrimination on the basis of religion. when a hindu dhobi is in SC list, a Muslim dhobi remains out of that…the irony must get resolved within the constitutional framework
Roshni: absolutely right...this dichotomy has to be addressed...that is exactly why i am not against reservations for the Muslims...if a Hindu or dalit can be given reservation, why not Muslims? secondly, why are only the Muslims left out of the reservation list?
Manzoor: that's needs constitutional amendment. It’s tough. But, u know many Muslims elite (Ashrafs) are against reservation, just because they will remain out side.
Roshni: right...and if there is going to be discrimination...then there better be positive discrimination....the people who speak for reservation on economic and not caste basis for the rest of India shy away when the same thing is demanded for the muslims...considering the fact that the Muslims constitute the poorest rung of the Indian social order next only to the scheduled tribes...
Manzoor: we have the Kerala model in which 99.2 % Muslims are under reservation and belongs to state OBCs List, then we have Karnataka Model where Muslims' have special representation. then Bihar and Tamil Nadu Model. we can incorporate these models at the central level with necessary changes
Roshni: but one thing is heartening to see...the southern states are doing better as far as development of muslims is concerned...in fact the difference is discernible if one travels down south...say hyderabad...the Muslim community there seems to be much better off than their counterparts in say UP or Gujarat...same is the case with Kerala...so models are available for replication...only the political will is required...
Manzoor: that's partially true, in the context of A.P. the index of social progress is bad in case of Muslims. poverty is deep rooted in the A.P. hinterland. Most Muslims are landless labourer.
Roshni: well that is true for all states...be it in south or in the north...the overall situation is dismal and things can only get better from here...so certain pragmatic and feasible steps have to be taken...by the political class...irrespective of the opposition of the BJP...
Manzoor: yes, but i m talking about muslims of A.P. in comparison with the Muslims of other states.
Roshni: yup i get your point...the situation is only slightly better...Muslims are landless labourers in most states across India with a small elite....then what about the furore on the PMs comments that the minorities should get first access to resources? this is exactly why Muslims need first access to resources...from now on at least...because they have not had any...access that is...
Manzoor: you know BJP will remain RSS, as a donkey can't be polo horse.
Roshni: you are absolutely right...donkey will remain a donkey no matter what...but now the horses should not become donkeys and try to become polo horses....and do some work...for a change...

Bush takes away citizen's rights

The following is a comment on the Military Commissions Act signed recently by Bush and foisted upon the people declaring almost 12 million Americans (and non-Americans) as citizen's without rights. Not only does the Act suspend the right to appeal against forced confessions, illegal confinement, and torture, it also revokes the basic structure of the American consitution. Anyone now could be arrested are incarcerated without providing any reason for doing so.

More such comments and critiques could raise a worldwide alarm against the Great Satan. This is one such attempt.

Now then, it is easy to decide who is winning the lofty War on Terror, Bush or Osama! Read on...

Year One of the Empire
Bush: Resistance is Illogical
by Juan Cole, http://www.juancole.com/

Bush and a supine, cowardly Congress shredded the US Constitution on Tuesday, abolishing the right of a court review (habeas corpus) for some classes of suspect. Suspect, mind you, not proven criminal.

In other words, we have to be confident that George W. Bush is so competent, all-knowing, and inherently just that we can just trust him. If he says someone is an enemy combatant, then he or she is. No need to check with a judge about why he or she is being held. And then Bush can have the suspect tortured to make him confess, and can convict him on the basis of the coerced confession, all in secret.

This law creates two classes of persons inside the United States, citizens with rights and non-citizens (12 million persons? Equivalent to the entire state of Michigan!) without rights.
Basically, Bush can issue them what the French kings used to call lettres de cachet.:

' In French history, lettres de cachet were letters signed by the king of France, countersigned by one of his ministers, and closed with the royal seal, or cachet. They contained orders directly from the king, often to enforce arbitrary actions and judgements that could not be appealed. . .'

We Americans made a revolution against such arbitrary practices of the French and other Empires.

Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution says, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

I look out my window. I don't see a general Rebellion or an invasion by a foreign power. The conditions, under which the right of the imprisoned to demand that a court establish whether
there are genuine grounds to hold him is suspended, are absent.

The law is unconstitutional.

Moreover, our founding documents did not admit of a distinction among human beings with regard to rights. The Declaration of Independence says:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

All men here means all human beings. It says they are all created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. All of them. Not some of them.

Of course we have had these periods of neo-Monarchy and temporary insanity before in our history. There was the Alien and Sedition Act, and the Red Scare after World War I, etc.

King George came on O'Reilly and said that it is "illogical" to disagree with his policies in Iraq and branded arguments that he is drifting along without a plan "propaganda."

Bush sounds more and more like the Borg every day. I swear to God, next we are going to get up in the morning and hear him proclaim, "Resistance is futile!"

So of course eventually Bush-think will lead to attempts to cure those of us who are critical of him of our illogicality, and to suppress our "propaganda." We'll all be right-thinking non-propagandists after a little water-boarding. You say we don't have to worry about that because we are citizens? But what is to stop Bush from declaring you an enemy combatant and stripping you of your citizenship? And then keeping you away from any civil court where those letters of cachet can be challenged?

The Republic is Dead, Long Live the Republic.

Bad boys

I have been a fan of the Pakistan cricket team for a while now. Ever since I started following the game closely and avidly, on television, in newspapers and magazines, on the Internet. Life now is incomplete without cricket. So controversies surrounding the team are not new to me. The Pakistanis have always had a reputation of being the bad boys of world cricket. From bowling spearheads Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, and Aquib Javed binging on ganja on a Caribbean beach to Shoaib Akhtar and other quickies being called for throwing, chucking, and ball-tempering, Pakistan has been through it all.

The speed at which the cricket board replaces coaches, both overall and bowling, is almost a joke now. The to-be or not-to-be captaincy saga also did not come as a surprise. What did was the manner in which the cricket board reacted. Not that the Indian board fares any better. But the Pakistanis take the cake as far as bad management is concerned. Now Bob Woolmer, the man who has been with the team through the ball-tampering mess and the captaincy imbroglio, at the same time lifting the side out of the doldrums in terms of sheer grit and high quality performance was also seen to be under a cloud. A recent report however quashed those rumours, thankfully for the team, and for the board.

The doping accusations, I must admit were a shock. Really. Shoaib Akhtar, thanks to his starry airs and his bohemian lifestyle, as well as the fact that he is the fastest bowler of the cricket ball on the planet, has been for long been under the scanner. His rockstar ways have never gone down well with the Pakistan Cricket Board. Mohammad Asif was more of a surprise. That a young man of 23 who has received such stupendous success in a short time and was seen as all set to claim the place the Waqar Younis’ and the Wasim Akrams’ left in the team would do something as foolish as dope is unpardonable. Why throw everything away in this fashion? He may have been ignorant about the contents of the medication he was consuming to get over injuries. Perfectly possible. I don’t know what reasons the two dope-tainted players will present before the three-member inquiry commission they are supposed to face in a day or two. But the scars shall remain…there’s no question about it.

Lage raho Gandhi

Just yesterday, I came across this very ill-informed critique of the cult movie, Lage Raho Munnabhai and its equally successful prequel, Munnabhai MBBS on a blog. If you ask me, the movie is probably the best thing to happen to the year 2006 after of course the trail-blazing Rang de Basanti. The fiery piece painstakingly argued that the reason why India has lagged behind all these years, politically, economically, and well, socially was precisely because of the very ideals that Gandhi propagated in his lifetime inspiring a whole generation. Gandhigiri, for the writer is a strict no-no in today's day and age of global progress, liberalization, cut-throat competition, and ritual communalization of the society. After all, India was surging ahead and there should not be place for complacency, slackness, and humility when the world was gazing at us with expectant eyes. A neo-liberal critique of a post-modern montage on screen? Perhaps!

Why would anyone want to jeopardise India's bull run by making a retrogade film like Lage Raho...? Let me give you some answers. The film posits truth as a virtue. In a world where a behemoth goes to war with a rather tiny piece of territory on the basis of a heap of sheer lies, truth becomes a rare commodity. The only WMDs in Iraq were the ones dropped with impunity by the Great Devil and his associates. That Bush lied to the world to bomb Iraq is not a secret, nor is the fact that more deaths have occured in that battered country from malnutrition, disease, insurgent and enemy gunfire, and of course torture than all American military casualities ever. So ah, the Americans lied, went to war and killed thousands! So Lage Raho... says 'truth is God'. Gandhi also said the same. What is wrong with that? Could lives in Iraq have been saved if Bush had not lied? Maybe. Trust Bollywood to teach the Amrikans some lessons. Even though we never realise the potential of our own cinema, it could actually give good old Hollywood a run for its money. And in turn drill some sense into the brainless morons who run, or ruin, America.

Back home, hundreds of murder cases pile up in courts. Even as the Jessica Lall and the Priyadarshini Mattoo cases capture eyeballs, the fact that eye-witnesses were bought over to lie in court stares everyone in the face. A recent Tehelka expose relates how Shayan Munshi, Karan Rajput and Shiv Das, all key witnesses to the gruesome murder, were paid hefty sums of money to either shut up or retract statements. In short, they were told to lie...or else! So there! Some semblance of truth could give justice to a dead young woman. But a bag full of untruth is all she has got. Even in death, truth has evaded Jessica. So is Gandhigiri relevant? I guess so.

The importance of being Musharraf

President Musharraf's memoirs have created quite a flutter worldwide. Understandable, considering his stature and the volatile situation of the country he heads. The lukewarm response that the book has recieved in India was also not way off the mark from what seers, literary pundits, foreign policy experts, leading lights of the publishing world, and others inclined to comment on everything from food to the overtly flimsy grounds of X's divorce had predicted. After all this man is the supreme commander of a country seen as everything from devil incarnate to enemy state to the harbinger of all evil in the world. The neighbour is seldom loved, in this case often reviled except when the overwhlming force of the game of cricket blankets everything down and raises a toast to subcontinental unity.

But that's beside the point. The assertions he makes in the book about the misadventure in Kargil too are not the most earth-shattering thing to happen to international politics in the past few months. One must agree and endorse that the Indian armed forces were done in by a massive intelligence failure. However, the deeds of the General cannot be condoned since he parlayed the hills with army colleagues disguised as mujahideen, all under the hawk eyes of erstwhile Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief, who has misled the world, and particularly India in claiming that he was unaware of the goings on at Kargil.

One must also agree that the man has taken an irrevocable risk in laying bare his soul on Pakistan-US relations. The fact that Richard Armitage, the former Under Secretary of State and senior Republican politico obviously threatened the Pakistan establishment with dire consequences bordering on death and pillage unless they hopped on to the War on Terror-Infinite Justice bandwagon has been highlighted by the President of Pakistan in the book. There are chances that he has brought upon himself the wrath of Bush and his cronies by naming them in a public document.

President Musharraf nevertheless has mitigated most of the danger by shaking hands with Bush, appearing on late night TV in the US, and embarking on a massive publicity drive which included the release of the book in New York. Or perhaps one would think so. What direction the storm in the teapot created by the revelations in the book will take, only time will tell.

Was the book mistimed in terms of the meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the joint statement? Experts feel so. And why not? Here is a man who is admitting his involvement and that of his army in a war ostensibly won by India where the Indian side is seen as a victim of terrorism and conspiracy. The strategic implications of what the General has said in his book are immense. But the Indian establishment has been strangely quiet on the issue and not raised a hue and cry about the contents of the book so as to hamper the ongoing peace process. Intelligent!

There are, therefore, obvious merits of reading In the Line of Fire even if one does not agree with what the President has to say. After all, no other book seems to be as relevant to the contemporary politics of South Asia. The Indo-Pak relationship, punctuated by two full and one half war, documented in the words of President Musharraf has enough historical significance for people to engage with. For a book of this nature is as much part of the composite dialogue as the secretary level meetings and other discussions.

Calcutta!

Kolkata is a strange city. I for one am quite fond of using the old Victorian intonation for the part-dilapidated, part-growing metropolis, if you could call it that. The growth, measured solely in terms of grand multiplexes and swanky shopping plazas, seems to be, in places, suspended in time. Not that someone like me should complain. I am quite satisfied with snaking through narrow Calcutta lanes, with monolithic, soot-blackened walls lining the sides, green and brown windows behaving themselves to allow cycle-rickshaws, auto-rickshaws and even taxis to maneuver through them.The wall faces are rather steep, sometimes children peep through them, at other times men of various ages look around for friends to sit down with a cup of sweet tea and spend the next few hours engrossed in the favourite Bengali pastime, adda while their wives are ensconced neatly in kitchens preparing for the evening meal. Food for one is one of the lifelines of Calcutta along with the Metro and of course, the Howrah Bridge. The old neighbourhoods bear the undisputed mark of past masters like Tagore and Satyajit Ray. I am reminded of the ubiquitous city detective Feluda and the manner in which Ray (the writer) described Calcutta in the stories.The rumbling houses bear the telltale signs of a bygone era, a time of precocious wealth and grandeur that has now given way to grime, filth and dust. The old city is crumbling. True, it is crumbling. But the crumble is worth its while even when erstwhile towns like Bangalore and Hyderabad have transformed into tech-savvy dream destinations.Calcutta is beyond compare. Beyond compare even with the New Town area that is witnessing the first pangs of unmitigated commercial growth. In its oldness and lazy languidity lies the promise of a new tomorrow. The youth is brimming with confidence. There is urgency in their stride. But somewhere they lack the passion of a Mumbaikar or Delhiite to compete with the rest of the country. There are areas of improvement and they, one is sure are working towards making sense of the world…as they do day after day while in the midst of an adda.The Wipro SEZ is a good beginning. One is however fearful of this uniquely beautiful city losing its old-world charm, swamped by skyscrapers and glass cascades. But again, the indomitable spirit of the Calcuttan – that comes to the fore each year as the Goddess Durga makes her way into the city, spends five days and walks into the sunset – is at work to preserve and secure an inviolate space. A space that takes me back to an age that I can never be part of but can glimpse…only in this city called Calcutta.

Terror and the Muslim: Hindi cinema’s proclivity to communal representation

A frantic Amaan rushing towards safety, followed by a blood-thirsty group of rioters, hauled into a speeding car by Murad Khan – a poignant and chilling sequence that captures the essence of Khalid Mohammad’s Fiza, arguably one of the finest films produced by the Indian film industry on the construction of the Muslim identity and terrorism. The fact that following the rescue by Khan Amaan decides to immerse his grief in the humbling stench of burning gunpowder and picks up the gun to avenge his humiliation completes the story of Fiza. The young man sucked into the vortex of terrorism, then trains against a backdrop of fire and grime, only to finish with a bullet in his heart, shot by his self-righteous sister who cannot bear to see her only brother going the wrong way.

After Fiza, in the same year came another Muslim-terrorism flick aptly named Mission Kashmir. Here the allegory focuses on the Muslim’s proclivity to turn anti-national at the first given chance. The protagonist, Altaaf – a wayward Kashmiri youth – trained in Pakistan and crossing over into Indian territory is a sad caricature of an infection attacking the secure body politic of the country – an indistinguishable element of the discourse of terrorism in India. The elimination of Altaaf is akin to cleansing the Indian ethos of all anomalies and inconsistencies propagated by one community alone – the Muslim. The Indian national and the Muslim terrorist represented by Altaaf are locked in a conflict of identities.

Both these films, and John Matthew Matthan’s Aamir Khan starrer Sarfarosh could be termed as the neo-patriotic genre of films that took the industry by storm in the early years of this millennium. They not only represent the growing Hinduization of Indian cinema but also the upper caste tilt that all these films acquired perhaps with the exception of Mission Kashmir in which director-producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra was considerate enough to hand the mantle of the ‘good’ Indian to a Muslim character played by Sanjay Dutt who battles the ‘bad’ Pakistan-trained Muslim youth Altaaf.

This essay would try and bifurcate the essential elements of both Fiza and Mission Kashmir that identify the Muslim as a treacherous and murderous individual creating a false stereotype for the consumption of the masses, a good number of whom have a tendency to move toward Hindu nationalist formations. Cinema has the capacity to mould and fashion stereotypes like no other medium. The construction of the Muslim as a monster has proved to be ominous for the societal fabric that has been torn asunder by frequent conflicts between the Hindu and the Muslim communities, the former harbouring a stereotype about the latter perceptibly created by films like Roja, Fiza and Mission Kashmir.

As Neera Chandhoke (Chandhoke, 1999, 2) notes in her works, the current debate around secularism in India has been sparked off by two explosive political trends: first, the recurrence of communal riots between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority; and second, the rise and consolidation of what has been referred to as majority fundamentalism or hindutva. Glossing the ideology of hindutva, Chandhoke argues: ‘Cast in the mould of cultural nationalism, majoritarianism calls for the erasure of all specific identities and demands the constitution of a culturally homogeneous nation. And this is cause for concern, for cultural or organic nationalism, as history shows us, is constructed on a ritualized and systematic suspicion of strangers (i.e. minority groups) upon the privileging of one ethnic, linguistic or religious community, and on calls to exterminate ‘impurities' in the organic nation. In India, the project of hindutva does all this. It appeals to the mythic unity of the Hindu people, invokes an ahistorical version of a glorious Hindu past, disparages minority identities, and demands conformity and homogeneity in order to accomplish two tasks’ (Chandhoke, 1999, 9).

According to Chandhoke, the first project of hindutva is to establish the identity of the nation on the basis of a narrow definition of Hinduism; as BJP strongman L. K. Advani put it, ‘ India is essentially a Hindu country. My party emphasizes that India is one nation and not a multinational state’ (Chandhoke, 1999, 10). The second project of hindutva is the systematic and insistent denigration of minority communities. ‘In a tenacious, ordered, and subversive mode, the votaries of hindutva cast suspicion on the moods and motivation of the community against which hindutva is largely defining itself – the Muslims (and now Christians)’ (Chandhoke, 1999, 10).

Contemporary representations of Muslims in Hindi films position specific cultural and religious identities as both necessary and intolerable to the security of the Indian nation. The figures of the radically alienated Muslim, juxtaposed with the patriotic Muslim and Christian citizen, and the dominant, often unmarked Hindu show how difference is crucial to the stability of the Indian nation – but not excessive difference: the militant Muslim is the figure of an intolerable difference (Rai, Summer 2003, 3).

Knitting together the question of community identity to broader economic processes, Arvind Rajgopal has recently argued that negotiating the tensions between national allegiance and other, more local forms of identity becomes increasingly important with the progress of globalization (Rajagopal, March 2001, 273-282). These tensions stem from the resilience of ‘community’ as a locus of affiliation, one that resists the homogenizing impetus of capital by acting as a site of historic memory and a resource for alternative futures. As Rajgopal states, ‘The kinds of rights asserted here are distinct from the chiefly individual character of the rights sought [after] and contested in western society. Classical liberal theory is unable to recognize communities as political actors . . . rendering it incapable of coming to terms with the kinds of developments witnessed in the contemporary world.’

The use of cinema as a means of political mobilisation has long been acknowledged in the West, with the propaganda genre coming into existence before the Second World War and employed with maximum force during that war by both sides to discredit each other (Shukla, 2005). However, its possibility, in explicit terms, in Indian cinema, was never recognised, until recently, because of its rejection, by the critics, as a serious and meaningful medium. Kitsch, melodramatic, repetitive in its themes, Hindi cinema was relegated only to be a mode of popular entertainment. Indian film historian M Madhava Prasad (Prasad, 1998) writes of Indian Cinema as a not-yet-cinema, a bastard institution in which the mere ghost of technology is employed for the purposes inimical to its historic essence. Indeed, Indian films have always been studied for their lack of realism and multiplicity of melodramatic emotions, jovial endings, chance meetings, supernatural interventions, songs and dances.

All criticisms withstanding, it cannot be denied that cinema in India is extremely popular and ubiquitous in nature, which is made apparent, through the music that is played in people's homes, through the clothes worn on streets, weddings or social gatherings, as well as on the hoardings and the posters in the streets, on the magazines, on television and on the internet. Cinema permeates every aspect of Indian culture and is a part of everyday life, part of its habit and speech, dress and manners, background and foreground.

The Muslim as Traitor
One of the most mischievous and dangerous myths that have been actively engendered in India in recent decades is that the Muslim community as a whole is implacably violent, communal, terrorist and anti-national (Mander, 2004). It matters little that the ground realities are painfully different, of a minority community struggling against great odds, battling poverty, unemployment and discrimination, yet inextricably enmeshed in the pluralist socio-economic, cultural and political fabric of the land. The systematically demonised image of the Indian Muslim as jihadi and treacherous has been used as a stunningly effective instrument to manufacture hatred and consolidate the political support of increasing segments of the majority community, by creating and constantly fanning their insecurities. As these poisons of hatred and mistrust seep into more and more hearts, the Muslim community finds itself under siege, alienated, impoverished and in despair. This demonised representation of the Indian Muslim has been aided not just by deliberately distorted textbooks, but also by popular modes of communication, especially cinema. It is not by mere chance that in most Hindi films in recent times, Muslim characters appear mainly as anti-national terrorists, or violent members of the criminal underground.There is peril enough to pluralism truth and justice when these false and inflammatory stereotypes are deliberately fostered by mainstream film directors like Govind Nihalani co-writes and directs Dev, a film that powerfully reinforces each of these stereotypes and what is worse, lends to them a spurious authenticity. In the opening sequences of Govind Nihalini's recently released film, Dev, the lead protagonist, portrayed as a noble, large-hearted and resolutely impartial police officer, sets the tone by advising a delegation from the Muslim community to control madaris, which he alleges teach their students secession and jihad. Most independent investigation maintains the contrary, that whereas the majority of madaris focus far more as religious teaching than modern education, very few propagate violence, treachery or hatred. The film on the other hand, makes no comment on the web of schools fostered by the Sangh Pariwar, especially in rural and tribal regions, that actively foment hatred against minorities. The same police officer, who declares that for him the Constitution of India is his sacred Geeta, condones a police encounter of a kind that continues to recur, most recently in the Ishrat Jahan tragedy, in which an alleged terrorist is gunned down by the police in his home along with wife and infant child. The police officer’s own son is also depicted to have been killed earlier by Muslim terrorists. Nihalini claimed in many interviews that his film was inspired by recent communal events in Gujarat. However actually at every stage, he twists and distorts contemporary history. A large body of independent citizens reports by several of the most credible activists and jurists of India have established that the Gujarat carnage was planned over a considerable period of time by organizations of the Sangh Parivar, with tacit support of the state government. Instead the only build-up to the mass brutality that Nihalini depicts through almost one half of the film is of unscrupulous and manipulative Muslim politicians fostering disaffection and terrorism, leading eventually to the gruesome tragedy. The flashpoint for the carnage in the film, the parallel to the Godhra train incident, the tragic precursor to the communal frenzy that engulfed the north-western state of Gujarat in early 2002, is depicted to be a bomb blast at a Hindu place of worship, killing children and women. Nowhere does Nihalini acknowledge the doubts about how the Godhra train tragedy actually occurred. What is far worse, reminiscent of both Modi and Vajpayee, the large hearted police officer reminds an angry and disillusioned Muslim youth that it was this act of terrorist violence that led to the subsequent communal conflagration. The film fortunately acknowledges that the Chief Minister and senior police officials enabled the mass violence to continue unchecked by wantonly refusing to apply force to control the marauding mobs. However, nowhere is it acknowledged that this was a one sided genocide, targeting almost exclusively the Muslim community. Instead, violence is portrayed from both sides of the communal divide, and not surprisingly the first stone is shown as being cast by the Muslims. It is claimed that five times more Hindus died in police firings than Muslims. Innumerable enquiry commissions have established the reverse, that 70 per cent of people killed by police in police firings are Muslims.Even in the subsequent subversion of the justice system, with parallels to terrorizing of a Zahira Sheikh to not to file her FIR or the first information report and give evidence against the assailants, nowhere is guilt apportioned by Nihalini to the state government. Instead, once again it is the power hungry Muslim politician who pressurizes his own community to keep silent. Nihalini uses the device of ideological debates between two friends, both senior police officers, to examine the causes of communal violence in India. The communal police officer, unrepentant to the end, repeatedly labels Muslims as a 'traitor community' and his comments were received with stray applause in the cinema theatres. Opposition to his views by the principled police officer was muted, with reference to the legal and moral duties of the police officer, never to the fascistic mobilization and impact of Hindu communalism. The film redeems itself belatedly in the closing sequences in which the protagonist courageously defies illegal orders not to use force, and also compassionately gives refuge to a Muslim youth who is alienated and disaffected. To him he says, 'One dies the day that one witnesses injustice and yet does not speak out.'
The constant ‘Other’The careful construction of the Muslim as a traitor and a terrorist lends itself to use within the ambit of India-Pakistan relations. As Gaston Roberge writes, 'History of whatever type is always a vision that bears on the present' (Roberge, 1985, 133). This is particularly true of present relations between India and Pakistan, because they share a common history, especially the history of partition, which not only marked the birth of two separate nations, but, also of the hostilities between the two. Roberge continues, 'Cinema is the great interpreter of the past and constantly programmes the memory of its audience.' Thus, the way partition is remembered in Indian cinema certainly bears upon present attitudes towards Pakistan. The first visual reconstructions of the partition, besides documentaries on television were made by films like the Train to Pakistan, Gadar and 1947 Earth.

Partition and the other events of that period are still being reconstructed through the interpretation of events, sequences, causes and effects. The partition as an event in almost all its cinematic constructions has been portrayed as having two essential features; firstly it was purely a result of the demands of the Muslim League. Secondly, while accepting partition as a sad memory, India has moved on; Pakistan hasn't. Both premises are arguable, and are constructions of just a single perspective. It is these myths that the films now are reinforcing.

Isakaason and Furhammar argue, 'reality is rich enough to provide authentic material for the most disparate interpretations' (Furhammar and Isaksson, 1971, 168). It is just that these films represent only one perspective, which bars a proper understanding of partition and other historical events.

The second premise, that India has moved on although quite accurate, often skips over the reasons for this. It was easy for India to do this compared to Pakistan, because not only did it inherit the majority of resources of the erstwhile British Raj, it also established satisfactory terms by force, as in the state of Hyderabad and in Kashmir, where Nehru got the Maharaja to sign the instrument of access as a condition for military support from India. Pakistan did not have any such neat conclusions to the partition saga. Not only did it struggle with state building with the meagre resources it had, but also its claim to Kashmir, which was ordered by the UN to be put to a referendum was never respected by India. None of this is ever showed in any of the films.

Therefore history has been constructed on the cinema screen through the portrayal of certain selective events. Even if cinema is not the major source of information about history, it definitely influences its audience's perceptions of partition with this single and selective perspective. The second influence that these films can have is on the psychological health of the country. Isakaason and Furhammar write that ultimately propaganda is aided by man's underlying psychological need for moral value judgements in simple black-and-white terms. This need is most apparent in attitudes to political issues which are too complex and too momentous for most people's psychological resources, and which can only be coped with on a much simplified, ritual level.

This need is also apparent equally for complex cross-national issues, of which India has many. The issue of Kashmir itself is quite complicated and has been often simplified in black and white terms: Pakistan claiming it because it is a Muslim majority state, and India insisting on its right based on the Maharaja's instrument of accession. Within these black and white terms, the issue of Kashmiri independence, the involvement of foreign mercenaries and the UN's call for a referendum have been overlooked. These simplifications are reflected Indian films. Thus, most films portray one singular and simple version of India's righteous claim to Kashmir, Pakistan's meddling in the state's affairs and young Kashmiris being misguided.

Thus, the complex issue of Kashmir becomes simple, events like the Kargil war understandable and the Indian army's actions justifiable. These films, therefore, not only provide entertainment, they also satisfy the audience's moral and political desires by providing a tool to makes sense of what is going on and understand the actions of the governments of the two countries.

In the films of the India-Pakistan genre, then, Indians are peace loving, responsible and take a paternal attitude to the actions of an irresponsible, fundamentalist and tactless Pakistan. Thus, the films keep us happy by providing visual pleasures along with psychological satisfaction. This imagery of India versus Pakistan also helps to define India itself. For an ethnically diverse country like India, the lines of the nation do not neatly map on to its territorial borders. It is under such circumstances that the state has to use cultural instruments to symbolise an all-encompassing Indian nation above the linguistic, religious and racial differences.

To the traditional paraphernalia, the national flag, patriotic songs etc., Sumita S. Chakravarty adds the Bombay films, as they also do the ideological work of re-affirming the nation (Chakravarty, 2000, 233). Almost every film in the genre puts forward an idea of India that is deemed acceptable, normal and defines an essential 'Indianness'. Writing on the images of terrorism on Indian cinema, Chakravarty argues: ‘For while it is true that the films under consideration posit Indian terrorism as a futile exercise and show the inherent recuperability of the terrorist, they also refashion the nation-space itself into a liminal space of dreaming.’

Likewise, the films of the India-Pakistan genre, while reflecting upon the essential pointlessness of any of Pakistan's claims, generate a sense of an acceptable national ideology of what constitutes India and its priorities. We can draw a bit from each film and constitute this idea of India. For example, below we take a few dialogues from various films and see how those words sketch some aspects of an acceptable Indian identity (Shukla, 2005).
Maa Tujhe Salaam - Hum jiyo aur jeeno do ke sidhant par chalne waale log hain….Naa hum pehel karte hain, na karenge. (We believe in the principle of 'live and let live'. We have never made the first attack, nor, we ever will.) The Indian is thus portrayed as peaceful by nature.
Gadar - Is mulq se jyada Musalman Hindustan mein hain….aur unke dil hamesha yahi kehta hain,'Hindustan zindabad'. (There are more Muslims in India than this country. Their hearts always say, 'Long Live India'.) The Indian is secular and tolerant.
Pukar - …jung ka ailaan karo…saat din kah khel hai saat din ka. Aathwe din tumhare mulq ka naamo nishan iss duniya se mita denge. (Come on, declare a war!... It is all then a matter of seven days. On the eighth day, we would destroy your country from the face of this earth.) The Indian is a symbol of power and strength.
These portrayals of the nation provide for a common identification with the nation, which is an essential prerequisite for the maintenance of the nation state's unity. This is probably the reason why the problems of Hindu Muslim relations have always been omitted from any film that deals with India-Pakistan relations. While portraying traditional rivalry, there is an essential assumption of Hindu Muslim unity within India.

All this reinforces cultural hegemony, the process by which the audience and thus the people at large are persuaded to acquiesce to a given set of policies, rules, strategies or political consensus. Thus, the media can not only make people identify with certain notions of the Indian state as discussed above, but through the assertion and reassertion of these notions, persuade them to agree over policies, methods and strategies that the Indian state seeks to employ against Pakistan.

Many more films of the same theme have been released, flouting all rules of balanced portrayals. Lakshya (Aim) 2004 (directed by Farhan Akhtar), LoC Kargil 2004 (directed by J P Dutta), Deewar (Wall) 2004 (directed by Milan Luthria), Zameen (Land) 2003 (directed by Rohit Shetty), and Main Hoo Na (I am there) 2004 (directed by choreographer-turned-filmmaker Farha Khan), of which only Main Hoo Na portrayed Pakistan in a positive light, probably because it was released in a phase when India-Pakistan relations had cooled down to a great extent. Since then, here have been friendly initiatives between the two countries like the cricket matches, medical exchanges, release of prisoners of war etc. But, the important point is not whether Pakistan is being portrayed in a negative or a positive light, but that the films in India have come to speak of or influence the political mindset. While this phenomenon has long been acknowledged in the West, primarily due to the Hollywood's propaganda movies of the Second World War, its rise in South Asia is not only discernible, but as we witnessed, alarming.

Fiza: The oft-repeated story of the Muslim jihadi

In Fiza, the closely connected lives of a lower-middle class Muslim family are torn apart by the communal riots that devastated Mumbai in 1993. Widow Nishatbi Ikramullah (Jaya Bachchan) and her daughter Fiza (Karishma Kapoor) witness a Hindu mob attack the son Amaan (Hrithik Roshan) and murder his friends. In the narrative, the memory of the communal riots returns explicitly at least three times: in Fiza's initial narration, in Inspector Shingle's recounting – Shingle, the police inspector, reminds Amaan that since he is a Muslim he should go away to Pakistan and not make the Indian police look after Muslims like him.

It is through Amaan's narrative that we learn how he survived the riots by killing three men, and how he found what Saskia Sassen has called an ‘alternative circuit of survival’ by joining the jihad.

Amaan is recruited by Murad Khan (Manoj Bajpayi), the leader of the militant group struggling against, he claims, both Hindu and Muslim ‘tyranny, injustice and hatred.’ Khan teaches Amaan that far from a life of dignity, a dignified death is not even possible under the current system. The last retelling, filling in the little mysteries of Amaan's flight and Fiza's search, does not serve to suture the narrative, but opens the story to the new traumas that will be visited on the Ikramullah family as Amaan turns more and more to terrorist activities.

About the Mumbai riots, Amaan says to Fiza, ‘Everyone knew what was happening in that city, which everyone calls the most modern. How people were being massacred, how in the name of TADA [Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act] 20 women and old people were being molested and harassed.’ It is as if the horror of the event expands each time, until finally we understand that although still living, Amaan is in some fundamental way already dead. As he says in his final speech, just before he asks his sister to shoot him, ‘I died a long time ago on the streets of Mumbai.’ Amaan ostensibly is a subject haunted by his own ghost.

Trauma sets up the central problem that will be resolved through narrative, a resolution that reconstitutes the nation in the figure of the individualized and domesticated protagonist. In the climax of Fiza, we can see this resolution and reconstitution taking shape through the charged dialogue between brother and sister, Amaan and Fiza. Murad Khan, the militant commander, decides that two Hindu and Muslim political leaders (Singh and Syed) who try to suppress enquiry into the riots must be killed in order to prevent a Muslim-supported, Hindu-dominated coalition government. Khan chooses Amaan for the mission. Amaan trains his body and then kills the two leaders.

But Murad Khan never intended that he survive: as chaos once again engulfs Mumbai, Khan orders his men to kill Amaan. Instead, Amaan kills them. In the last scene of the film, with the police chasing him, Fiza confronts her brother (Rai, Summer 2003, 3).
Fiza: Throw the rifle away, Amaan.
Amaan: What will happen then? Another will pick it up.
F: So much hatred, Amaan? Forget all this. There is still time.
A: This is not hatred. It is a voice raised against hatred. They call those who die fighting in jihad martyrs [shaheed].
F: Jihad means a fight for truth, and the truth is that we are of this country and will remain part of it. Where is it written in the Koran that to win your point you must spill blood? What kind of warrior [mujahid] are you that you can't accept this fact? Right yourself, Amaan. Accept it. Look, only what is right will prevail.
A: What is right? What happened to me six years ago, was that right? Are these Singh and Syed people right? If they wanted to, they could fix all this. But they don't do that. They have power, but with that power they pit us against each other. Separate us from each other so they can retain their own seats of power. If such people are right then I have done no wrong. I am pure [pak]. I didn't take up this rifle as a hobby. It just came to me through a line of fate in my hand.

As the police take their position against Amaan, he begs his sister to shoot him, saying, ‘I died a long time ago on the streets of Mumbai. Let me die with honour.’ Fiza pulls the trigger. In this complex and heart-rending climax, Fiza stands for the assimilated Muslim and Amaan for that trajectory beyond the pale of normality. In their dialogue, honour can be taken ironically to mean both living by the duties of the proper minority citizen and dying with the cry of those who will never be allowed into the nation.

Bollywood’s Mission in Kashmir

Similarly, in Mission Kashmir, the drama centres on the possibility of Muslims being included in the nation. Inspector of Police Inayat Khan (Sanjay Dutt) seeks vengeance for the death of his son, who died due to circumstances arising from a fatwa issued by Islamic militants. Marshalling his police force, he dons the black mask of the militants and let’s loose a hail of bullets that not only kills the militants, but an innocent Muslim family as well. This killing, reminiscent of so much police repression and outright assassination of innocent Muslim peoples, forms the trauma that will return and expand through the narrative.

The only survivor of Khan's killing spree is a twelve-year-old boy, Altaaf, who before fainting from terror glimpses Khan's eyes behind the mask. Altaaf's nightmares keep the past present, as if Khan's eyes were keeping watch over a memory that can only be presented through fragments and repetition.

Trauma gives birth to a character that conflates the present with the past. In one nightmare, Altaaf (now the grown up Hrithik Roshan) blurs the object of his desire, his childhood sweetheart Sufi (Preity Zinta), with the memory of his foster mother, Neelima. In this scene, a dream sequence of the adult Altaaf, a certain struggle over Islam is at stake.

Altaaf: Why did you hang up on me, Sufi?
Sufi: I don't want to speak with you.
A: And so you put a picture of me on TV to get me killed?
S: What of all the people you've killed?
A: Sufi, why don't you understand? I'm doing all this for my religion.
S: I'm a Muslim, too. Islam doesn't permit the murder of innocent people. You're only taking revenge for your parents' death, Altaaf.
[As she walks away, he screams her name, demanding she stop; finally, he shoots her. When he turns her body over, he finds it is Neelima Khan.]
In this dream sequence, the loss of Altaaf's childhood love Sufi not only blurs with a subliminal desire for his foster-mother, but also foreshadows the moment when Altaaf accidentally kills Neelima. In a plot to avenge the murder of his family, Altaaf plants a bomb to destroy Inspector Khan, but it kills Neelima instead. Here, as in other cine-patriotic films, the memory of trauma functions to link the subject beyond the law of the nation to the sentimentalized ties of kinship, and then to rupture those very ties through the fragmentation of narrative.

Inspector Khan and his police force track down the Afghan mujahid, Hilal Kohistani, just in time to discover the real meaning of Mission Kashmir. The militants plan to blow up Hazratbal Masjid – a grand Muslim pilgrim site in Kashmir that houses strands of the Prophet’s hair – and the Shankaracharya Temple – a thronging Hindu religious site, and a pre-produced video tape will fix the blame on Hindu soldiers with the ultimate aim of inciting communal riots throughout India. In the climactic fight scene, Inspector Khan, the man who killed Altaaf's family, convinces Altaaf of the sinister plan.

Altaaf remembers his foster mother's words of love. She had said, ‘In reality, this war is not between you and Khan-saab. On one side is love [mohabbat], on the other side hatred [nafrat]. On one side is compassion [insaniyat] on the other side brutality. Between innocence and guilt, good and evil, and humanity [insaniyat] and bestiality [haivaniat]. What will remain of Kashmir – this is what you, only you have to decide. So think very carefully before firing that gun, Alaaf.’ As if suddenly humanized, Altaaf shoots Kohistani and foils the terrorist plot.

The movie ends with Altaaf, Inspector Khan (who now serves as his re-claimed foster parent) and Sufi reunited and at home. Thus, the trauma that haunted Altaaf is displaced and resolved through the elimination of Kohistani and the integration of a chastened, repatriated Altaaf into a new family structure. We must note the specific role of women, domesticity and humanization through memory and flashback that marks this genre of Hindi film. In a crucial sense, without the figure of Sufi and the memory of Neelima, Altaaf would be lost to the forces of evil.

In Sarfarosh, we find a similar problem and an analogous resolution. The narrative is launched through a trauma of familial violence. The patriarch of an extended Hindu family, on his way to give evidence against atankvadis or ‘terrorists’ is abducted, and the older son is killed. Ajay, the younger son, witnesses it all. The father is tortured and then returned to the family, incapacitated for life.

The complex narrative follows Ajay as he joins the Indian Police Service bureaucracy and goes on to become a feared officer who tortures suspected criminals. Finally, we see Ajay avenge the death of his brother and the maiming of his father by displacing the trauma onto the doomed terrorist Gulfam Hasan, a Pakistani agent posing as an entertainer, who smuggles arms into India trying to foment insurrection. The movie ends with Ajay promising his college sweetheart, Seema, that he'll be home for dinner as soon as he apprehends another insurgent criminal with his Muslim subaltern sidekick, Salim. It is imperative to suggest that all these narratives resolve the individualized memory of collective trauma in terms of the success (Ajay and Salim in Sarfarosh, and Inspector Khan and Altaaf in Mission Kashmir ) or failure (Amaan in Fiza) of reintegrating the liminal subject in the national family (where the family stands in for the nation).

What is also important about these Hindi films is that they show the forces of justice and humanity already blurring into the violence of injustice and inhumanity. As if a breach or gap had opened in the national imaginary, trauma allows for the emergence of a monster, fully formed and ‘incorrigible,’ one whose implacable cruelty will be pitted against all the forces of humanity and justice that the state represents. Indeed, both Inayat Khan, the Muslim Inspector General of Police in Mission Kashmir, and Ajay Rathod, the Assistant Commissioner of Police in Sarfarosh, resort directly to tactics that would otherwise be called terrorist, while Inspector Shingle in Fiza could rightly be said to embody the stereotype of the corrupt and communal cop.

The state thus matches its terrorist double in terms of brutal violence. In that sense we can see that violence is not what separates the state from its other: the means are the same, but the ends (national unity vs. fundamentalist fragmentation) differ. For instance, in Sarfarosh, we see the routine brutality and corruption that mark Ajay's ascent into police stardom. Moreover, in Mission Kashmir, two sequences show an enraged Inspector Khan who resorts to outright assassination after the loss of family members – first his son and then his wife.

In Fiza, however, the critique of the state and the critique of Islamic militancy are tied together in far more explicit ways. Thus, the opportunistic betrayals of elite leaders such as Singh and Syed only mirror the tactics of Murad Khan, the militant leader who draws Amaan into terrorism. Meanwhile corruption, communalism or simple incompetence implicates Inspector Shingle and the Mumbai police in a kind of self-interested passivity. In this example, we can see how even as the monster is severely marginalized, Shingle and Khan present equally moribund options for both Amaan and Fiza.

Hindi cinema thus weaves an image, which coincides a great deal with the construction of the Muslim by Hindu nationalist forces in India. Protagonists like Amaan and Altaf are summarily conflated with the ordinary Muslim on the streets of Delhi or Mumbai, being perceived as a traitor and a terrorist by ordinary Hindus because a certain film portrayed the Muslim as such. The way in which the Muslim is treated in the films makes a quick and lasting impression, creating a jingoist nationalist edifice that finds expression in frequent bouts of communal terror (such as in Gujarat), pushing the community further towards the peripheral margins of Indian society.

Wait! The demon in your vanity bag

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall; who's the fairest of them all?’ Is this what you silently ask your mirror after dabbing that foundation, applying the perfect shade of lipstick, or even patting your face with an after-shave? May we suggest that you address this query to a skin specialist and finally get an answer, unless you enjoy your slightly narcissistic traits! While you take time to decide, peruse through some not-so-new-but-always-alarming information.

The fourth World Conference on Breast Cancer (held in June this year) saw 650 delegates from 60 countries – including cancer survivors, environmental groups, and NGOs – come together to draw attention to the links between cosmetics and breast cancer. We already know that wide-scale global research has established how one-third of all cosmetic products contain one or more ingredients such as coal tar, formaldehyde, and lead acetate, all potentially linked to cancer. However, the growing awareness among the masses and the increasing pressure on global brands to reveal the real ingredients used in their products is heartening.
Even policies of the Indian Ministry of Trade and Commerce seem to be growing teeth. At the time of writing this article, a random search on Google throws up 754 000 results for 'cosmetics + cancer'! Mind you, the search does not include the wider category of toiletries or 'personal care' products.

Oh, what a beauty! Really?

Academically speaking, understanding the notion of ‘beauty’ could be as difficult as contemplating a measure of Jack’s beanstalk. The notion has undergone a dramatic shift—from the dusky, voluptuous feminine form to the ‘tall, fair, slim’ adage prominently displayed in all matrimonial advertisements. This standardized evaluation of beauty is a product both of the economic and its resultant cultural system. Beauty pageants play a significant role in the whole process of stereotyping a certain image as beautiful. At the surface, they sell products, while on a deeper plane, they reinforce notions about femininity and beauty. That beauty has turned into a competitive sport is most conspicuous in Hindi films and television soaps. And like most other things in our profit-oriented economies, the business of beauty too thrives on stylish and sleek marketing. Cosmetic companies play on notions of femininity and nationalism to make a case with gullible women. Sample this, an Editor’s note from a fashion and beauty magazine, ‘Indian beauties have been world-beaters. Couple that with the superpower India is poised to become. Triple that with the steadily growing liberal economy and foreign brands arriving at our shores. Can you as a modern woman afford to be left out of it all?’

Women are constantly and consistently bombarded with these images through pervasive advertisements that gradually become part of their aspirational list. And whom do they turn to for succour? Of course, to cosmetics and beauty products, while cosmetic manufacturers, marketers, and advertising professionals laugh their way to the bank. The disturbing success of a popular fairness cream – both the product and the advertisement – is a case in point. With an estimated 60 million consumers within the Indian subcontinent and exports to 34 countries in Southeast and Central Asia, as well as the Middle East, the real ‘face’ of the product has been veiled considerably. ‘I used this fairness cream for the period mentioned on the package. Instead of becoming fair, I developed skin problems!’ complains Chandni Sengupta, a college student who was ensnared by the advertising blitz.

After tapping half of the global population, marketers decided to hypnotize the other half of the market—the males. And lo, mass media started announcing the entry of the metrosexual male, one who dons moisturizers, under-eye serums, and loves manicures and orange peel facials. Buoyed by a giant push in sales figures, marketers work incessantly to dish out new products and product extensions. Words and phrases such as ‘new’, ‘with active ingredients’, ‘vitamin enhanced’, and what have you hide the dangerous chemical concoctions they are made up of.

Health, who cares?
Indiscriminate product innovation has led to a larger number of cosmetic products flooding the Indian market. The global cosmetic sales figures skyrocketed in 2003 to US $200 billion. Markets in the developing region have seen an upward trend generated by improving economic conditions, which drove up levels of disposable income on the part of consumers which, in turn, encouraged investment by major manufacturers.

The Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, underlines that cosmetics must comply with standards prescribed by the statute. It also does not allow for deception on the part of the manufacturer and the promoter. Legal measures are delineated so as to control the manufacture, import, and sale of ‘spurious’ and ‘harmful’ cosmetics. The Act also states that ‘false’ claims cannot be made on the package of the cosmetic about its transformative capacities. Surely, if these were implemented – seriously and stringently – most cosmetic manufacturers in India would face criminal charges for misleading the consumers!

A representative of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization told TerraGreen that it is the responsibility of the state drug licensing authority to issue licenses to all pharmaceutical and cosmetic manufacturers. Further, the Bureau of Indian Standards approves all manufactured drugs and cosmetics, adhering strictly to the Act. The market, however, has relegated all these authorities to the background in its march towards success.

Working on the minds of vulnerable young women, cosmetic manufacturers have had a field day. The façade, however, is now beginning to give way to critical inquiry about the harmful ingredients used in these skin care products. It is not difficult today to come across cases where a particular brand of lipstick led a consumer to the doctor more than once. ‘I had eruptions all over my lips. And yes, I did lodge a complaint with the company but to no avail. All they did was to send a representative who bought my silence with a hamper full of cosmetic products…for free!’ says Jaya Gupta, a retired government employee.

The worst case scenario is one where the consumer is not even aware of the kamikaze mission one is on unless something drastic happens. Vani Arora, a young 20-year-old college student, displays total ignorance about the harmful chemicals being rampantly used in cosmetics despite the resultant health risks. Still others are lured by the ‘herbal’ tag! ‘I use a certain brand only because it is 100% herbal,’ exclaims Pallavi Mehta, another collegian.

To allow cosmetic companies a voice in this article, many manufacturers were contacted. None of them spoke with the TerraGreen team, on one pretext or the other. In fact, several officials of one of the oldest herbal cosmetics brand in India made the team shuttle from one to the other till the team gave up in vain. It seems, however, that it is not only the cosmetic companies who seem to be shying away from divulging any details to the media. Repeated attempts to get in touch with concerned officials from departments handling the cosmetic trade also proved futile. Under the garb of meetings, these officials avoided answering questions posed by this team.

The grim scenario calls for some soul searching on the part of the manufacturers, government officials as well as consumers who have surrendered completely to the charms of cosmetics and toiletries. Cascading colour-induced auburn hair, ruby red matted lips, and kohl-lined eyes are a must have for any woman, thanks to incessant marketing and advertising. Lip service is often paid to inquiries about health hazards associated with these products.

Unless the notion of beauty created by marketers undergoes a change, little can be really done about limiting the use of beauty products. Regulation has hardly made a difference to the manufacturers who flout the rules with impunity. Crores spent on advertising ensures that they never go out of fashion. As for the health concerns, well, you decide.

Lagaan-II

A broken bucket for stumps and a bunch of rags tied together for a ball; a pair of brown, dusty legs, scampering across what appears to be 22-yards of pallid, decadent earth; the face breaks into a large grin at the end of the sprint, makeshift bat in the air. To top it all, boys of all ages and sizes surround the ‘match’ venue where impromptu commentary has given the whole setting the feel of a gladiatorial battle between bat and ball. From the dust bowls of the Indian hinterland to the urban sprawls that grow bigger by the day, cricket in the country seems to have shattered a number of myths in the past couple of months, the Chappell-Ganguly spat notwithstanding.

Heroes with the bat, ball and, of course, the gloves have risen to dizzying heights from absolutely nowhere. The resurgence has been both surprising as well as gratifying for the millions who are glued to every match that India plays. A new hope pervades India, that of being able to make it big without being part of the cosmopolitan mainstream. Watch Suresh Raina flit across the cricket field ball in hand, positioned perfectly to take a shy at the stumps or sample Mahendra Singh Dhoni lofting the ball over the stands into the street behind and you will know what it is to be a star. Endorsements and corporate deals are raining thick and fast and why shouldn’t they? After all the era of the subaltern is here to stay!

The rapid spread of cricket into rural India is both fascinating and intriguing. Recent events remind one the blockbuster Lagaan wherein a band of energetic and well-fed men from the dusty outback bring the mighty Englishmen to their knees. Did Lagaan inspire the Indian cricket team? It most certainly did by the looks of it. Rudra Pratap Singh, the rookie left arm seamer from Uttar Pradesh certainly seems to have taken a leaf out of Bhuvan’s (Aamir Khan in Lagaan) book to emerge as a perfect replacement for the out-of-form Zaheer Khan.

The Hindi heartland has seen a transition from boys to men in many in the span of the last couple of years. Be it the sardar from Ludhiana (Harbhajan Singh) or the chhora from Allahabad (Mohammad Kaif), Indian cricket has been witness to new stars making the firmament their own. A unique phenomenon, the subalternization of cricket in India just about looks complete. It seems to have shed its elitist tag though a long road lies ahead.

Dhoni, with his rockstar hairstyle and immaculate strokeplay has suddenly become the symbol of a young, resurgent India. Cricket meccas like Mumbai are now passé as Ranchi and Rae Bareilly seems to have captured the imagination of the cricket crazy country. The thin red line between Bharat and India is now fuzzy with the aspirations of many making a beeline for the next cricket coaching centre, trying to emulate these talented young men who are the toast of the nation.

Once the preserve of Maharajas, the British occupiers and the privileged landed English-educated gentry, cricket today has left millions craving for the top spot. Not only are Dhoni and Raina new-age cricketing icons, they inspire a whole generation of youngsters with stars in their eyes. Cricket fields are the dream factories of the many who see themselves every ball that J P Yadav plays and every run that Venugopal Rao scores. The great Indian middle class is the new hunting ground for young talent.

The subalterns are making it big. A sociological revolution seems to be taking place in Indian cricket. A classless, non-religious fraternity cricket now has come to be a level playing field. The sand castles have been falling away as cricket turns into a melting pot of sorts. A victory for the proponents of a classless society, the bridging of gaps has been smooth and complete. Perhaps Indian cricket can show us the way.

Such a long journey

This piece was written a while back at the height of the euphoria that had gripped the nation as the new emerging Indian team had taken everyone by surprise. The euphoria and the happiness has just worn off a little...

History is a vast body of disciplines, intertwined and complicated. Where does the history of Indian cricket figure in the scheme of things? A trivial pursuit, say some who prefer losing out on the glorious rise of the game in the sub-continent. From the Bombay and Deccan Gymkhanas to the Hindoos and Parsis competing against the Mohammedans in the confederacy of Bombay to the heights of success that Palwankar Baloo – the first Dalit cricketer – touched in his walk to fame, the story of the game goes beyond the boundary, quit literally.

India has seen a gentle rush of cricketing giants for the past many years…a good number have fallen by the wayside while others have gone on to attain legendary status. He of the fathomless spirit and gregarious powers of ingenuity, the peerless Lal Amarnath; suave and handsome, the princely swagger in place, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi swept everyone from cine-stars to critics off their feet. Who can forget the inimitable, magical spin trio of Bishen Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna and Chandrasekhar bamboozling the opposition into submission?

If the fluent elegance of Sunil Gavaskar was a treat to the senses, the plaint demeanour of the portly G. Vishwanath ambling to the crease only to thrash any bowler in sight was a lesson in attacking batsmanship. Krishnamachari Srikkanth’s demolition of the Pakistani spin legend Abdul Qadir is a sight to behold even after long years have rolled past. The thumping success of a fiery Kapil Dev is not lost on anyone while the fluid wrist work of (the much maligned) Azharuddin is the packaging material of icons.

The dust bowls of India has thrown up heroes time and again. Be it the sublime, venerable destroyer Sachin Tendulkar or the calculative grafter Rahul ‘The Wall’ Dravid; be it the grinding, thudding batsmanship of the rustic Virender Sehwag or the carefree panache of a Mahendra Dhoni in full flow; Indian cricket has seen ebbs and heights at the rate of once a million.
Arise then and cruise along as the glorious game moves into the next generation…where starts are born, not made and talent and success is not the preserve of the urban middle classes…where an R P Singh can make an even mark with Irfan Pathan, the son of a muezzin and a Suresh Raina can elicit accolades with his pristine skill on the ground. The beginning of a beautiful time!

Green pathways to energy security

As the world wades through the slurry of falling fossil fuel reserves and attempts to prevent an oil shock more acute than ever before in history, arguments in favour of renewable sources of energy are gaining ground. It was to facilitate new ideas towards effective policy making in this regard that TERI brought together a plethora of bright minds for a panel discussion on ‘Green Pathways to Energy Security’. Roshni Sengupta reports.

Matthew R Simmons, on account of the arguments he makes in his book Twilight in the Desert: the coming Saudi oil shock and the world economy, comes across as a visionary. His thesis, though simple, is revolutionary. He predicts that the endgame for Saudi oil supplies has begun and it is likely that the world will see a significant dip in the production index of Saudi oil fields. Now that is a scary prospect, the repercussions of which would rock the world’s economy.

IEA (International Energy Agency) projections are the icing on the cake. Oil demand in 2030 is expected to be 121.3 MBD (million barrels per day) as against 77 MBD in 2002. So, is the desert kingdom ready for an increase in oil production and supply, given the fact that a large part of this boom shall be absorbed by Saudi Arabia? What role will the non-OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries, such as India, play if the present energy crisis grows beyond proportions? Critical questions without any immediate answers.

India’s engagement with natural gas is a positive way forward. However, considering the current geo-political scenario and the complexities and challenges that exist on the path towards global energy security, attention needs to be paid to the development of markets, infrastructure, and legislation at the domestic level. As negotiations over the nuclear status of Iran and the unresolved conflict between Israel and Lebanon seem continue unabated, the stakes for the rest of the world in terms of energy requirements keep rising.

The dark shadow of the burgeoning energy crisis – premised very starkly on the dark colour of oil – is growing by the day. This approbation of the approaching doomsday has prompted everyone, from energy experts to social scientists and policy makers, to look inward and come up with a workable strategy for the future, based on renewable forms of energy.

The panel discussion on ‘Green Pathways to Energy Security’ provided a forum for such necessary deliberations. ‘Green pathways, to my mind, should be built on two guiding principles. The first is energy conservation by way of adopting efficient tools and techniques in the entire energy cycle of extraction, conversion, transportation, storage, and consumption. The second guiding principle is to use renewable energy resources, such as solar, wind, biomass, and hydro-power for a variety of applications,’ said Mr Jyotiraditya Scindia, Member of Parliament, speaking on the occasion.

His views were seconded by Dr R K Pachauri, Director-General, TERI who stressed the need for reducing the dependence on oil and related products, such as petroleum, both, at the global as well as the local level. ‘A failure to undertake such a step,’ said Dr Pachauri, ‘will lead to irreversible environmental problems, which would be difficult to overcome’. Global developments bear out this statement. Natural gas has emerged as the fuel for the 21st century. Not only is it cleaner and more efficient than fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, it is also abundantly available. Ensuring the development of international, interdependent gas markets; hinged on investor confidence, reciprocal access, financial capital, and government backing; is the key to receding dependence on fossil fuels.

The current trend of resource nationalism only serves to speed up the impending energy shock. Countries have tended to respond to high energy prices by acquiring oil and gas reserves, when not available domestically, or using the available resources as a cover to flex geopolitical muscle, when required. Energy, thus has emerged as a powerful tool for international political and economic maneuvering, a development that might acquire extremely dangerous dimensions for the world at large.

How has India responded to this urgent international energy crisis? ‘The Government of India, in its Integrated Energy Policy Report, has set a vision of securing future of energy in India,’ explained Mr Scindia, adding that ‘the government has also, through the policy document, made sure that the energy services should be safe, reliable, techno-economically viable, and sustainable considering different fuels and forms of energy, conventional as well as new and alternate sources’.

The distinguished speakers discussed various ways in which energy regulation and efficiency could be brought about. Energy-efficient design and construction of buildings was identified as one such step towards a greater level of energy conservation. ‘The fast-developing SEZs (Special Economic Zones) could turn out to be a death warrant for the environment unless legislation is put in place at the central level so that the buildings of the future are not replicas of the current crop,’ warned Dr Pachauri.

Mr Scindia further emphasized the vast potential of renewable sources of energy. ‘In India, renewables contribute over 8 000 MW of power generation presently. The Integrated Energy Policy Report, however, has projected over 1 00 000 MW capacity to come from renewables’. He particularly singled out facilitating mechanisms, such as state-of-the-art and cutting edge technologies, a conducive policy and regulatory regime, fiscal and financial incentives, among others that could aid the achievement of these targets.

Dr Pachauri seconded the view by stating that misplaced subsidies are the key. ‘Instead of targeting fuels like kerosene for subsidies, the price mechanism has to be geared towards renewable energy-powered products, such as a solar lantern. Innovation can leads to solutions. Why not adopt a system of smart cards for the poorer sections of the society?’ he said raising a pertinent question in light of the debilitating energy crisis looming over large parts of the world.

In light of the fact that oil prices have spiraled out of control and supplies continue to walk the tightrope, one must look back over the events of the last five years. Technological advances, such as seismic imaging and reservoir management, in the 1990s, led to investments by international companies in areas, such as Russia and the Caspian. As a result, supplies grew while prices remained moderate. In April 2000, driven by the need for revenues by countries with a burgeoning population, the OPEC member-states set a price framework for oil at around 25 dollars a barrel.

The other fundamental change came about on the demand-side. The demand for oil over the past two years has grown by almost 5 MBD. Chinese imports alone grew by 1.4 MBD and demand increased by 70%, primarily due to economic growth and prosperity. The overall impact of this development prompted experts the world over to contemplate a delayed return to the calm and balance of the 1990s. High prices, coupled with an anticipated increase in the demand for oil and the dwindling reserves of the most preferred fossil fuel, are the primary causes of the energy insecurity pervading the world. Even though soothsayers predict that the world has enough oil to last another 40 years of continuous supply at the current rates of consumption, the countdown to the fuel downslide has begun in earnest.

To make a case for the rapid adoption of renewable sources of energy, keeping this scenario in mind, would make things simpler, more efficient, and pollution-free. Emphasizing the need to make rapid strides towards renewables, Mr Scindia said, ‘The Integrated Energy Policy Report has projected over 1 00 000 MW capacity to come from renewables. This would constitute 12–15% of the total power generating capacity that would be required by 2032 to support an 8% rate of growth’. Not only did he quantify what has been in the pipeline for a very long time, he categorically propagated a greater role of renewables for a cleaner future.

Global facts and figures amply bear out what Mr Scindia painstakingly stressed upon. Total renewable power capacity in the year 2005 stood at 182 Gega watts supported by an investment of 39 billion dollars. The technology leaders were bio-diesel production, which grew to almost double its capacity in 2004, followed by solar photovoltaics, which posted a growth of 60%, and then wind at 24%, the country leaders being Germany and China (each investing 7 billion dollars), followed by USA, Spain, and Japan.

Moderating the discussion, Ms Mythili Bhusnurmath, senior columnist put forth arguments that summed up much of the deliberations taking place on the issue of green pathways to energy security. ‘There are three issues of utmost importance. Firstly, there is less hope pinned on renewables in India. Secondly, dependence on fuels, such as coal, does not seem to be financially feasible. Lastly, but most importantly, there is an urgent need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels,’ said Ms Bhusnurmath. She also held India’s ‘regional hegemon’ status responsible for the energy crisis in South Asia.

The enriching nature of the deliberations on a green future of India, in particular, and the world, in general, contributed a great deal to the fast-growing knowledge base on renewable forms of energy. The fact that the dependence on fossil fuels must be reduced to whatever extent possible was borne out by the lively interactive session that followed the panel discussion. A small step towards creating awareness actually went a long way in getting some of the brightest minds in the country together to formulate what might well be the blueprint of a better tomorrow.

Waging war against the earth

Bloody pictures of conflict and war have pervaded our consciousness from time to time. But what does war do to the environment? Has the planet been able to cope with the military onslaught that nations have inflicted on other nations as well as the ecology? Roshni Sengupta investigates some calamitous conflicts to understand the dynamic of war and its impact on the environment.

Jiyeh is a small industrial port town 30 kilometers north of Beirut, the Lebanese capital bombed incessantly by Israeli fighter jets. On 13 July 2006, this suburban town experienced an ecological nightmare as Israeli planes attacked a large oil storage depot at the edge of Jiyeh. As oil spewed into the Mediterranean Sea, fires erupted and are still burning.

Four of the plant’s six oil storage containers have been burnt completely, spilling at least 35 000 tonnes of thick fuel oil into the sea. As the fifth storage tank burst into flames, residents witnessed a thick cloud of smoke, soot, and debris rising to the atmosphere corrupting the air quality completely. So devastating was the fire that it melted rail cars and turned sand into glass.

A scenario intimidating enough to send us scurrying for cover! What happens to ecology when nations decide to go to war? Does anyone give it a thought? Lebanese authorities say that cleaning up the oil mess alone will cost upwards of 200 million dollars, an astronomical sum in a country with a gross domestic product of close to 21 billion dollars!

Humans – bulwarks of a composite ecosystem of sustainable processes – now the mainstay of a global race for economic and military superiority have been oblivious to in the perils of a path of progress detrimental to them and the coming generations. The environment, globally, has suffered uncontrollably and immeasurably as wars and low-intensity conflicts continue unabated. The systematic and slow death of the natural resource-based industry in Jammu and Kashmir is another example.

Even though experts on another side of the spectrum believe that going to war is not as environmentally damaging as preparing for war, statistics bear the fact out. History too tells a different and painful story.

Vietnam: the history behind the fact

‘Not since the Romans salted the land after destroying Carthage has a nation taken such pains to visit the war on future generations,’ wrote Ngo Van Long of the US war against Vietnam, which ostensibly ended with the liberation of Saigon in 1975. The ecological catastrophe that the imperial forces rained on the Vietnamese continues to be a cause of concern nearly 31 years after the most notorious misadventure in the history of US military and foreign policy campaigns.

The NLF (National Liberation Front) – Vietnam’s jungle-based guerilla group – was assured of a food and survival base by the forest cover. The country’s environment therefore was targeted under a deliberate strategy of attrition, which aimed to drive the rural populace into the cities in order to deprive the NLF cadre of a natural cover. These young fighters took refuge in the deep-cut mountains and used the rugged terrain to their advantage.

The Vietnamese – dependent upon the dynamic equilibrium of the mountain forests, which guard against floods, droughts, and silting – were uprooted from their native lands just as the commons are appropriated in a bid to develop rural and traditional economies on modern Western lines. This time not by big dams and lumberjacks but by a trigger-happy occupying army, under the guise of a legitimate war (sic). Much of Vietnam was turned into ‘free fire zones’, into which was hurtled immense tonnage of explosives and herbicides.

The strategy, according to Arthur H Westing in the Natural Resources Journal (April 1983), involved ‘massive rural area bombing, chemical and mechanical forest destruction, large scale crop destruction, destruction of food stores, destruction of hospitals, and large-scale population displacements – in short the massive, intentional disruption of both the natural and human ecologies of the region.’

The Vietnam war involved the greatest expenditure of bombs and shells in history. Between early 1965 and mid-1968, over 2.8 million tonnes of bombs were dropped on South Vietnam alone – more than were dropped in all the theatres of World War II by all sides. In total the US fired some 10.2 million tonnes of munitions in South Vietnam, and 11.3 million tonnes in all of Vietnam.

Arthur H Westing has estimated that around 100 000 hectares, or some 1% of the forestlands of Vietnam were completely obliterated by bombing and that a further 5 million hectares, or over 40 % were damaged. Much of the damage to the trees was due to shrapnel, a significant cause of tree mortality as it gives rise to fungus and decay.
(Source: www.greenleft.org.au)

The amount of herbicides dumped on the forests and paddy fields of Vietnam was immense. A study by Australian government scientists claims, ‘The figures for Agent Orange alone indicate that the amount of 2,4,5-T sprayed over Vietnam during the period 1962–1971 is far in excess of the amount of 2,4,5-T which has been used in Australia over the past 30 years’. An estimated 72.4 million litres or 100 000 tonnes of herbicides were sprayed on South Vietnam, affecting 43% of the cultivated area and 44% of the total area. 70% of the coconut groves and 60% of the rubber plantations were destroyed, together with enough crops to feed two million people.

In addition to high explosives and spraying, this destruction was achieved by the use of napalm and ‘Rome ploughs’ – large bulldozers equipped with sharpened three-metre wide blades – which would smash through the forests uprooting everything in their path. Elizabeth Kempf, in an article in New Scientist (1988) enumerated that Rome ploughs completely removed and significantly disturbed the topsoil of 325 000 hectares, or 3% of southern Vietnam’s forests.

Operation Ranchhand in the 1950s, also in Vietnam used 91 million kilograms of ‘defoliants’ made up of active ingredients, usually mixtures of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, Agents Orange, Blue, and White in lay terms. While Agents Orange and White killed plants by disrupting their metabolism, Agent Blue got to them through desiccation.

Agent Orange contains quantities of the dioxin TCDD (Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-Dioxin) as an impurity from the manufacturing process and a controversy has raged in scientific circles over the effects of the chemical on living organisms. It is said to be both teratogenic and carcinogenic and induces deformities in foetuses and cause cancer.

Ever since the 1960s there have been persistent reports of grotesquely deformed infants and a high incidence of liver cancer among the inhabitants of the affected areas.
(Source: www.greenleft.org.au)

Reports document the horrors visited upon the faunal species in the area after the chemical was sprayed. One of them tells of dead cattle and river fish floating on the surface of the water, belly up, soon after the chemicals were sprayed. Another side effect of spraying of chemicals appears to have been the enhancement of the habitat for Anopheles maculatus – the malarial mosquito – by the flooding of an estimated 10–15 large bomb craters in southern Vietnam.

Forests treated with herbicides lost leaves, flowers, and fruits, especially in the upper canopy. About 10% of the trees, depending on the strength of the dose and the species involved, would be killed outright; the survivors would show various stages of damage, including dieback and sterility. It is not possible to remove forest cover on such a large scale, particularly in a tropical country, without causing massive long-term damage to both human and natural ecosystems. These broad-leaved forests in Vietnam also served as a regulator for the rate of surface run-off. Their destruction has led to summer flooding and winter droughts.

Vietnam has over a million acres of coastal swampland, much of it concentrated in the south of the Mekong delta and the Cape of Camau islands. Much of this swampland, thickly covered with mangrove forests was a natural hideout for the guerillas. The Americans subjected this stretch to intense chemical attack. The main mangrove type, Rhizophora spiculata, sensitive to defoliants was destroyed right away. There was also a rapid increase in bird life and 50% of the productive woodlands and fisheries of the Cape of Camau mangroves were destroyed.

Many years after the Americans had turned their backs on the country, in 1988 Vietnam’s forest cover had fallen to an all-time low of 21% of the land surface. Scientists in the same year had exclaimed that the country needs to bring the figure back to around 50% if environmental disaster had to be avoided.

Afghanistan: a similar story

BBC News Online’s correspondent Marcus George is a lucky man. Why lucky? Why not? After all, he had the good fortune of meeting Marjan, the king of the only and debilitated zoo in Kabul. This 48-year-old lion was blinded by a grenade thrown inside his shelter in the early days of the US bombardment of this proud city. The blast which cut through his handsome face also wounded the soul of ecology in this embattled landscape.

That animals suffered the worst impact of the serial bombing bears witness to the Taliban’s practice of fierce ground fighting. The fate of birds flying through and over Afghanistan also became a grave concern in late 2001 as the bombing picked up pace. Ornithologists in Pakistan feared that populations of birds whose migration route took them over Afghan territory may have been devastated by weeks of bombing. Whole populations of birds went missing from the shores of the Rawal Lake – a key conservation area, which is only a 10-minute drive away from Islamabad.

Thousands of ducks, cranes, and other birds migrate to Pakistan, flying over Afghanistan. For the birds, the timing of the bombing could not have been worse. Most birds were killed, either by bombing or because of the poisoning of the wetlands/sites they frequented. Another impact of the bombings was that birds were being derouted from their precise migratory corridors.

Cranes were perhaps the most at risk. The globally endangered Siberian crane is just one of them. Earlier, locals in Pakistan used to spot cranes in large groups of 50–55. In 2001 – the year Afghanistan was bombed relentlessly– not see more than three cranes could be seen together! At the Rawal lake, observation teams waited for a glimpse of the earlier cache of birds, but in vain. After all, the number of birds flying across the region had dropped by a staggering 85%.

The UN dispatched a team of investigators to the region in the same year to evaluate overall ecological damage. Only an estimated 2% of the country is presently under anything resembling forest cover. The worst deforestation occurred during Taliban rule as the timber mafia felled forests to cater for the demand in Pakistan. The American bombing only compounded the problem.

The rugged mountains usually provide a safe haven for mountain leopards, gazelles, bears, and Marco Polo sheep – the world’s largest species. The same terrain that allows fighters to strike and disappear has also, historically, enabled wildlife to survive the American bombing, initially, and the invasions of refugees and fighters, subsequently.

Sometimes, refugees resort to hunting rare snow leopards, using their fur to buy safe passage across the border, into Pakistan. A single fur, according to a report of the Wildlife Conservation Society can fetch 2000 dollars on the black market. Only around 5000 snow leopards are thought to survive in central Asia with less than a 100 in Afghanistan, their numbers already decimated by extensive hunting long before the conflict actually erupted.

Incessant bombing has also left its mark beyond the craters. Defense analysts say that while depleted uranium had been used less in Afghanistan than in the Kosovo conflict, conventional explosives have littered the country with pollutants. They contain toxic compounds, such as cyclonite, a carcinogen, and rocket propellants contain perchlorates, which are known to damage the thyroid glands.

The story of habitat destruction and ecological catastrophe is strikingly similar in almost any place where the treacherous travesties of war have been inflicted. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan too has been tanked and bombed, its species destroyed and its lands degraded forever. A story much worse is unfolding in the dusty flatlands of Lebanon.

Devastated Middle East

UN IMO (United Nations International Maritime Organization) stated recently that the Lebanese coastline, for some 70–80 kilometres north of a power plant, has been adversely affected. The effected areas include sandy and rocky beaches, fishing ports, and marinas. Ecologists are of the opinion that the spill, an outcome of the bombing will turn out to be an environmental catastrophe threatening spawning fish species and sea turtles including the endangered green turtle, which is a rare sight in the Mediterranean. IMO (International Maritime Organization) is coordinating an international effort to assist Lebanon in dealing with the disaster.

Meanwhile in northern Israel, huge swathes of forests and fields have been scorched by thousands of Hezbollah rocket strikes. Experts opine that it would take nature at least 50 years to recover. While entire fields have been reduced to heaps of ash, countless animals have been killed. The Mount Naftali forest was hit by a series of Katyusha rockets in the early phase of the Unequal War, setting it ablaze. Strong gusts of wind helped in the spread of the ghastly fire trapping gazelles, coyotes, jackals, rabbits, and snakes. The destruction of Mount Naftali is painful since it is not a natural forest, but one meticulously planted by man.

Amid this conflict of monumental proportions, between the Hezbollah and Israel, the environmental damage has attracted little attention. But experts warn that the long-term effects could be devastating. Cyprus, Turkey, and even Greece could be affected by the ecological disaster waiting to explode onto the scene in the heart of Arab territory. Chances are that the whole marine ecosystem along the Lebanese shoreline is already dead.

Lebanon, whose flag features a cedar tree and which is known by many as Green Lebanon for its forested mountains, is one of the few countries in the Arab world that pays attention to environmental degradation and pollution. Minibuses that run on diesel are banned, and factories usually abide by very strict rules and environmental ethics.

Large parts of the country’s sandy and rocky beaches are covered with a thick layer of black oil. Many fishermen have been forced out of business and people are too scared to eat fish. Baby turtles, usually born in late summer, die once they swim into the polluted water after hatching. Optimistic assessments suggest it will take at least six months for the shore to be completely cleaned up and up to 10 years to re-establish the ecosystem of the eastern Mediterranean.

In light of the mammoth environmental crisis brewing in the Middle East, can the Israel-Palestine conflict be far behind? Palestinian hopes for genuine self-determination hinge on a number of factors, not the least of which is Israel’s ability to solve its perennial and growing water shortage. The problem is based upon one simple premise that has guided Israel-Arab relations for decades, since the establishment of the Jewish homeland in 1948.

Israel uses 17% more than the 1.9 million cubic metres of water that is renewable from natural resources. Arguably, 50% or more of the water that Israel uses is unilaterally appropriated from water that should, in all fairness, go to its Arab neighbours. Jewish settlers have for long diverted water from the Jordan River, along the Jordan Valley, through the Mediterranean, to River Negev in the Israeli mainland. Lebanese waters too have been seen to be of interest to the Israelis; hence the recent conflict is attached to another argument of gross misappropriation and outright theft to solve domestic water woes.

The Litani river in Lebanon has been a bone of contention. This natural resource over which only the Lebanese have any rights has led to skirmishes culminating in war. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Moshe Dayan’s plan of action for the control of the Litani river was to ‘enter Lebanon, occupy the relevant territory’ and then ‘annex the territory south of the Litani into Israel after which everything would fall into place’. Since its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there have been reports that Israel has been taking more water than authorized from the Litani river and has not allowed any external observations to take place.

The Iraq story

Land-based hostilities in Iraq in the First Gulf War in 1991 had a significant environmental impact that compromised post-war reconstruction. This was concluded in a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the Gulf War upon the land and atmosphere undertaken by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in the same year.

Coral reefs, salt marshes, mudflats, mangroves, and seagrass beds – the ecological backbone of the Gulf region – already degraded by livestock, uncontrolled killing of wildlife, and disturbance of oil installations was rendered useless by the onslaught of the war. The saltpans, marshes and wadis scattered in the desert – of considerable economic and ecological importance for man and wildlife – were damaged irreparably by military activity.

The Mesopotamian marshes of the Euphrates and Tigris river basins in Iraq, northwest of Basra – an extremely rich and fertile wetland supporting a prolific freshwater ecosystem including commercially important fisheries – was badly affected. The British military base in the Oman island of Masirah in the Indian Ocean, a major staging site for logistical support to troops fighting in the Gulf region is also the most important nesting site in the world for the globally endangered Loggerhead Turtles.

The bombing of Iraqi bridges – a norm in the First Gulf War as well as the 2003 invasion of the country by the Allied forces – led to extensive damage to the irrigation schemes and agricultural production as some of the main irrigation barrages served as strategic river crossings. This affected food supplies and increased the problem of post-war rehabilitation. Large smoke clouds resulting from the burning of oil installations impacted the down-wind environment from soot fallout, acid deposition, and reduced solar radiation.

Increasingly, stories of senseless destruction in numerous war zones spread across the world filter into our homes, making the painful reality all the more palpable. More fires rage today than ever before, scorching the earth beyond repair – a result of rapidly deteriorating international relations, the monstrous ambitions of a global superpower, and the reluctance of the rest of the world to stand up and say no. Cluster bombs and carpet attacks continue to maim the planet, decimating forests, ruining ecosystems, impairing species habitat, and scarring the ecological landscape for a long time to come. Hasn’t Mother Earth had enough?