Tag Archive for 'violence'

Attacks on Indians in Australia: Is it racism?

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on February 6, 2010
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Rod McGuirk, The Associated Press, from Canberra:

Discerning the truth, amid the back and forth, has proven difficult.

The controversy comes amid explosive growth in the foreign student population in Australia. The Indians have grown the fastest, from 2,700 in 2002 to 91,400 last year. Overall, overseas students rose from 150,000 to almost 400,000 during the same period.

Australian universities expect Indian enrollment to plummet 30 percent this year, in part because of safety fears.

No doubt there is racism in Australia, as in virtually every society. Researchers have found that one in 10 adults here could be described as racist, a proportion that is not negligible, said University of Western Sydney geographer Kevin Dunn.

“It’s good that they’re a minority of people, but what’s bad is if we deny that that’s out there, and secondly, that we don’t do anything about it,” he said. “My concern is the Indians are right in saying that on those latter two points, we’ve got a problem.”

To what degree racism is behind the attacks is another question. More:

Curry bashing?

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on February 2, 2010
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Do the recent attacks against Southasian students in Australia constitute hate crimes or sporadic violence? And has the reaction been more harmful than the incidents themselves? Bina D’Costa, a research fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Justice at the Australian National University, in Himmal Southasian:

The story is actually far more complex than either of the two dominant narratives – on anti-Indian racism and students – would appear to let on. The problems not only appear to go well beyond the education sector, but also include class issues within Southasian communities, and racial tensions between South and West Asian communities. Shortly after the student protests, taxi drivers of Southasian origin demonstrated in Melbourne for their own security; many saying they have long felt unsafe driving at night. While those demonstrations were widely reported in the Australian media, the global media – including in India – did not pay serious attention to the pleas of the taxi drivers. But all the while, there was great focus on the plight of the Southasian students, most of them from relatively well-off families. While some Southasian taxi drivers are also students, the recent attacks, portrayed as targeting only Indian students, created a different kind of anxiety about Australia. Both the press and the middle class in India were able to mobilise critical public opinion to pressure the Australian government to respond to the violence. More:

Down Under, India’s Plunder

An Australian perspective on the recent attacks on Indian students. Jane Rankin-Reid in Tehelka:

First, let’s dump some false assumptions about the so called “lucky country”. Complacency about Australia’s tremendous success as a cohesive multi-cultural new world society is both a good sign that co-existence is second nature in our community, and potentially a bad sign of institutionalised insensitivity towards newer, more swiftly changing migration issues. Still, after decades of vigorous political correctness where official language was combed for all signs of offensiveness towards minorities of any shape or size, it is unsurprising that we Australians think of ourselves as some of the planet’s fairest, most tolerant and open minded individuals. We are, if only because by law, we have to be thoughtful and cooperative with one another. Sorry is our second name. But being sorry is not always enough, as indigenous Australians will testify. More:

Politics, Karachi style

Published
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on January 23, 2010
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From Foreign Policy:

Two days ago, armed Sindhi and Pashtun activists exchanged tit-for-tat murders in the middle class Gulistan-e Jauhar area. Since the start of this year, targeted killings have claimed the lives of over 41 political workers. And in the last six months of 2009, there were 256 political assassinations in the city, according to Pakistan’s interior ministry.

An uptake in ethnic and political violence in Karachi is cause for concern for the prospects for Pakistan’s political stability and national cohesion. Karachi is a microcosm of Pakistan as virtually all of its ethnic groups and power brokers are represented there.

Massive civil unrest in Karachi is an indicator of the strength of centrifugal tendencies inside multi-ethnic Pakistan, which has historically been deeply challenged in managing its diversity. More:

A portrait of Kashmir

Published
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on January 31, 2009
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On the blog The Middle Stage, a review of Basharat Peer’s book  Curfewed Night (Random House):

peerThere are many books now in circulation on Kashmir and its discontents, but possibly none as haunting and intimate as this one. Basharat Peer has been a name in Indian journalism for some years now for his reporting on Kashmir for Rediff and Tehelka, but his new book Curfewed Night, a blend of memoir and reportage, is probably the best first-hand account of the region-its beauty, its alienation, and its pain-available to thousands of interested readers more simply and securely Indian than Kashmiris are.

Indeed, Curfewed Night lifts the veil not just from a Kashmir that is no longer a part of mainstream experience and limps along on its own track, but also from an India that many of us are not willing to acknowledge. Here is India as a military power, holding its own citizens-or people that it asserts are its citizens-to ransom in a double bind of ineptitude and brutality.

More here, and here at Pak Tea House:

In world’s largest democracy, tolerance is a weak pillar

Published
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on October 29, 2008
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India is reeling from a rash of religious and ethnic clashes, prompting many in the country to ask why their democracy tends to encourage intolerance. Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

With national elections only months away, India is reeling from a rash of spiteful religious and ethnic clashes, prompting many in this country to ask why their vibrant, pluralistic democracy tends to encourage, rather than avert, the cruelty of neighbor against neighbor.

Tensions are growing in several corners of the country. The latest dispute was set off in Mumbai last week, when an upstart nativist party claiming to represent Marathas, the dominant ethnic group in the state, pounced on Indians who had come from elsewhere to apply for jobs at Indian Railways.

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Pakistan’s bleakest moment

Published
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on September 18, 2008
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On BBC, Ahmed Rashid takes a look at how Pakistan is facing its bleakest moment, months after getting a new democratic government.

Just when Pakistanis thought they had a new democracy, ushering in a new civilian government, a new president and the end of eight years of military rule, they are faced with the bleakest moment in the country’s history.

Proverbially listed as a failing state, this precariously poised country could now be in a downward spiral towards becoming a failed state.

Internationally isolated and condemned by the world community due to its Afghan policy, Pakistan’s tribal territories have become a free for all firing range for US troops even as the domestic threat from the Pakistani Taleban multiplies.

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‘Stable’ India a myth

Published
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on August 7, 2008
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The country the west loves to call a peaceful, capitalist success has a terrorism death toll second only to Iraq, says Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

In the past five years bomb attacks claimed by Islamist groups have killed hundreds across the Indian cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. An Indian Muslim was even involved in the failed assault on Glasgow airport in July last year. Yet George Bush reportedly introduced Manmohan Singh to his wife, Laura, as “the prime minister of India, a democracy which does not have a single al-Qaida member in a population of 150 million Muslims”.

To be fair to Bush, he was only repeating a cliche deployed by Indian politicians and American pundits such as Thomas Friedman to promote India as a squeaky-clean ally of the United States. However, Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-born Muslim editor of Newsweek International, ought to know better. In his new book, The Post-American World, he describes India as a “powerful package” and claims it has been “peaceful, stable, and prosperous” since 1997 – a decade in which India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war, tens of thousands of Indian farmers took their own lives, Maoist insurgencies erupted across large parts of the country, and Hindu nationalists in Gujarat murdered more than 2,000 Muslims.

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As Tibet erupted, China wavered

Published
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on March 24, 2008
in Tibet
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Witnesses say Chinese security forces melted away as unrest boiled over in the Tibetan capital on March 14. Jim Yardley from Beijing in The New York Times:

In the chaotic hours after Lhasa erupted March 14, Tibetans rampaged through the city’s old quarter, waving steel scabbards and burning or looting Chinese shops. Clothes, souvenirs and other tourist trinkets were dumped outside and set afire as thick gray smoke darkened the midday sky. Tibetan fury, uncorked, boiled over.

Foreigners and Lhasa residents who witnessed the violence were stunned by what they saw, and by what they did not see: the police. Riot police officers fled after an initial skirmish and then were often nowhere to be found. Some Chinese shopkeepers begged for protection.

“The whole day I didn’t see a single police officer or soldier,” said an American woman who spent hours navigating the riot scene. “The Tibetans were just running free.”

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And in Nepal…

From Nepali Times:

monk.jpgIn scenes not witnessed since April 2006, police brutally put down rallies and candlelit vigils by monks in Kathmandu. This young monk (above) was hit on his head with a bamboo stick wielded by riot police outside the United Nations office in Pulchok on Monday.

The UN’s human rights office in Kathmandu condemned what it said was the “excessive use of force” by Nepal’s police to disperse the demonstrations.

The protests have been part of an international campaign by Tibetans in exile and their supporters to highlight Chinese crackdowns in Lhasa and elsewhere. The rallies came in the run-up to the Olympics in Beijing in August. The unrest in Tibet has already hurt Nepal’s tourism industry since Kathmandu is the jump off point for Lhasa. Hundreds of Sherpas are also employed by expeditions climbing the Himalaya from the north.

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The official version

Published
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on March 15, 2008
in China and Media
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chinadaily15.jpgOn a day when 10 people died in violence in Tibet, here’s the front page of the state-owned China Daily. In case you’re trying to locate the Tibet story, you’ll find it at the bottom of the page, in columns 2 and 3. The headline says: “Dalai Lama behind sabotage”. And the story reads:

The government of Tibet Autonomous Region said Friday there had been enough evidence to prove that the recent sabotage in Lhasa was “organized, premeditated and masterminded” by the Dalai clique.

The violence, involving beating, smashing, looting and burning, has disrupted the public order and jeopardized people’s lives and property, an official with the regional government said.

The sabotage has aroused indignation of and is strongly condemned by the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet, he said in an interview with Xinhua.

Here’s the link, but you’ll have to register for a clearer image of the page.

In Sri Lanka, the ethnic divide is worsening

Published
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on March 9, 2008
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Somini Sengupta reports from Colombo in The New York Times:

srilanka.jpg

There are no eyes on this war. A truce between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is over, and gone are the Nordic monitors who kept watch over it.

The government has refused entry to United Nations human rights monitors. Independent journalists are not allowed anywhere near the front lines. Only occasionally does a glimpse of the war’s damage surface, as when the Red Cross confirmed that in the first six weeks of this year alone, 180 civilians had been killed, a toll it called “appalling.”

While it is impossible to gauge what is happening on the battlefield, that is where, it seems, the government has placed its bets to settle the long-running ethnic war, once and for all. As it does, the public mood in this country is more divided than in many years, like an old scratch that has festered into a gaping wound.

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Outside home, Indian women unsafe; inside, she needs luck

Published
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on January 24, 2008
in Crime, Society and Women
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A woman president. A woman who heads the country’s oldest political party. And yet, women in India have a bad deal. A study on violence against women by Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar published in The Indian Express. 

You don’t need a survey to find out that women feel insecure in this country. You just need to take a walk in the evening. You don’t need numbers to see that domestic violence against women is widespread. You just need to look into their eyes, perhaps yours. Yet this realisation is not enough to devise a strategy to combat this violence. You need to understand the anatomy of violence — where, how and why of violence against women — to begin to think about countering this violence.

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