Hello, everyone. Good morning, afternoon or evening, and welcome to this edition of Notes from South Asia. You can find all the articles in the series here (along with my other diaries).
India is celebrating our 74th Republic Day today and at the same time witnessing or participating in the fall of the republic. A centrepiece of that process is the fall of the Babri Masjid and the construction of the Ram Temple over its ruins. Today’s articles will focus on that given that 22nd January saw the installation of Ram’s idol at the temple. Then, you have Afghanistan’s incarceration system, and Sri Lanka’s new law that proscribes dissent even more (just as in India).
India
Ram Temple Consecration in Ayodhya
Vaishna Roy writes for the Hindu Frontline (which is far more progressive than the Hindu) about the politicisation of faith. It is an editorial for this fortnight’s issue.
What we are seeing today rather is a brazen rise in the politicisation of religion. What was once a personal matter of faith is now public business. The country’s Prime Minister is now the household priest. The functions of the nation’s administrator include those of the clergyman. A democracy is run as a theocracy. The Ram temple’s construction, consecration, and promotion is entirely a government project. In fact, a half-day holiday was announced for central government offices on January 22 to embed the administration fully into the event.
The high visibility of Hindu rituals and symbols in the public sphere is, therefore, neither an organic nor miraculous reawakening of piety but a carefully cultivated display of religious pride sown by the party in power for its own political gain. It is important that the public be aware of this reimagined construction of Ram and the exploitation of religious sentiments.
As the 2024 elections draw near, we are being inundated with encomiums to the BJP’s organisational skills and to Prime Minister Modi’s singular popularity, there is endless chatter about trains and roads, growth figures and start-up miracles. If all of this is indeed true, these achievements must be able to campaign on their own legs. They should not have to piggyback on the politics of divisiveness and othering and the ominous spectre of hate-fuelled violence.
Read the whole if you have the time.
If you want to know how this whole movement came about, blame the British.
While I do criticise colonialism a lot, I don’t usually lay all of our issues at their door. But this (the fascist Hindu Supremacy) is one structure that they lay the foundation for. This video with English subtitles (with a few minor errors in subtitles) gives you the history.
Moving on, Anjum Altaf writes for his Substack about his thoughts on Ram Temple (no paywall; you have to click continue reading if that popup comes up).
What makes one pause is that this depth of support for the Temple did not exist from day one. It literally had to be manufactured which raises questions about the workings of democracy and the interaction between citizens and the state. The state has its thumb on many hot buttons and displays no compunctions in pushing the one that suits its objectives regardless of the consequences for society. There seem no checks on such self-serving misuse of state power.
Religion is the hottest of hot buttons and in this regard the Ram Temple, momentous as it is, pales into insignificance compared to the creation of Pakistan. The latter vivisected the country as opposed to a small piece of land in a city. Consider that in 1937 there was hardly a demand for Pakistan but by injecting religion into the equation it became an unstoppable force by 1946. The pre- and post-Rath Yatra periods in the case of the Ram Temple could be seen in similar terms.
Given the subsequent steep decline along every dimension in Pakistan, is it possible that the consecration of the Ram Temple could be a similar high point of this new drama? Could it come back to haunt its creators in the same way? The law of unintended consequences works in strange ways.
On the Ram Temple itself, it is difficult to overlook the fact that it rests on the blessings of a court ruling that called the demolition of the existing structure on the land “an egregious violation of the rule of law” without holding anyone accountable and an ensuing conflict that cost over 2,000 lives. Many would consider that an inauspicious birth adding to the apprehensions of unintended consequences.
Speaking of Pakistan, we have Parvez Hoodbhoy (Pakistani physicist who writes on politics for the Dawn) writing for the Dawn: Ram Mandir — an ill portent
Mixing religion with politics — whether in the Hindu or Muslim way — won’t surprise those who know Pakistan’s history. Soon after the All India Muslim League suffered a crushing defeat in the 1937 elections, its leadership successfully weaponised religion and wove it into politics. It was reinjected with a double dose by Gen Ziaul Haq in the 1980s.
Today, in every Pakistani political party’s arsenal, religion is the weapon of choice for demolishing opponents. When in power, PTI used it repeatedly against PML-N and PPP. In retaliation, Maryam Nawaz’s media team has recently returned the favour — with markup — in attacking Imran Khan.
Still, to me, an infrequent visitor to India, secularism’s rapid retreat comes as a surprise. Twenty years ago, while visiting the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Research in Bangalore, I was intrigued by Nehru’s words inscribed on the foundation stone: “I too have worshipped at the shrine of science.” But I don’t see ‘worship’ and ‘shrine’ tallying well with modern science or the scientific temper associated with Nehru.
My hosts rushed to explain. Shrine of science, they said, was actually a metaphorical allusion to labs and research centres. Nehru, they proudly asserted, was an atheist and never went to temples. Later, I found he actually did visit temples as well as mosques. Further, as in his prison diary The Discovery of India, his view of religion is fairly nuanced.
Mani Shankar Aiyar recently argued that Nehru would have fought tooth and nail against making Hinduism India’s official religion. In December 1947, his cabinet decided to rebuild — at state expense — the Somnath temple plundered in the 11th century by Mahmud Ghazni. When Nehru found out, he was furious and had the minutes secretly altered. But so long as the state was not involved, he said, any private initiative was fine. In 1951, when president Rajendra Prasad sought to officially visit the restored temple, Nehru refused permission.
If I remember, Prasad visited against Nehru’s advice (the president is supposed to act on the advice of the Cabinet). Even at the time, Nehru was fighting against majoritarian sentiment within and beyond his party. However, his and some of his compatriot’s secular vision carried the country for a few decades.
India’s descent into a Hindu rashtra generates a kind of smug satisfaction in Pakistan, a vindication of the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims cannot ever live together. But then, how shall the Muslims of India, and the few Hindus remaining in Pakistan, fare in times to come? Whether India can ever revert to its earlier, more accommodative and secular self, is an open question. For Pakistan, whose flirtation with liberal values ended in the 1970s, it appears even more difficult.
Sagar writes for the Caravan about the windfall gains made by a few in the construction of Ram Temple.
However, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Ram Lalla, on 9 November 2019, it asked the Modi government to set up a new trust within three months. On 5 February 2020, the government established the Ram Janmabhoomi Teertha Kshetra. Nritya Gopal was initially excluded from the RJTK but, after he threatened to launch an agitation in response, the trust elected him its chairperson at its first meeting, on 19 February.
The silver brick donated by Nritya Gopal—worth Rs 26 lakh at the time—was merely a prop. After Modi placed it in the ground, it was removed and transferred to a bank locker belonging to the RJTK, adding to the trust’s rapidly expanding coffers. The Modi government had made a symbolic donation of one rupee, on 5 February, to kickstart the fundraising process. The RJTK announced at the time that it would accept contributions in cash, kind or property, without any conditions. By August, it had Rs 42 crore in the bank. As of March 2023, it had raised over Rs 3,500 crore from all over the country and spent around Rs 900 crore on the temple complex.
In October, the trust was granted a license under the Foreign Contributions (Registration) Act to solicit additional donations from abroad. Such a license is an exceedingly rare commodity in Modi’s India. The home ministry told the Lok Sabha, in December 2022, that it had cancelled the FCRA registration of nearly two thousand NGOs between 2019 and 2021. Unlike other NGOs, the RJTK has faced very little scrutiny from the government over how it raises and spends money. A study of the transactions it conducted reveals that some of the donations were used to help certain individuals connected to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party make windfall gains.
It is a long piece and behind paywall. So, I will get to the crux.
The process allowed a number of local notables—almost all of them Brahmins—to make crores of rupees in profits. I analysed several land deals involving the RJTK in Kot Ramchandra and the nearby Bagh Bijaisi neighbourhood, and found a common pattern in most of them. Instead of the trust acquiring the land directly from its owners, it went through a number of intermediaries, many of whom were connected to Rishikesh Upadhyay, the mayor of Ayodhya at the time. They would first purchase the land at about the market price and then immediately sell it to the RJTK at an exorbitant markup.
The intermediaries were able to do this because, in many cases, the land was not the original owners’ to sell—it was either government or waqf land, or under dispute. The RJTK was evidently willing to pay these intermediaries a premium, out of the vast corpus of donations it had accumulated, in order to obtain clean title over the land, rather than dealing with the occupiers or leasing it from the government, which would have taken time and come with restrictions over its use and disposal. There is very little oversight over how the trust has spent the money it collected, with the government and the courts regularly shutting down attempts to elicit information about it.
Although the RJTK claims to be an apolitical private body concerned only with building the Ram temple—a position that allows it to deny requests made under the Right to Information Act—it is seen in Ayodhya as an arm of the government. I spoke to over two dozen local lawyers, revenue officers and residents for this story. Those who had fought the trust’s various land acquisitions and lost had a common refrain: “Who can fight the government?”
Economist Ashoka Modi writes for Project Syndicate about The Slow Death of India’s Secular Democracy
Initially, the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, countered Hindutva’s appeal to India’s Hindu majority with a unifying secular ideology anchored in freedom from British colonial rule. But Hindutva forces saw Gandhi’s call for religious harmony as pandering to Muslims, and in 1948, a Savarkar-inspired ideologue assassinated him.
Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, promoted a progressive secular Indian ideal precariously held together by the hope for material and social progress. But after Nehru’s death in 1964, communal forces within and outside the Congress party gained momentum. Secular ideals suffered a major blow on April 19, 1976, when the younger son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used the dictatorial powers of emergency rule to brutalize Muslims. The day began with humiliating forced sterilizations near Delhi’s Jama Masjid and culminated in a massacre of slumdwellers resisting eviction in neighboring Turkman Gate.
As Muslim electoral support for Congress waned, Gandhi shifted her focus to the Hindu vote, thus opening the door wider for hardline Hindutva forces. She established backchannel communications with the RSS, and increased her use of Hindu symbols as Hindu-Muslim riots became more frequent in the early 1980s. Her pandering to Hindus in the Jammu and Kashmir elections, and her support for the Sikh militant Sant Bhindranwale in Punjab, further stoked Hindu identity politics. After her assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, the anti-Sikh violence orchestrated by Congress leaders catalyzed mobs of unemployed – even unemployable – men as Hindu nationalism’s foot soldiers. Two key developments in the 1980s gave vivid reality to Savarkar’s vision of an India united by politicized Hinduism. In 1983, emboldened hardline Hindutva forces launched the “Ekatmata Yatra,” loosely defined as a “march to celebrate India’s one soul.” Organized by the Sangh Parivar (the umbrella term for Hindutva groups), multiple processions crisscrossed the country with Hindu emblems. In 1987-88, instructed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (Indira Gandhi’s older son), state-owned television Doordarshan serialized the much-loved Ramayana epic, which spawned a Rambo-like iconography of Lord Ram as Hindutva’s avenger.
Rajiv Gandhi also reignited the Hindu-Muslim contest for the site on which the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid stood. With Hindu zealots claiming that it was Lord Ram’s birthplace, Gandhi declared himself a champion of Hindu ideals and opened its gates, sealed since 1949 to contain communal passions. Then, in December 1992, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress-led government dithered as frenzied Hindu mobs demolished Babri Masjid, triggering bloody riots and further bolstering the Hindutva cause.
Or how Nehru’s descendents betrayed his vision. I know Nehru features a lot in this but many consider him to be one the major bulwarks against communalism in newly Independent India. Despite his flaws. There was no paywall for me. If you have not read any other article from them this month, you should be able to read it, I think.
Let me end with the mosque in Ayodhya: What about Ayodhya’s mosque? Ismat Ara writes for the Hindu Frontline.
The 2019 Supreme Court verdict paved the way for the construction of the temple on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, but the court also directed that a “suitable” five acres in a “prominent place” be given to the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh for the construction of a mosque.
In the same order, the apex court had particularly asked the government, both at the Centre and the State, to facilitate the construction of the mosque simultaneously with the temple. Yet, while Ayodhya prepares for the grand consecration of the Hindu temple, the proposed Muhammed bin Abdullah Masjid (mosque) of Ayodhya exists only as a blueprint. [...]
The Supreme Court gave five acres to build a mosque as compensation for the Babri Masjid land that they gave to the Hindu claimants.
The local theory is that Faizabad district was renamed Ayodhya before the judgment to justify giving the land in Dhannipur for the mosque. “We cannot say the land was not given in Ayodhya, even though it is far from there, because it is all Ayodhya now,” Sohrab Khan said.
The Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF), tasked with building the mosque in Dhannipur village, recently changed its strategy. The foundation has struggled to raise even Rs.50 lakh for the new mosque. Potential reasons for limited donations? Lingering anxieties, economic conditions of Muslims, and concerns about the project’s future. There are no political interventions to sort out bureaucratic bottlenecks.
There are administrative hurdles as well. “More than four years have passed since the court order, and efforts have been consistently hampered by administrative delays. While we acknowledge that we cannot compete with the construction of the Ram temple, the challenges we now face were not anticipated,” a senior Sunni Waqf Board member told Frontline. If there is no progress, it will cause the Muslim community to lose morale and feel left out, he said. “The fund-raising has been stopped because of the hurdles posed in the way of its construction,” he said.
Look to the comments for a few more articles and updates.
Afghanistan
Prisons and Taliban
Haroun Rahimi writes for Himal South Asian about incarceration under the shadow of the Taliban. This is part of their series on carceral system in South Asian countries. I think I shared one on Myanmar last week in the comments.
Since the Taliban’s takeover of power in 2021, the Afghan government has undertaken a complete overhaul of the justice sector in Afghanistan, implementing what it considers to be the Islamic system of justice. The existing evidence suggests that the emerging Taliban justice system is likely to prioritise swift corporal punishments over incarceration, especially with regard to women. In this, the Taliban administration claims to hark back to pre-modern traditions. In reality, the system that it is building continues to retain features associated with modern incarceration, including coercion and cruelty, with punishments often meted out to peaceful protesters opposing the Taliban government, many of them women.
Before the 20th century, Afghan rulers only employed imprisonment unsystematically and infrequently, detaining their enemies in ad hoc holding locations either indefinitely or until they were put to death. Islamic jurisprudence or Shari’ah, which was largely autonomous from the ruler, facilitated and legitimised communal self-governance, save for the enemies of the ruler. Those who transgressed the legal and ethical norms of the community could receive punishments ranging from harsh words to more severe penalties. The primary function of such punishment was psycho-ethical, because what merited punishment was a transgression against a divinely ordained way of communal life and not a mere violation of the command of the state. The punishment was primarily administered against the body of the wrongdoer publicly and swiftly, to allow the punished individual to return to the right path and to assure the community that its ethical norms remained secure.
The article goes on to trace the evolution of the carceral system in Afghanistan with the evolution (or transition to) of modern government.
In Afghanistan, a country deeply embedded in the Muslim tradition, incarceration did not become the primary form of punishment until Afghan nationalists and Afghan communists in the second half of the twentieth century undertook a process of re-making Afghan subjects into, respectively, a citizens of a nation-state or communist revolutionaries.
As the modern state in Afghanistan grew in power and scope, the state legal system increasingly displaced the autonomous form of communal self-governance, but it never completely replaced it. A turning point for the development of the state criminal system came in 1976, when the Afghan politician Mohammad Daoud Khan, who had recently taken power in a bloodless coup supported by leftists and nationalist Afghan elites, enacted the country’s first systematic Penal Code. The Penal Code of 1976 consisted of two books, eight sections, and 523 articles, and firmly established incarceration as the primary mode of punishment for crimes against individuals, society and the state.
Sri Lanka
Legalisation of Repression
Sri Lankan government it appears is rushing to pass an online safety bill that will restrict freedom of speech and dissent in advance of the presidential election. Meenakshi Ganguly writes for Colombo Telegraph.
A repressive new internet law that Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe is trying to rush through parliament this week would create broad and vague new speech-related offenses punishable by lengthy prison terms. The law would seriously threaten the right to freedom of expression as Sri Lanka prepares for parliamentary and presidential elections later this year.
The proposed law, the Online Safety Bill, purportedly provides protections against online harassment, abuse, and fraud. Instead, it is mostly concerned with creating a new “Online Safety Commission,” appointed by the president, that can decide what online speech is “false” or “harmful,” remove content, restrict and prohibit internet access, and prosecute individuals and organizations.
Commission-appointed “experts” would be empowered to enter and search suspects’ premises. Offenses under the law carry hefty fines and prison sentences up to five years. The United Nations human rights office said the law “could potentially criminalize nearly all forms of legitimate expression, creating an environment that has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”
The Asia Internet Coalition, an industry body including tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Meta, has called the bill a “draconian system to stifle dissent” and warned it “could undermine the potential growth of Sri Lanka’s digital economy.”
Sri Lanka is still reeling from an economic crisis partly caused by misgovernment and failures of accountability. In 2022, months-long protests demanding reform toppled the prime minister and president. Since coming to power that year, President Wickremesinghe has moved to stifle dissent.
Other repressive legislation before parliament includes a new broadcasting law, which the UN experts say could be used to “suppress dissenting voices,” and a counterterrorism law that “grants wide powers to the police – and to the military – to stop, question and search, and to arrest and detain people, with inadequate judicial oversight.”
As the author says, the law must be seen in the overall context of repressive regime in Sri Lanka.
Newswire reports that Sri Lanka risks losing Tech Collaboration as Social Media Companies oppose new law
If the controversial Online Safety Bill is passed in Sri Lanka, social media companies are likely to terminate all its communication and collaborative links with Sri Lankan state institutions with effect from January 24.
Once the proposed Online Safety Bill (OSB) is enacted, the country will have its own legal mechanism to deal with social media related issues, hence, there will be no requirements of these existing mechanisms, according to tech company sources.
As a result, Meta (Facebook), Youtube, Google, X and other members of AIC will stop their current special communication and collaborative channels with state institutions.
The government will have the controversial OSB’s second reading on January 23 and it is expected to pass on Wednesday (24).
Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the Singapore-based gathering of tech companies, has repeatedly requested the government to revise the proposed controversial piece of legislation in consultation with stakeholders, but the House is supposed to consider the same Bill that was challenged through unprecedented 52 cases in the Supreme Court.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for social media companies. However, authoritarian governments are a greater problem.
Elections in Sri Lanka
Laksiri Fernando writes for the Colombo Telegraph about the Presidential Elections in Sri Lanka.
Unless there is a major political predicament, the Presidential elections will be held between September and October 2024. That is for what all political parties and formations are now getting ready. [...]
It was reported yesterday that Namal Rajapaksa is going around the country forming Dasa Maha Senawa (Great Ten Armies) among their political supporters like in the ancient days. During Dutu Gamunu’s time, he even selected Dasa Maha Yodayo (Great Ten Giants) to lead those armies. Namal’s selection also would be for leaders who would lead the presidential elections and then face the Parliamentary battle thereafter. It is becoming very very clear that the Sri Lanka Podu Jana Peramuna (SLPP), has not changed an iota of their policies or politics based on family rule, traditional culture, archaic economics, and authoritarian politics.
Therefore, a major task at the presidential elections would be to defeat the SLPP candidate whoever he (not she) is. There is a possibility that the next SLPP candidate would be Chamal Rajapaksa who apparently has a better profile than the other Rajapaksa’s (i.e. Basil). However, he is under family rule and his orientation or policies are the same traditional, archaic, and authoritarian ones.
At the last presidential elections, Gotabaya Rajapaksa received over 6.9 million votes amounting to 52.25%. His main challenger, Sajith Premadasa, from the UNP could obtain only 41.99% of the votes or 5.6 million. The gap is over 1.3 million, which might not be a difficult task to overcome at the next presidential elections considering the events and changes during the last five years. People who voted for Gotabaya mainly came from the hardcore Sinhala Buddhist communities who mainly considered the war victory as the key reason. That situation has now largely changed. Rajapaksa rule under Gotabaya was an utter failure. While he failed to manage the country’s external debt situation, his murky policies on the national income and tax system brought the country into a bankrupt position. Most disastrous or hilarious was his fertilizer policy that affected the farmers and the economy alike.
On who might oppose the Rajapaksas, he talks of an alliance between two parties.
The best way to defeat Rajapaksas under these circumstances would be an alliance between Ranil Wickremasinghe (UNP) and Sajith Premadasa (SJB), perhaps Sajith as the presidential candidate and Ranil running for the prime ministerial position. The reason is that although Ranil is a better person in terms of economic vision and external relations, he is not a popular or acceptable character among the ordinary people or voters in the country.
That people want change is clear and on that, Vishwamitra writes for the Colombo Telegraph about the choices before Ranil Wikremasinghe.
We have been focusing mostly on the Opposition, largely on Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) and his party, National People’s Power (NPP). There is reason for this. AKD’s rise has been perceptible; some may have described it as meteoric; others as unbelievable. Whatever the adjective one uses, the exhibitionistic fashion the NPP has been engaging in its political campaign has in turn engaged the focus of the masses. The abject conditions of the economy, its radical relationship to the personal lives of the people at large, its grave impact on their daily lives, its negative effect on the stripping of somewhat relative luxuries enjoyed by the middleclass and the lower middleclass not yet being deterred by the stringent application of the IMF recommendations has captured our collective attention. [...]
The whole context of polity has undergone severe change and it’s threatening to destroy all what we has collected as our memories and pathetic legacy. The IMF calculus has not been able to read these subtle facets of life of an average villager. As an unfortunate consequence of this ‘failure’ on the part of these international lending agencies, politicians whose responsibility and duty is to implement the said recommendations do not possess that specific aspect of knowledge and information to impart into the populace. The populace loses trust in the politicians. When they lose that sacred element of trust, the system breaks down and restoration of that trust is almost impossible.
That is the fundamental advantage the National People’s Power (NPP) enjoys today. Although the NPP has not been tested and tried as a governing party in the past seventy five years, that very fact is presenting itself as the sole reason why the people are being attracted towards its leaders and pronounced policies. When one adds the skills and talents of those leaders to contextualize and orate in rich vernacular, the people listen. Gathering in thousands at the NPP rallies is no accident. When the people have lost their trust in the existing leadership, they look for alternatives, not substitutes. In the last seventy five years, it was a cycle of substitution; the Senanayakes and Jayewardenes were substituted by the Bandaranaikes and Rajapaksas. The battle between the traditional right versus the traditional left continued unbroken for three quarters of a century. Little wonder that the people got utterly fed up of this maddening cycle of musical chairs.
That is it for today. Until next Friday, everyone. Stay safe. Be well. Take care.
May the unjust fall and reign of justice come to pass. May we have the courage to fight for that.