Pakistan Elections and support for Arun Gandhi
Waleed Ziad writes in the Op-ed of the NYT about the need for democracy in Pakistan. It seems quite a balanced article on the ground realities in Pakistan and how the majority of the people do not want a talibanization of their country nor American determination of it's policies.
WHILE it’s good news that secular moderates are expected to dominate Pakistan’s parliamentary elections on Monday, nobody here thinks the voting will spell the end of militant extremism. Democratic leaders have a poor track record in battling militants and offer no convincing remedies. Pakistan’s military will continue to manage the war against the Taliban and its Qaeda allies, while President Pervez Musharraf will remain America’s primary partner. The only long-term solution may lie in the hands of an overlooked natural ally in the war on terrorism: the Pakistani people.
This may come as a surprise to Americans, but the Wahhabist religion professed by the militants is more foreign to most Pakistanis than Karachi’s 21 KFCs. This is true even of the tribal North-West Frontier Province — after all, a 23-foot-tall Buddha that was severely damaged last fall by the Taliban there had stood serenely for a thousand years amid an orthodox Muslim population.
Last month I was in the village of Pakpattan observing the commemoration of the death of a Muslim Sufi saint from the Punjab — a feast of dance, poetry, music and prayer attended by more than a million people. Religious life in Pakistan has traditionally been synonymous with the gentle spirituality of Sufi mysticism, the traditional pluralistic core of Islam. Even in remote rural areas, spiritual life centers not on doctrinaire seminaries but Sufi shrines; recreation revolves around ostentatious wedding parties and Hollywood, Bollywood and the latter’s Urdu counterpart, Lollywood.
So when the Taliban bomb shrines and hair salons, or ban videos and music, it doesn’t go down well. A resident of the Swat region, the site of many recent Taliban incursions, proudly told me last month that scores of citizens in his village had banded together to drive out encroaching militants. Similarly, in the tribal areas, many local village councils, called jirgas, have summoned the Pakistani Army or conducted independent operations against extremists. Virtually all effective negotiations between the army and militants have involved local councils; in 2006, a jirga in the town of Bara expelled two rival clerics who used their town as a battleground.
The many militant outfits in the frontier regions are far from a unified popular movement. Rather, they are best characterized as ethnic or sectarian gangs, regularly changing names and loyalties. More often than battling the army, they engage each other in violent turf wars. For many of them — some with only a handful of members — “Taliban” is a convenient brand name that awards them the status of international resistance fighters. It is not uncommon for highway bandits to declare themselves Taliban when stealing tape decks from vehicles.
The Taliban franchise that has battled the army for months in the Swat Valley is held by an outfit whose founder marched thousands of local youths to their death in a campaign in Afghanistan in 2002. Upon returning, he virtually solicited his own arrest by Pakistani authorities to escape the vengeance of the victims’ families. The group is now led by one “Mullah Radio” who, armed with an FM station, preaches that polio vaccinations are a Zionist plot and that the 2005 earthquake was retribution for a sinful existence. A worrisome crank, yes, but hardly Osama bin Laden.
The big problem — as verified by a poll released last month by the United States Institute of Peace — is that while the Pakistani public condemns Talibanism, it is also opposed to the way the war on terrorism has been waged in Pakistan. People are horrified by the thousands of civilian and military casualties and the militants’ retaliatory attacks in major cities. Despite promises, very little money is going toward development, education and other public services in the frontier region’s hot zones. This has led to the belief that this war is for “Busharraf” rather than the Pakistani people.
Also SAJA is reporting community support for Arun Gandhi here.
A couple weeks after Arun Gandhi was forced to resign from the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence for his comments on The Washington Post's On Faith website - see our earlier coverage, with loads of comments - he's finding support from a number of progressive/leftist academics, activists, filmmakers and others. A statement in his defense has been endorsed by over a hundred individuals and groups based in the U.S., India, Canada, the UK and other countries. It criticizes the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League for labeling "any and all criticism of Israel’s policies as anti-Semitic."
The statement, titled "Why Did Gandhi Have to Resign?" was drafted by Sunaina Maira of the University of California-Davis, who authored "Desis in the House" and co-founded the desi activist event known as Youth Solidarity Summer. She singles out the Hindu American Foundation for "attempting to model themselves on the lines of the Israel lobby, while criticism of Israel's policies or support for justice in Palestine are increasingly less tolerated within the Indian community." (Read HAF's initial take on Arun Gandhi's remarks here)
From "Why Did Gandhi Have to Resign?":
"It was not enough for University of Rochester that he had been pressured to apologize. Gandhi’s resignation makes it clear that he was the latest casualty of the powerful and highly organized pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. that immediately deems any and all criticism of Israel’s policies as anti-Semitic. The irony is that in his post, Gandhi was actually noting the very phenomenon of a community overplaying its historic experience that was enacted in the vitriolic response of powerful and well-funded organizations created to silence and intimidate critics of Israel."
Further down:
"It is shameful that groups such as the Hindu American Foundation who claim to promote “tolerance and understanding” would support such blatant censorship of Gandhi’s grandson. Perhaps they choose to ignore Mahatma Gandhi’s statement in 1946 that Jewish settlers “have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism ... Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?” The HAF has chosen instead to ally itself with groups such as the ADL and to participate in the dishonest and cowardly silencing of any one who dares to criticize the racism and violence directed against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. Hindu, Indian, South Asian groups that profess to support dialogue and mutual respect should respect the rights of individuals to freely express their views without fear of losing their jobs and being publicly defamed. Such actions are insulting to the memory of courageous leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi who risked their lives for national self-determination and an end to colonialism and racism. Like his grandfather, Arun Gandhi has paid a price for the larger principle of speaking out in support of justice and freedom."
WHILE it’s good news that secular moderates are expected to dominate Pakistan’s parliamentary elections on Monday, nobody here thinks the voting will spell the end of militant extremism. Democratic leaders have a poor track record in battling militants and offer no convincing remedies. Pakistan’s military will continue to manage the war against the Taliban and its Qaeda allies, while President Pervez Musharraf will remain America’s primary partner. The only long-term solution may lie in the hands of an overlooked natural ally in the war on terrorism: the Pakistani people.
This may come as a surprise to Americans, but the Wahhabist religion professed by the militants is more foreign to most Pakistanis than Karachi’s 21 KFCs. This is true even of the tribal North-West Frontier Province — after all, a 23-foot-tall Buddha that was severely damaged last fall by the Taliban there had stood serenely for a thousand years amid an orthodox Muslim population.
Last month I was in the village of Pakpattan observing the commemoration of the death of a Muslim Sufi saint from the Punjab — a feast of dance, poetry, music and prayer attended by more than a million people. Religious life in Pakistan has traditionally been synonymous with the gentle spirituality of Sufi mysticism, the traditional pluralistic core of Islam. Even in remote rural areas, spiritual life centers not on doctrinaire seminaries but Sufi shrines; recreation revolves around ostentatious wedding parties and Hollywood, Bollywood and the latter’s Urdu counterpart, Lollywood.
So when the Taliban bomb shrines and hair salons, or ban videos and music, it doesn’t go down well. A resident of the Swat region, the site of many recent Taliban incursions, proudly told me last month that scores of citizens in his village had banded together to drive out encroaching militants. Similarly, in the tribal areas, many local village councils, called jirgas, have summoned the Pakistani Army or conducted independent operations against extremists. Virtually all effective negotiations between the army and militants have involved local councils; in 2006, a jirga in the town of Bara expelled two rival clerics who used their town as a battleground.
The many militant outfits in the frontier regions are far from a unified popular movement. Rather, they are best characterized as ethnic or sectarian gangs, regularly changing names and loyalties. More often than battling the army, they engage each other in violent turf wars. For many of them — some with only a handful of members — “Taliban” is a convenient brand name that awards them the status of international resistance fighters. It is not uncommon for highway bandits to declare themselves Taliban when stealing tape decks from vehicles.
The Taliban franchise that has battled the army for months in the Swat Valley is held by an outfit whose founder marched thousands of local youths to their death in a campaign in Afghanistan in 2002. Upon returning, he virtually solicited his own arrest by Pakistani authorities to escape the vengeance of the victims’ families. The group is now led by one “Mullah Radio” who, armed with an FM station, preaches that polio vaccinations are a Zionist plot and that the 2005 earthquake was retribution for a sinful existence. A worrisome crank, yes, but hardly Osama bin Laden.
The big problem — as verified by a poll released last month by the United States Institute of Peace — is that while the Pakistani public condemns Talibanism, it is also opposed to the way the war on terrorism has been waged in Pakistan. People are horrified by the thousands of civilian and military casualties and the militants’ retaliatory attacks in major cities. Despite promises, very little money is going toward development, education and other public services in the frontier region’s hot zones. This has led to the belief that this war is for “Busharraf” rather than the Pakistani people.
Also SAJA is reporting community support for Arun Gandhi here.
A couple weeks after Arun Gandhi was forced to resign from the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence for his comments on The Washington Post's On Faith website - see our earlier coverage, with loads of comments - he's finding support from a number of progressive/leftist academics, activists, filmmakers and others. A statement in his defense has been endorsed by over a hundred individuals and groups based in the U.S., India, Canada, the UK and other countries. It criticizes the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League for labeling "any and all criticism of Israel’s policies as anti-Semitic."
The statement, titled "Why Did Gandhi Have to Resign?" was drafted by Sunaina Maira of the University of California-Davis, who authored "Desis in the House" and co-founded the desi activist event known as Youth Solidarity Summer. She singles out the Hindu American Foundation for "attempting to model themselves on the lines of the Israel lobby, while criticism of Israel's policies or support for justice in Palestine are increasingly less tolerated within the Indian community." (Read HAF's initial take on Arun Gandhi's remarks here)
From "Why Did Gandhi Have to Resign?":
"It was not enough for University of Rochester that he had been pressured to apologize. Gandhi’s resignation makes it clear that he was the latest casualty of the powerful and highly organized pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. that immediately deems any and all criticism of Israel’s policies as anti-Semitic. The irony is that in his post, Gandhi was actually noting the very phenomenon of a community overplaying its historic experience that was enacted in the vitriolic response of powerful and well-funded organizations created to silence and intimidate critics of Israel."
Further down:
"It is shameful that groups such as the Hindu American Foundation who claim to promote “tolerance and understanding” would support such blatant censorship of Gandhi’s grandson. Perhaps they choose to ignore Mahatma Gandhi’s statement in 1946 that Jewish settlers “have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism ... Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?” The HAF has chosen instead to ally itself with groups such as the ADL and to participate in the dishonest and cowardly silencing of any one who dares to criticize the racism and violence directed against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. Hindu, Indian, South Asian groups that profess to support dialogue and mutual respect should respect the rights of individuals to freely express their views without fear of losing their jobs and being publicly defamed. Such actions are insulting to the memory of courageous leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi who risked their lives for national self-determination and an end to colonialism and racism. Like his grandfather, Arun Gandhi has paid a price for the larger principle of speaking out in support of justice and freedom."
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