I. Introduction: 
I am speaking on behalf of many of us when I say that Sept 11, 2001 snatched away our innocence, especially those of us living in the US. If the years and months preceding 9-11 seemed like times when things were more predictable, whether positively or negatively, everything since then seems to be destabilized. For the people of South Asian origin, especially the younger generation, the specter of racist attacks suddenly became a reality. Then came the “US Patriot Act” that institutionalized arbitrariness in the way law enforcement agencies deal with the minorities, especially from the Middle East and South Asia. Then came the Afghan war in South Asia, followed by terrorist attacks in South Asia and the Indo-Pak face-off. Soon after has come the carnage in Gujarat in India where over 700 people have been killed, including those in police firing. I do not need to tell you the kind of pressure these events have put on every one of us in terms of finding our bearings within the situation. How we deal with this is going to determine our future even though it may seem like we are far removed from the situation.

II. Disinformation:
In these brief remarks I want to focus on the Gujarat carnage to draw out how the issues present themselves. I am going to only summarize the main themes and we can get into details to clarify things as needed. Of course, all news these days have to be sifted for disinformation and we all have to learn the art and science of it as we go. We have to learn not only to use multiple sources of information, but also to apply our own knowledge and experience and also to check news for their coherency and consistency. We are all under pressure to accept the outlook that reality is unknowable and that everything is thus a matter of interpretation. This means that those in control can force their interpretations and even “prove” them right by using the power of the state. But for the people at large, we start by saying that the reality is knowable and that however imperfect knowledge may be at a given time, it still forms the basis of conscious human action to change the situation. 

III. Gujarat Carnage:
Coming back to Gujarat issue, on Feb 27th, 2002, there was a mob attack on the Sabarmati Express train in the town of Godhra of Gujarat. When the dust settled, 58 passengers had been burnt to death. The victims included supporters of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and many women and children. What followed this gruesome tragedy was a systematic burning, lynching, looting and terrorizing of mainly Muslim people living all over Gujarat. Entire families, colonies, communities of Muslims, an ex-member of the Parliament, businessmen and women, young and old were burnt to death, and even sitting High Court Judges of Muslim background could not be given police protection. Scores of places of worship were turned to rubble and cleared away in a hurry; even a shrine standing in front of the Ahmedabad police station was demolished and the crime scene cleared away by the authorities in record time. Then came the paramilitary and army to the streets of Gujarat and in the next few days, they killed over 100 people in the name of “maintaining law and order”. These killings are continuing today, as we speak. Thousands of people were arrested and tens of thousand sought refuge in relief camps or with relatives and neighbors of the opposite faith. There are still tens of thousands of refugees who are either too scared to go back to their homes or have no place to return to. The relief supplies announced have been most meager, especially from the government, which also has announced a discriminatory compensation formula for the deceased depending on where and when they died.  Loss in property is estimated to run into hundreds of crores of rupees. Many volunteers have courageously come forward to help the victims.

IV. Equal Protection:
The burning and looting went on for days on end as the police looked the other way or even aided and abetted the miscreants. The Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, Mr. Narendra Modi, actually condoned retaliation by the trident and mashal-wielding goonda squads while the police chief of Ahmedabad sought justification for the police action supposedly because the force was communalized!  The Central government, which considers “security” as a core priority and has in the last four years doubled the expenditure for the armed forces and police and paramilitary, did not intervene to provide security to the minority community even after the Prime Minister described the mayhem as a “black mark”. The principle that the State has to provide equal protection to all members of the polity irrespective of their religion or economic and social status stood in contempt.

V. Who Benefits?:
Right in the midst of this mayhem, on February 28th, the Finance Minister of India presented the Union budget for the coming fiscal year. This budget had been billed as a “hard budget” even before it was announced, seeking to increase the tax burden on the middle strata, increasing defense expenditure and accelerating the privatization of state enterprises. In addition, it contained hefty increases in indirect taxes on fuel and transportation and a reduction of the allocation for social services like healthcare, old age and unemployment protection, education etc. With the Gujarat in flames, and the planned Ayodhya temple construction playing itself out, the attention of the country was shifted away from these harsh economic measures. The opposition of many state enterprise workers to the privatization of public assets at throwaway prices and the subsequent restructuring to eliminate jobs was drowned out. The same was the case for anti-war activists opposing the war preparations and chauvinist war hysteria. The peasants and farmers who bear the brunt of poverty and underdevelopment in India saw for the third time their program for “land to the tiller” sidelined by the government-funded “third revolution” to promote agribusiness and agritrade, but their opposition was drowned out. For over two weeks, a very diversionary agenda on Ayodhya was debated as if this was the main problem for the people of India. This was disinformation at its best. 

In this period, the government of India introduced the prevention of terrorism ordinance (POTO) in parliament. Much of the country was watching in disbelief as an attack on the state assembly in Orissa by miscreants wielding trishuls and hailing the Vajpayee government when the terror legislation was adopted in the Lok Sabha of India! The point I want to highlight is that the atmosphere of anarchy and violence has served the authorities well and helped them implement their anti-people agenda, and one should think about these things seriously – especially about who benefits from the existence of anarchy and violence.

VI. We are Minorities Too:
More than three weeks after the Godhra train fire, we find not only the anti-social and anti-democratic agenda getting entrenched but also a deep wound inflicted on the body politic in the form of a de facto hierarchical system of rights defended by state power. It is not just the 140 million people belonging to the minority religions who are the victims but the over 800 million people who live hand to mouth and the billion plus people staring at the threat of war and a threat to their rights. If we just focus on how the people of Indian origin living abroad are affected, it is a matter of grave concern that governments around the world have barely whispered at these blatant violations of rights in India. The Indian state and government are not being accused by governments around the world for a version of “ethnic cleansing” and the Security Council of the UN has not seen it fit to discuss the matter. 

We are all minorities in the countries we live in and we do not accept that as members of the polity in these countries, we can be left unprotected by the state power under any pretext. We all know that there was a public effort in the US after 9-11 to oppose a racist backlash - which could not be otherwise without the state losing its democratic credentials. Of course we also know that this official line actually forced all the minorities coming from Arab and South Asian countries to prove that they were American by supporting the war the US was to launch in Afghanistan. It helped the US ruling circles to restrict the political space available to the anti-war and anti-racist movement at a time they were going to war and stepping up state-sanctioned racist discrimination. The South Asian community has seen both a sharp rise in the racist attacks and the US-led war in South Asia.  It is really important to emphasize the importance of rejecting these pretexts and to take a bold and unyielding stand against discrimination and war. As we can see, the pretexts can even be contradictory, but they are pretexts all the same and how we respond under any circumstance requires vigorous discussion and action with analysis.

The security of the people of India and South Asia, as well as their prosperity faces grave threats at this time and this is bound to have its effect on all the people of India and South Asia living anywhere on the globe. The effect will be on two fronts – how they fight for their own minority rights and how they affirm their identities. Their values, their identities, their place in the societies they live, their security etc. are all up for grabs. The threat of Indo-Pak war and the US-led military actions in South Asia complicate the future of South Asia and South Asians still further. Our short term and long term interests are on the line and we cannot afford to sit and watch when faced with such potential threats.

VII. Minimum Demands:
Many of you may have first hand or second hand experience of the violence and massacres in Delhi and Punjab, in Kashmir, in Manipur and Assam, in Mumbai, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India in the past decades. You may or may not know that in the majority of those instances, the culprits of are yet to be brought to justice and victims are yet to be compensated. If the culprits and victims of the latest violence are allowed to have a similar fate, you have to look no further than the situation in Afghanistan to see where India and South Asia may be headed. It is very important to take a stand – even if it is the minimum stand that the government of Gujarat and India must arrest, try and punish the culprits and rehabilitate the victims. 

VIII. Long Term Issues:
This minimum stand is very important but this must be viewed within the proper context, i. e. within the big picture. We must go deeper, examine if this is in deed a criminal case where the crime is committed by the acts of omission and commission of the state or does it point to something else, stretching outside the legal and law enforcement realm, extending to politics.  Is it a case of inability of the authorities or is it one of the tools the authorities use to stay in power?  Is this violence similar to other communal violence of the past or does the situation warrants new conclusions to be drawn?  Is it a product of the serious crisis the country is passing through when the state is unable to govern?  Even after all these questions are gone into and sorted out, we still have to deal with the fact that the Gujarat carnage has come at a time when Indians and South Asians were asserting their identities and setting a vision for ending the marginalization of India and Indians and how does it complicate matters?

In my opinion, we should always keep the big picture in focus when we debate specific demands to ensure that our immediate actions are not counterproductive to our own long-term interests. Let me illustrate this with two specific examples – some people are today suggesting that Gujarat carnage is a product of a fight between communalists and secularists and one should demand that the Gujarat government or even the Home Minister be dismissed. Even if both of these demands are acceded to, past experience suggests that it will only sow illusions that the problem has been fixed without forestalling any future anarchy and violence. Similarly, the demand for a judicial inquiry is an old demand – how many commissions like Srikrishna Commission of Mumbai, the Ranganath Mishra Commission of Delhi etc. have we seen? Those were tools to depoliticize the people and pacify them then, and they were never meant to - nor could they - bring an end to the politics of divide and rule, communal massacres, and police violence.  In other words, such demands not only do not address the long term interests but cannot even solve the immediate problems.

IX. Big Picture and the White Man’s Burden:
Looking at the carnage from the other vantage point – that of the movement to end the marginalization of South Asia and South Asians - it is not difficult to see how this kind of state-sanctioned and state-sponsored barbarism does not help us and our own struggles.   These days, you hear how groups of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan exhibit only tribalism, and that it is the role of the western powers to go in and civilize them. If you take the State of the Union speech of George W. Bush this year where he calls on the people of the US to take up the burden of educating the Muslim world about western values, and then extrapolate that call to include other Asian people like the Hindus in India, the Gujarat carnage will provide a very powerful justification to do so. This week, Mr. Bush has given the thesis during his visit to South America that poverty can spawn violence. To accept this kind of formulation is to accept the criminalization of poverty on the one hand and to legitimize the pretext of “ending poverty” that the US wants to use for intervening in other countries.  India and South Asia have the largest concentration of poverty on the globe and together with the Gujarat-type violence, a case can easily be made for the US to go there to stop this actual and latent violence bred by poverty. 

I think these are issues that need discussion at this time when the US is sharpening its arsenal of pretexts for intervention anywhere. In my view, this is nothing but the White Man’s Burden of the 21st century and it needs to be challenged head on. Our identities and national values as well as our political future as citizens of the countries where we live are at stake.

India and Pakistan are big countries, have nuclear weapons and have large armies, so they cannot be taken on directly by any single Western power. But they can be corroded from within, made to fight with each other, be weakened so that the societies can be torn apart and the people humiliated and brought under control. These are not hypothetical situations but real possibilities if the blueprint that the US administration is putting forth in Afghanistan is allowed to succeed in Asia. I wish to appeal to everyone to look at these things seriously because they constitute the big picture and will affect the movement to end the marginalization of South Asia. We still have time to make South Asia a factor for peace in the world, failing which the new century will be a century of wars in which India will be deeply enmeshed.

X. Hierarchical Rights:
You all know how the people of Middle Eastern origin and of the Muslim faith in general are under great pressure today. They are made to feel the weight of the hierarchy of rights in the US, especially since Sept 11. The people of Indian origin in the US were making a contribution to the struggle against this system of hierarchical rights through their hard work and continuing opposition to discrimination, without accepting the “true blue” racist and jingoist values of the US ruling circles.  But a few more bombs in front of US consulates in India, a few more assassinations of the likes of Daniel Pearl, a few more massacres like those in Gujarat, and the stage will be set to lump India with other countries of Middle East and North Africa, and we here will also be treated like those of Middle Eastern origin. If the mayhem of Gujarat continues and mosques, tombs, temples and churches keep being pulled down, we will be portrayed like those in Afghanistan who had no value for their Bamiyan heritage. 

XI. Way Forward: 
The way to change this course is to take a democratic and political stand now. Before young men and women from amongst us are recruited to go to India to fight against their own collective short term and long term interests, before the Indian State and governments preside over more massacres, before a war is imposed in South Asia, we must develop a political movement against these things and more importantly, unite behind a vision for a new India and new South Asia where everything is organized in favor of the people of India. 

India has been thrust into the center-stage of world politics and geopolitics, and this creates a favorable space for the people of India to act. As you all know, the opposition and ruling parties in the US united after September 11, and effectively shut the people out from the political discourse as they enacted the Patriot Act, went to war and paid out big sums of money to the monopolies in this country. They could not do these things in India because the political space available to the people could not be closed and the opposition and ruling parties could not unite. Because India is in the midst of various world developments, all forces in India are called upon by history to make their proposals and visions. Some want India to become a big power by allying with the US, while others want India to become a big power by opposing the US.  Yet others see India becoming a power by solving the problems of the people on the basis of empowering them. None of these visions can be shut out at this time – and so, the third one has an equal chance of prevailing. The chance of this happening improves if we consciously work for its realization and organize for the people to take up this vision.

This is how the AIPSG views the situation. The AIPSG has been projecting such a vision for last five years, if not more, and has adopted a program for democratic renewal of political, economic and national life. It is based on the theme of affirming the rights of all human beings, affirming the equality of rights of all members of the polity. It is rooted in the old Indian values of sarva jana sukhina bhavantu and basudhaiv kutumbakam and the modern values of all for one and one for all and working people of the world unite. 

We have just seen how these values unite people – the entire world united in condemning the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because an attack on the US was felt to be an attack on all humanity. We have also seen how the same feelings about the attacks in Afghanistan or Gujarat are manipulated to justify a different agenda by the powers that be.  More such wars and violations of rights are on the cards because these powers have run out peaceful options to maintain a status quo that keeps billions of people suffering silently in the hands of a handful of big powers, big multinationals, big banks and big weapons merchants. We are being challenged by history to end this incoherency, this conflict between what is possible and what is being maintained by a combination of deception and force. This is the way various questions pose themselves today even though we started this discussion by focusing on the Gujarat carnage. 

We must take a stand for our own future today. It is a stand that will defend our immediate interests and advance our long term interests. We must put our hands out to help those in need, put our voices out to oppose current and future attacks and demand justice. We have to go the extra mile to create an alternative so that the economic, social and political injustices of the past are ended and all the people can live in dignity. Thank you.