The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind is one of countless organisations that claim to represent Muslims in India. However, unlike most others, the Jamiat stands out because of its track record. It was at the forefront of the freedom movement and vehemently opposed the country’s partition

This was not a *new* statement. Hon Sh Chidambaram had said something similar at Deoband last week:

The Home Minister lauded the role played by Jamiat during freedom struggle, nation building, and opposing the two-nation theory espoused by the Muslim League.

The facts though are somewhat different - and difficult.

As Prof Hari Om explains in his article, Sh Chidambaram is only partly right on this. Yes, the Jamiat did oppose the British rule and the partition. Its motives howevere were far from being liberal and “secular“. As Prof Om writes (emphasis added):

It needs to be underlined that the JuH, which came into being in 1919 as a political organ of the Deoband School to join the Turkey-centric Khilafat Movement, opposed the two-nation theory because it believed that the division of India and creation of Pakistan would defeat its ultimate objective of converting the non-believers and re-establishing Islamic rule in all of India.To be more precise, its arguments against the two-nation theory were: “The Pakistan demand has British backing; Pakistan will split and therefore weaken Muslim India; Muslims left behind in India after separation will be at the mercy of the Hindus; partition will hinder the missionary activities of the Ulema; Muslim League leaders are ignorant of Islam, have no ideology, and are only exploiting the name of Islam for the worldly gains of Muslim vested interests; and Muslim League leaders are incapable of building up an Islamic state and their Pakistan will be no better than the Turkey of Mustafa Kamal.”

What were the stated aims and objectives of the Deoband seminary and its political outfit, the Jamait-Ulama-i-Hind? Their aims and objectives were “to defend Islam, Islamic rituals and customs, and Islamic nationalism against all odds injurious to them; achieve and protect the general religious and national rights of the Muslims; establish good and friendly relations with the non-Muslims of the country to the extent permitted by the Shariat-i-Islamiyah; fight for the freedom of the country and religion according to the Shari objectives.”

I have left a comment on the DNA website for Javed but I am not sure it will be published. Fingers crossed.

Related Posts:

Distorting history…and getting paid for it

Lies and half-truths in the name of national integration

Post from: || Satyameva Jayate ||

This is a subject with such rich pickings (pun unintended)…that I am seriously considering a series on “How to earn Rs XYZ crores in X years” focused on politicians (- feel free to write in with tips and information).

That post was about earning Rs 10 crores+ a year (give or take a few)…so my eyes naturally popped when I read this bit from Shantanu Guha Ray’s “The Rise and Fall of King Koda” in the lastest issue of Tehelka (emphasis mine):

How did Koda create an empire so huge? Where did the cash come from — and what triggered the collapse?

ED officials say Koda’s empire ran like a welloiled machine: cash — collected by the state’s all-powerful coal mafia — would be routinely deposited at unknown locations by Koda’s men. They would also hire youngsters, sometimes school students, to count this cash, which allegedly totalled Rs 35 to Rs 50 lakh a day from the coal belt alone. That’s because the coal mafia is said to collect Rs 2 lakh from each of the 20 coal rakes (collection units or wagons) announced by subsidiary companies of the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) and also some private companies managing coal patches offered by CIL. This reportedly goes to the man who runs the state (read the CM) and is estimated to add up to around Rs 14 crore a month..

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Next post on the spectrum scam - which might be the mother of all scams to date.

Post from: || Satyameva Jayate ||

If you ever wondered how bad the situation is in the North-East, look no further.  Courtesy this news-report by Rahul Karmakar (HT)*: Ministers Too Pay Tax to Militants in North-East (emphasis mine):

It’s out in the open. Ministers in the Northeast do pay `taxes’ to militants. A top leader of a faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland has claimed while drawing a line between extortion and levies imposed by underground `governments’.

…”Yes, we collect taxes and there’s nothing illegal about it,” asserted Kughalu Mulatonu, leader of the Khaplang faction of the NSCN. “Our tax net covers farmers, traders, government employees and even ministers and MLAs. Like the Indian government, we also have to run a government and sustain an army.”

In adjoining Manipur, at least half a dozen outfits such as the Peoples’ Liberation Army and Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup collect tax from residents of Imphal Valley. This is over and above the tax that the government imposes. In government offices-police department included -the drawing and disbursing officers reportedly deduct the `tax’ from every employee’s salary before pay day and hand the cash over to the collection agents of each outfit every month…

If this is the case with elected leaders, you can well imagine the plight of the common people.

* Sadly no web-link to this story. I have no reason to doubt its veracity though. I have left a comment on Rahul’s blog to see if he has a link.

Somewhat related posts:

“India Breaking” - Read this and Weep

North-East “burning”

Getting obsessive about Arunachal…

Post from: || Satyameva Jayate ||

*** Excerpts Begin ***

Most educated Indians know that most Indian languages are divided into two broad linguistic streams - i.e. the “Indo-European” and the “Dravidian”. Tied in with this linguistic classification is the theory that the North Indian languages came with “Aryan” settlers.

…To this day, influential historians (such as Romila Thapar) and others at the JNU (and several other leading Indian universities) continue to swear by this colonial era model. Critics of this colonial-era formulation are usually dismissed as “amateurs” or “national chauvinists” who are somehow unable to comprehend the supposedly well-established “science” of “modern” linguistics.

But is this classification truly “scientific” or a construct that derives more from purely political considerations as some recent critics have argued?

Hungarian Critics of the “Indo-European” Scheme

For instance, in Hungary, there is a growing body of scholars who are extremely uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the manner in which Hungarian was excluded from the Indo-European framework.

…As some modern linguists have argued, the inclusion or exclusion of a language in a particular family must be based on very precise and consistent criterion that should be backed up computerized statistical analysis. For instance, there are some Indian language scholars who have suggested that a computerized analysis of Sanskrit and Latin lexicons might yield a far more limited overlap than would be rationally implied by the “Indo-European” classification.

In fact, such analysis might reveal a greater overlap between North Indian and South Indian langauages as well as between Adivasi langauges and their neighboring Indic langauges that are presently placed under the “Indo-European” umbrella.

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But to date, advocates of the Indo-European paradigm have strenuously resisted such calls for a fresh and unbiased scientific analysis of their classification methods. Nor have they been open to analyzing their conclusions in the context of geography, archaeology, anthropology, trade ties, cultural exchanges and regional political developments.

Few linguists ascribing to the Indo-European/Dravidian divide have bothered to investigate the extent of commonality between Sanskrit or Tamil or Munda and Hindi or Tibetan and Bengali. The possibilities of overlapping vocabularies or shared words between langauges that are currently placed in different linguistic streams has simply not interested many Western-influenced Indian linguists.

Problems with the “Indo-European” Construct

…Building primitive lexicons that show similar roots for certain common words can hardly be an adequate basis of linguistic classification. Especially if that classification is going to be further used to generate implications about sociological and cultural development. If the commonality between Indian and European langauages extends only to a small pastoral-era oral lexicon, the Indo-European theory of langauges could hardly be called in to justify the “Aryan Invasion” theory let alone infer that the Vedas were written by “Indo-European Aryan” migrants.

In fact, one of the unintended (or even intended) consequences of such linguistic speculation is that there has been a needless intellectual division between North Indians and South Indians, between Adivasis and “non-Adivasis” . Moreover, it has strengthened the now increasingly untenable view that there is no continuity between the Indo-Saraswati Harappan civilization and Vedic civilization, and that India’s languages (both in the oral and written forms) must have been brought to India by more “civilized” outsiders.

India and the Birth of Formal Linguistics

Although there is some disagreement on when Panini lived, few modern linguists would deny him and (his lesser-known) predecessors a place at the very forefront of the science of linguistics.

Amongs the earliest known formal Sanskrit lexicons is the Nighantu (a thesaurus-like lexicon) ascribed to Yaska (7th c BC) whose work attempted to systematize the various lexicons that had been developed to aid in the understanding and intrerpretation of the Vedic texts. These included lexicons of rare or difficult words classified into chapters containing similes, metonyms, and other categories of related words that were used to describe physical things and objects in nature. A separate chapter contained words that related to human physical/physiological and mental/emotional qualities and yet another chapter confined itself to words relating to abstract qualities and concepts. A separate book described homonyms that presented special difficulties in their interpretation or had ambiguous meanings. Yaska’s Nighantu was accompanied by his Nirukta (a treatise on entymology and word-parsing) in which rules for deriving words from roots and affixes are described. Yaska followed Sakatayana (an older grammarian) and described four types of words: nama (or nouns), akhyata (verbs), upsarga (prefixes) and nipata (particles such as prepositions). He defined verbs as those in which the process or action predominated and nouns as that in which an entity or a being or a thing predominated. He was also cognizant of how sometimes verbs taken on a noun-like form - such as “going for a walk” where the verb walk takes on a noun-like form.

Yaska also posited a semantic theory in which he argued that words had inherent meanings in contrast to Panini who argued that words had meanings only in their specific context. This debate appears to mirror the modern-day debate between semantic atomists and cognitive linguistics. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi (Eight Chapters) went deeper into linguistic morphology defining such terms as phonemes, morphemes and roots. He also described rules/algorithms for taking material from lexical lists (dhatupatha) and generating words from them in a structured and systematic manner. Panini’s influence on modern linguistics has been considerable (see notes below).

In this entire body of work stretching, from Sakatayana to Panini, there is virtually nothing to link Sanskrit to any European influence.

On the other hand, both Sanskrit and Tamil are syllabic languages and both treat consonants and vowels very similarly. Just as in Sanskrit where aksharas (speech particles or atoms) are divided into Svarams (vowels) and Vyanajanams (consonants), in Tamil vowels (Uyir Ezhuttu) are clearly distinguished from consonants Mey Ezhuttu.

Alphabets versus Syllables

And although linguists are divided as to which came first, both Sanskrit and Tamil are written in very similar ways. Unlike the European langauges that are written using alphabets (derived from Greek, and branching off from Latin or Cyrillic), all Indian languages are written using syllables made up of (simple or compound) consonant shapes that are modified by the symbols for vowels that connect the consonants. In Sanskrit (and languages derived from it) as well as in South Indian languages like Telugu and Kannada there is a precise and unambiguous correspondence between how words are pronounced and how they are written.

From the point of view of classifying languages based on the organizational principles that govern their written scripts no logic would permit the Sanskrit-derived North Indian langauges to be placed in the same language group as the European languages.

For instance, languages (such as Chinese or Japanese) that use pictograms, logograms and ideograms in their written form are a unique group of languages and are classified as “Semanto-phonetic”. To understand the development of such languages using morphological and entymological constructs as described by Sanskrit linguists such as Yaska or Panini would be absurd.

Yet, Western scholars seem to have no difficulty in clubbing Sanskrit with English and French even though the manner in which Sanskrit developed and was formalized was entirely unknown and alien to the Europeans. On the other hand, structurally speaking (notwithstanding some differences), Sanskrit and Tamil are like sisters, yet many Westerners persist with placing them in entirely different language families.

…

Pan-Indic Linguistic Features

Writing in Language in India (9, Jan, 2002), G. Sankaranarayanan observes how repeating words and forms is a significant feature that extends across the Indian subcontinent and includes not only the Sanskrit and Tamil derivatives but also Munda and languages from the Tibetan-Burmese group.

…Thus word repitition is an economic but meaningful way of expressing varied forms of frequency, plurality or multiplicity.

Note too that Indic languages permit the dropping of pronouns (which become implied). In the previous example both the subject (I/we) and object pronouns (him/her/them) may be dropped, but (got tired telling) would be impermissable in English.

Another form of repitition is the use of an echo word to suggest a broader category than the word echoed.

Sentence Word Order

It may also be noted that across India, both Sanskrit and Tamil derived languages use SOV (subject Object Verb) word order as a default. But several Indo-European langauges such as English, French, Portugese and Bulgarian use SVO word order.

However, in colloquial or theatrical speech, (or even in poetic/literary texts) Hindi (like Arabic) also permits VSO. Moreover, when repeated words are used all Indian langauges permit the omission of the subject and the word order becomes flexible - either OV or VO.

Word order also becomes flexible in the context of question and answer exchanges. Thus in Hindi “Gaye the Tum?” (Went did you?), “Tum Gaye The?” (You went did?) and “Tum Gaye?” (You went?) are all possible. Replies to where did you go could be equally varied from the standard SOV “Main Allahabad gaya tha” (I Allahabad went) to an OVS “Allahabad gaya tha main” (Allahabad went I) or simply OV “Allahabad gaya tha” (Allahabad went) or even VO “Gaya tha Allahabad” (Went Allahabad)

In this respect, Indian languages are similar to each other but not to less flexible “Indo-European” languages like English. On the other hand, Russian and Czech (like Hungarian) do not require a fixed or default word order.

In conclusion, it might be stated that the present scheme of bifurcating Indian langauges into the “Indo-European” and “Dravidian” scheme is unsatisfactory in many ways. Not only does it ignore vital commonalities between the langauges of Northern and Southern India, it has also precluded comprehensive comparitive studies between these Indic languages and other Indic langauges such as the Munda or those from the Tibetan-Burmese stream.

…Also obscured is the scientific analysis and rational organization that went into the formalization of Sanskrit (in both spoken and written forms) and other Indic languages that created a solid foundation for India’s largely self-propelled progress in philosophy, epistemology, law and governance, mathematics, art, theatre and music, mathematics, and the biological and physical sciences.

Consciously or unconsciously, the “Indo-European” scheme not only divided India from within but also set it apart from from its intellectually-linked Asian brethren and oceanic neighbors in Africa.

*** End of Excerpts ***

In case you are tempted to dismiss the author as another misguided “nationalist”, Sh Thadani is an undergrad from the prestigious IIT in Delhi and a Post-Graduate degree in Computer Science from Yale where his area of specialization included Theoretical Computer Science, the Syntax and Semantics of Computer Langauges and Natural Language Processing.  He was assisted in his reasearch by Giti Thadani, who is intimately familiar with several European langauges including German, French and Hungarian (as well as Sanskrit).

The article in full here.

Related Posts:

“Defalsify India’s History” by Subramanian Swamy - Excerpts

“The Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence” - A blurb

Revising the “Aryan Invasion of India” Theory

Post from: || Satyameva Jayate ||

*** Excerpts Begin ***

Like most women who prefer to visit the ladies’ room together, the women of Sakhara village in Vidarbha’s Yavatmal district also answered their nightly nature’s call in groups. Except it wasn’t for midnight banter, but for their safety.

Because right till early 2005, the ladies’ latrine in this tiny hamlet, located about 753 km north-east of Mumbai, was an open field.

Today, this village housing 62 families has 50 functional toilets. In November 2005, it received an award from the state government as the first ‘open defecation-free village’ in the Pandharkawda block of Yavatmal.

…“We used to sit down, look around here and there to make sure there were no men around, quickly do our business and scamper off,” grins Anusay Gonivar, a feisty 60-year-old and one of the village’s key SHG members.

While the men’s loo (read open ground) was a fair distance away, squatting in a field unprotected from prying eyes was unnerving for the women, especially at night.

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“We had to wake up our neighbours for company,” says Pushpabai Gutmulkuvar (54), another SHG member.

…Much of rural India has benefited from the government’s Nirmal Gram Yojana introduced in 2000, to ensure open-defecation free villages. Nearly 3,450 villages in Maharashtra have been declared open-defecation free thanks to this scheme, which highlights the issue of rural sanitation through the building of toilets in panchayats, blocks and districts.

Ironically, Sakhara’s inhabitants used the 20 government-sponsored toilets built in 2000 as storehouses.

“The government only made outer structures, which fell apart in a few months. There were no seats, no pipes; not even a door,” grumbles Gutmulkuvar. “Neither did they teach us how to use it or educate us about its benefits.”

In April 2005, with the aid of local UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) representatives, the women SHGs devised a sanitation plan for Sakhara.

Each of the groups pooled in Rs 500 for raw materials to build toilets costing Rs 300 to Rs 1,500.

…The government’s shoddy latrines were rebuilt with cemented bricks, commodes, flush tanks, drainage pipes — and doors. Makeshift toilets were also constructed in homes and the local primary school.

Once the toilets were ready, the most challenging part for the women was to convince the shy villagers to use them.

“They thought it was unhygienic to defecate and urinate within their own houses,” says Gonivar.

Through gram panchayat meetings, the women helped locals understand the advantages of lavatories. “It was strange at first,” …But it soon caught on.

…The women know they have earned this praise. “Our village is good, but we have worked hard to make it so,” says Gonivar.

*** Excerpts End ***

But a lot still needs to be done.

To round off this series,  pl. read this concluding paragraph from Tavleen Singh’s recent article, ‘Gandhian’ field trips:

Instead of the tokenism of renaming the NREGA in his name, what about a campaign to create sanitary living conditions in our villages in Gandhiji’s name? He was one of the few Indian leaders who was appalled by the squalour of rural Indian life and wrote about it eloquently.

There is much that can be done in Gandhiji’s name that would truly honour his memory. But, for that we need to get beyond the empty symbolism of sleepovers in Dalit huts. It mocks the misery of the poorest of our citizens to do this. They do not live in squalour because they like to, but because they have no choice.

Their squalid living conditions, their shameful poverty, bear witness to how little has changed for the Dalits since Gandhiji first began his fight against untouchability. What is sadder still is that Dalit leaders like Mayawati so quickly forget where they came from.

Related Posts:

On Open Defecation, Hygiene and India Shining - Part I

“A plea for sanitation” - excerpts

Post from: || Satyameva Jayate ||