By C. Raja Mohan
From THE HINDU, August 27, 2001

NEW DELHI, AUG. 26. Any attempt to dredge up the divisive question of equating Zionism with racism, the Government believes, could only help undermine the international conference against racism opening at
Durban, South Africa, next Friday.

India has not been in favour of overloading the Durban deliberations with a range of extraneous issues that might take the focus away from the stated purpose of the conference to combat racism and racial
discrimination.

The Minister of State for External Affairs, Mr. Omar Abdullah, is leading the Indian delegation to the Durban conference. As many contentious issues cloud the deliberations at Durban, it might fall upon the Indian delegation to act as ``a bridge builder'' at the conference, observers here say.

India believes the international community has gone through the divisive debate on equating Zionism as racism before, and that no point is served in raking this up again at Durban.

In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly had declared that Zionism was racism. But the following the initiation of a peace process in West Asia in 1991, the UNGA repealed the earlier formulation. Since then this consensus has been upheld in all the declarations of the international community.

India is a party to the consensus that Zionism is not racism; it will not support any move at Durban to overturn that formulation. In the run up to the conference, India had cautioned against extremist positions that would raise hackles and undermine the very purpose of the Durban debate.

At the same time India is realistic enough to see that criticism of Tel Aviv's policies in the occupied territories may be inevitable.
There will be ``some reflection'', diplomatic observers here say, of the current depressing state of the peace process in West Asia, in the deliberations at Durban. The policies of the current government
in Israel are certainly not designed to gather international support, they add.

But India would not like to see the Arab-Israeli tensions derail the deliberations at the ``World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance'', that is taking place after extraordinary consultations and preparations.

With barely five days to go before the inauguration of the conference, the prospect of radical states wanting to isolate Israel at Durban and the threat of an American boycott of the conference remain in diplomatic play.

India, which is looking for a successful outcome at Durban, hopes the unfolding confrontation will not be allowed to drift towards a breaking point. It is in touch with key players. It expects moderation and political realism will eventually prevail and let the conference focus on the stated agenda.

The issue is also likely to figure in Monday's discussions with a senior Israeli official who is here to brief the Government on the current situation in West Asia.

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Dalits and Durban - I
By P. Radhakrishnan
From THE HINDU, August 27, 2001

It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves? - Thucydides

THIS QUOTE with which Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who exposed the numerous Hindu myths, mysticisms and mumbo-jumbo justifying the injustices of Indian society, and tried to instil in the vast masses of India's
`outcasts' a sense of confidence, defiance, dignity, freedom, and hope, began his controversial work, `What Congress and Gandhi have done to The Untouchables', is as relevant today as in 1945 when he
wrote it.

However, convinced as he was that India's pernicious caste practices have been part of the malignancy of Hindu society which can be extirpated only on Indian soil and only through social reforms and constitutional means, it cannot be gainsaid that in India's changed stature as a sovereign democratic republic Ambedkar himself would have found it ludicrous and even abhorrent to showcase caste, even as tableaux, in an alien land and through a world body of which India is a member-country. More so, as it was mainly because of Ambedkar's initiative as the chief architect of the Indian Constitution that the numerous safeguards for the untouchables and the other weaker sections were enshrined in the Constitution.

The reference is to the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, to be held in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 to September 7,
the confusion and controversy about caste and race as discriminatory categories, and the furore in India and abroad on inclusion of caste in the conference.

Understanding the fallacies underlying this confusion and controversy, and their fallout for India calls for understanding the widely varying postures on caste and race by the proponents and opponents for inclusion of caste in the conference, and the role of the U.N. as a global ``do-gooder''.

Going by press reports, there has been widespread support through social mobilisation, meetings, conferences, and writings in the press for inclusion of caste in the conference. The most prominent and
vociferous proponents are the ``Dalit activists'', who are a heterogeneous ensemble. The organisations purportedly representing them include the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, the
Republican Party of India, People's Watch, the National Council of Churches in India - the highest body in the country representing different denominations of the Protestants - and so on. Whether the
``Dalit activists'' are leaders from among the Dalits, or non-Dalits feigning to be self-appointed Dalit leaders of pressure groups, or both is a moot issue. This issue is, however, very important for at least two reasons. One, if the Dalits could spawn such aggressive, articulate, globetrotting, and internationally acclaimed and
influential leaders, they would have overcome long ago their precarious plight as the despised and the damned, the depressed and the downtrodden of the caste- ridden Indian society. Two, if evidence
and experience are any indication, the ``Dalit cause'' is hard currency for ``Dalit activists'' operating in developed countries, though it is questionable how far the Dalits themselves have been beneficiaries of the Western dole.

Sources would have it that in Geneva several NGOs in special consultative status with the U.N. have been spearheading the movement for inclusion of caste on the agenda for the conference, and a number
of organisations have joined forces to form the International Dalit Solidarity Network.

As notable among them are the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, and similar organisations from Europe and the U.S., their involvement and vociferous claims are certainly grist to the
Hindutva mill. While the initiative of the Church-related organisations is laudable and hopefully indicative of the revival of the long-dormant liberation theology, ignoring for the time being the Hindutva monster, one might ask what the Church-related organisations have been doing to overcome the discriminatory practices among the Indian Christians, in particular Christian converts of Scheduled Caste origin, the persistence of whose disabilities and plight as ``twice alienated'' have necessitated their organised demands for at
least the last ten years for treatment as Scheduled Castes so as to enable them to take advantage of the State's affirmative action and special treatment programmes, though here again the initiative of the
Church-related organisations has been commendable.

Whether by the Church Council or other organisations, the claims for inclusion of caste in the conference are of two broad streams. The first would have caste as race, caste as worse than race, caste discrimination as racism and more, and so on. The second would have Dalit oppression as worse than racial discrimination; Dalits as victims of centuries-old polluting and stigmatising occupations such as scavenging, persistent discrimination and atrocities, untouchability, social segregation and denial of access to public places and spaces forcing them to live at the margins of society; the history of Dalits as a genealogy of pain captured in the very etymology of the word, and so on.

While all this is true, the claim that the justification for inclusion of caste in the U.N. Conference is to ``internationalise'' Dalit discrimination, raises several issues. One, equating caste with race. As Professor Dipankar Gupta observed in his work `Interrogating Caste: Understanding Hierarchy and Difference in Indian Society', despite some commonalities between caste and race, particularly between the bottom end of the caste system and the segregationist racism, caste and race are vastly different, for which reason, they
should not be collapsed into a single analytical category. Important among the differences are the caste system is about 3000 years old, extremely complex based on multiple hierarchies, characterised by the
pervasive purity-pollution dichotomy, and graded discrimination. In contrast, racism is of recent origin, and as race is based on phenotypic criteria there can be no dispute about where one belongs in the race hierarchy.

Caste has been under extensive debate and indepth research for several decades now, and the literature on it is probably much more burgeoning than on race. Though race has also been under extensive
debate and indepth research and Gunnar Myrdal's `American Dilemma', followed by Oliver Cromwell Cox's `Race: A Study in Social Dynamics' are still probably the most important works on racism, racism is
predominantly an American and South African problem, and even here race relations have undergone tremendous changes during the last three decades. So, a U.N. Conference on caste or race or both may not
add up.

Two, equating the caste system with Dalits, as if it comprises only Dalits and none else. This is political appropriation of the caste system by ``Dalit activists''. Though Dalits are certainly the worst victims of discrimination, and account for about one- fourth of India's population, their existential problem cannot be isolated from that of the rest of society.

Other traditional caste groups barring Brahmins and probably a few other upper castes have also been victims of the caste system. It is recognising this pervasive nature of discrimination, disparities, and disabilities, that the first all-India Backward Classes (Kaka Kalelkar) Commission of the 1950s recommended reservation for a separate category just above the Scheduled Castes; and it is in
keeping with this recommendation that some States such as Tamil Nadu have created the Most Backward Classes category for reservation purposes.

(The writer is Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies,
Chennai.)

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Modern missionaries

BBC News, Saturday, 25 August, 2001, 11:17 GMT 12:17 UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/from_our_own_correspondent/news
id_1508000/1508120.stm

The Taleban have recently arrested eight foreign aid workers for allegedly preaching Christianity - a crime under the Taleban's strict Islamic code.

The BBC Afghanistan correspondent, Kate Clark, looks at the tradition of the two great proselytising faiths - Christianity and Islam.

"Go on, go on, just do it, it's only a few words. Go on." It's a hot, sweaty, mosquito-ridden evening and I'm experiencing the heaviest proselytising of my life.

I feel I now know how people could succumb to brain washing. I'm reduced to the most basic arguments.

"I can't, my Mum would be upset if I became a Muslim. " "That's alright," came the instant reply. "You can lie to her."

I was shocked. "I can't lie to my mum," I said. "Whatever happened to honouring your parents?"

"Yeah, it would be alright, it would be a lesser sin. Go on, just say those few little words."

Intense pressure

The scene was a small town in south-eastern Yemen, six years ago, in the Hadramuaut region. It's the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden - now a wanted Islamic militant holed up in Afghanistan - but that's
not the reason I was there.

The Hadramaut has been pushing out Muslim missionaries for centuries.
And I'd come to interview students and teachers at the ancient madrassas or religious seminaries.
Locals boast of having converted Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of India and east Africa to Islam. I could now understand why.

Persuasive tactics

What was making it more difficult was that every conversation I had there was in Arabic - a language in which it's virtually impossible to say the simplest sentence without invoking god.

And it's so easy to convert to Islam - you just make the testament of faith to a Muslim - that you believe in one god and Mohammed as his messenger - less than a dozen words in Arabic - and bingo, you've joined the faith.

Arab Muslims have been particularly fond of trying to convert me. When I was working in the West Bank, the first three questions I usually encountered were: "Where are you from?", "Are you married?"
and "What's your religion?"

Even friends who are secular occasionally and off-handedly ask when I'm going to convert. One Palestinian friend explained it by saying they believed it was a sure-fire way to Paradise.

Less overt

Afghanistan has been a very different experience. Not because Afghans aren't devout - they're more so if anything. Most Afghans seem to pray and keep the Ramadan fast, but they do it quietly and without much fuss.

Religion seems to come up in conversation, if at all, a long way down the line, when you know people well. And it's never heavy - an exchange of information at most. It always seemed a bit rough that a religion which prizes missionary work as much as Islam does should penalise anyone from their side who chooses to leave the faith. But apostasy is one of the severest offences under religious law - a capital crime. There are very few countries in the world where a death sentence might actually be carried out by the state, but Afghanistan is one of them.

Preaching Christianity

The idea that anyone might choose to go there to preach the gospel is chilling. Yet that's precisely what the workers from Shelter Now International are accused of.

What's ironic is how little sympathy any potential Christian missionary receives in the West in the year 2001.

Possibly in America, still a deeply devout nation, it's different. Interviewers there have asked me lately how it's possible that listening to the Gospel could be a crime.

But generally, it seems that if the Shelter Now employees had been arrested for being gay or trying to improve women's lives - like carrying out clandestine literacy classes - there would be far more outrage at their arrests.

But if few westerners identify with the eight detainees as fellow Christians, their alleged crime makes perfect sense to the Taleban.

They see us foreigners in their own image - likely missionaries, eager to conspire against their faith, ready to line up for Christianity, as they do for Islam.

In this world view, the eight foreigners are just the latest casualties of centuries spent battling for souls by these two great proselytising faiths.

For those brought up in a secular world, the idea of living in poverty as an aid worker seems perfectly reasonable - but being a martyr for the faith seems medieval and utterly incomprehensible.