| 05 November 2004 | Friday | 21 Ramazan 1425 |
Holding a debate on Kashmir
A four-year nightmare
The 2004 elections: view from the left
Belief in the divine guidance is the necessary corollary of belief in God. The Muslims believe that the Quran is the final Revelation and that it is the only book which has not been tampered with. "Ramazan is the month in which the Quran was (first) revealed as a guidance unto mankind and a self-evident proof of that guidance, and as the standard by which to discern the true from the false" (2:185).
Man has always been puzzled by certain fundamental questions like what is the purpose of life, and why the claims of different individuals and interests of different nations are often mutually contradictory, and how these can be reconciled. He has often thought about the common values of humanity and questioned how these are related, and what are the fundamental rights of man and how these can be protected?
Evidently, human reason and its manifestations of science and technology do not help in solving these problems. Einstein says "science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain, value judgments of all kinds remain necessary." The Quran says, "The God that has created all the objects in the universe has also undertaken to make them aware of their goal and guide them towards it" (20:50).
In all religions, theologians have discussed the nature of creation. In Islam every created being has a definite place in the overall pattern of creation and in that sense, it is good. But it is not intended to remain the same throughout its span of life. It is endowed with a number of potentialities and tends to realize them.
It is through divine guidance termed 'Rububiyyah' in the Quran, that things develop and finally attain their goal. The guidance of God is essential for the development of humanity. This guidance is at work everywhere in the universe. "He inspired in each heaven its mandate" (41:12).
In the animal world divine guidance is reflected in the form of instinctual drive as the following verse indicates, "Your Rabb inspired the bee saying: choose your habitation in the hills and in the trees and in that which they thatch" (16:68). And "Have you not seen that thou who are in the heavens and the earth serve God, and the birds also, their wings spread out. Each one knows its appointed task (salaat) and the way in which it is to be performed (Tasbeeh) (24:41). And "There is no living being on the earth, nor a bird that flies with its wings which is not (God's) creature like you. No single thing have we neglected in the decree" (6:38).
We have to realize that divine guidance carries each and every creation from stage to stage until it has reached its full development. Man too needs divine guidance, otherwise he will go astray. He is free to choose the right or wrong path. But once he chooses his path, he cannot alter the ultimate results.
These results are in accordance with the Divine natural laws and apply to all human beings. If he controls the animal instincts, he will definitely attain sublime heights; but if he does not, he may easily sink below the animal level. Self-fulfilment is the reward of following the Divine guidance.
History tells us that relative values prevailing in the world shall never solve the problems of mankind. Only permanent values which are for all societies and all times can guide man on the right path. These permanent values are offered to man through a messenger called the nabi. This divine guidance is a gift of God which He bestows on the man whom He selects.
The purpose of wahi is not to compel man to choose any particular way. It merely informs him about the right and wrong paths and leaves him free to choose. The Quran says "Say it is the truth from Allah. Then whosoever will let him believe; and whosoever will let him reject" (18:29).
Throughout his life Muhammad (PBUH) never changed a single word of the Revelation for reasons of expediency. The Quran bears witness to this fact: "Say (O Muhammad) it is not for me to change it of my own accord. I only follow which is revealed to me" (10:15).
The divine guidance transcends human intellect but does not conflict with reason. It rather supplements it. Man is exhorted to ponder and reflect over it in the light of reason. "Those who, when the Revelations of their Rabb are presented, do not fall thereat deaf and blind." (25:73) "Will they not ponder over the Quran?" (4:82).
Those who deny reason are described in this way: "Will they not then meditate on the Quran or there are locks on their hearts" (47:24). Muhammad (PBUH) was asked to say, "This is my way. My invitation to you to follow Allah's path is based on reason and insight" 12:108).
No doubt it is possible to doubt the existence of God and the reality of the Hereafter. But then, it is also possible to doubt the existence of the world. The rational test will take the form of determining whether it furthers the interests of humanity. It is needless to say that the Quran has stood the test of reason and proved itself to be in harmony with the best in man.
Secondly, the Quran invites people to judge it in the light of history. It asks them to ponder over the rise and fall of nations. It assures them that if they seek the causes of the downfall of a people, they will find that the people had contravened the principles of right conduct and permanent values which were communicated to them by the nabi of their age.
"But they deny the knowledge that they could not compass and whereof the final result had not come unto them. Even so did those before them deny. Then see what the consequences were for the wrong doers" (10:39).
The unbelievers are repeatedly urged to apply this test and satisfy themselves about the truth and value of divine guidance. The Quran repeatedly exhorts man to think and think hard. Those who do are honoured. "The blind man is not equal with the seeing, nor is darkness equal to light" (35:19) "Are those who know equal with those who know not? But only men of understanding will pay heed" (39:9).
Holding a debate on Kashmir
President Pervez Musharraf's call for a national debate on various options to resolve the Kashmir issue has been followed by several official clarifications and explanations.
The president himself, talking to a group of intellectuals the other day, said that there was no specific proposal in respect of which the debate has been suggested, nor did any specific proposal figure in the agenda of his meeting with the Indian prime minister in New York. Perhaps there was no formal agenda for the meeting.
What the president has perhaps in mind is that since there are several districts or regions in the disputed state and the same resolution may not be valid for all the various regions, a possible solution should be evolved for each region separately. As a beginning, the entire state territory should also be demilitarized.
Demilitarization would apply to both Azad Kashmir and Indian-held Kashmir. Each region should be treated as an entity for the purpose of ascertaining the wishes of its people. This would not mean a departure from Pakistan's principled position on the question, and would be in consonance with what Pakistan has been suggesting all along.
The basis suggested by President Pervez Musharraf would be close to what Sir Owen Dixon, who was UN representative in Kashmir, suggested in September 1950, long before the issue was the focus of so much acrimony. No plan for a permanent division of the state had at the time been visualized nor an omnibus solution which could apply to the state. Dixon apparently had a piecemeal solution in mind. It has been said that Dixon's formula was intended to unravel the complex nature of the central part of Kashmir i.e. the Valley.
A well known expert on Kashmir, Robert Wirsing, has expressed the view that the basis of the partition of the state proposed by Dixon "would largely have rid India of at least one - ethnic Kashmiri - minority problem, at the same time eliminating the core of the grievance that Pakistan has been nursing since the state's manipulated 'accession' to India in 1947."
It appears that before formally accepting the Dixon plan, India insisted upon a condemnation of Pakistan by the UN for what New Delhi believed to be its aggression (in 1948) and the dispute remained unresolved, and Dixon went home believing that he had "nothing more to do." President Musharraf has all along maintained that Pakistan will never give up its principled stand on Kashmir but that it has an open mind with regard to possible alternative ways of resolving the Kashmir dispute.
However, as he pointed out while talking to a group of intellectuals the other day, a solution to the dispute could only be found when both India and Pakistan agreed to move beyond their stated positions which would mean a significant measure of flexibility of approach on the part of both. Any proposed solution, however, had to be acceptable to the Kashmiri people as well.
Since in a subsequent statement the president also said that he "saw light at the end of the tunnel," it seems that he perceives a growing realization in both India and Pakistan that a peaceful resolution of the dispute would lead to "tremendous development." One would tend to believe that he had reason to feel encouraged by the trend of the discussion in his meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York.
The flexibility of approach that the president often refers to has to be equally evident in the attitude of the representatives of the people of Kashmir, including the freedom-fighters and those adhering to the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC). Significantly, the APHC leaders have reportedly found the idea "floated" by President Musharraf as "positive" and "pathbreaking." There have also been reports from across the border suggesting that violence has abated in Indian-held Kashmir "with fewer militants crossing over into the revolt-torn region."
Only three years ago international observers were of the view that the jihadis at the end of the war in Afghanistan, who had been rendered "jobless", found their opportunity in crossing over into Kashmir apparently to launch a fresh jihad. This view was apparently shared by American policymakers since the US secretary of state included the so-called Pakistan-based "jihadis" along with others belonging to Hamas, Hezbollah, etc as among those who were allegedly active in Indian-held Kashmir.
According to the Turkish scholar, Turkkaya Ataov, author of Kashmir and Neighbours, these activists believed that "the only solution" of Kashmir lay in jihad. He also maintained that "evidence accumulated indicating that Afghan training camps produced insurgents who infiltrated into Kashmir." Today, there is every reason to believe that there is no infiltration across the LoC and that Pakistan has effectively checked the movement of the insurgents across the border.
Reports attributed to the Indian security sources in Srinagar have admitted that with the composite dialogue in progress, violence has abated in Indian-held Kashmir. The number of militancy-related incidents in the Indian-held state has reportedly came down. Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, head of the APHC, has endorsed President Musharraf's proposal, claiming that he had a meeting with the general when he was recently in Holland, on his way back from New York.
The prospects of peace in Kashmir should also improve with New Delhi's initiative to extend an invitation for talks to the APHC. The Indian officials, who are likely to meet their counterpart from amongst the Kashmiri freedom fighters, could include the Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil. Mr Patil as well as the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh are likely to visit Srinagar shortly. Mr Singh would have met his Pakistani counterpart, Shaukat Aziz, before he goes to Indian-held Kashmir.
A former APHC chairman, Prof Abdul Ghani Bhatt, has been quoted as saying that "a positive outcome to the Kashmir issue is in the air." APHC leaders were among the guests at an iftar party hosted by the Pakistan high commissioner in India this week.
The problems in the way of the Kashmiri leaders taking a united stand on their response to a possible solution of the Kashmir dispute should not be minimized. The sheer number - more than two dozen or so - of the freedom fighters' parties cannot but be regarded as a hurdle. Moreover, the fact that some of them have been involved in militant activities will also add to the difficulties.
The Dawn correspondent, who was at the Pakistan High Commissioner's iftar party, noted that the hardline Kashmiri leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani stayed away from the other Kashmiri leaders, including Bilal Lone, Javed Ahmad, Mir Shabbir Ahmad Shah and Yasin Malik - all front-ranking freedom fighters. That cannot be regarded as a good omen.
However, it is important that peace must prevail not only between India and Pakistan but also between the two subcontinental powers and the state of Kashmir. Of the Kashmir freedom fighters, Bilal Lone is said to be optimistic about being able to units the fractious leadership of the freedom fighters. According to reports, he is being tipped as a member of the group in Kashmir planning to travel to Pakistan for what have been called "political talks."
The Pakistan high commissioner's statement at his iftar party as reported by Dawn's New Delhi correspondent, is very thought-provoking and deserves to be quoted verbatim. The high commissioner, Aziz Ahmad Khan said: "The nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan are proving to be too weak because of the forces of history. Momentous days are ahead and I am very hopeful."
Obviously, General Musharraf's call for a national debate for a possible solution of the Kashmir dispute must not be allowed to go unheeded. In fact, hopefully it should evoke a positive response and ultimately lead to a positive outcome.
A four-year nightmare
"I will sleep and dream of great danger" ran the opening line of an email from a friend in Brooklyn. It was 4 am eastern standard time and the last hope of a Kerry victory - or, more precisely, a Bush defeat - had dissolved into the night.
"I believe the field day Bush will have for the next four years will create a nightmare worse than anything this country has seen." Make no mistake, the fear and despair evoked across the globe by the US election result are shared by many millions of US citizens. Indeed, their grief, their frustration, has a peculiar intensity - because there's no loathing like the loathing within families.
The 55 million Kerry voters who went to the polls primarily motivated by a burning desire to dump Bush are no more reconciled to his rule this morning than they were a few days ago. Bush will claim a mandate, but there's no reason we should accept the claim. The result confirms that this is a wartime leader who does not speak for, or enjoy, the confidence of half the population.
There will be those in Europe who will seize on this result to urge us to reconcile ourselves to the superpower and its peculiar ways. And it will be claimed that a refusal to do so is tantamount o "anti-Americanism". This charge has been fouling the atmosphere since 9/11. It is alleged that the left or Europe is blindly hostile to America and Americans. As a US passport-holder long resident in London, I know that this charge is baloney.
Anti-Americanism has become a catch-all charge levied against anyone who engages in a radical critique of America's global power, its sway over the lives of billions who had no vote in Tuesday's election.
People rebel against US hegemony for the same reasons they rebelled against the dominance of earlier imperial powers, not out of a distaste for the culture of the rulers but out of an objection to undemocratic, unaccountable, self-serving rule by remote elites of whatever culture.
A disbelief in the prerogatives or the beneficence of the American empire is not anti-American. Nor is it anti-American to be alarmed by features of US political culture, an alarm shared by many millions of Americans.
Bush supporters should be wary of crowing too soon. This election result will do nothing to placate those Americans who cry out for health care, a living wage, and decent public services. It will not reverse the leftwing tide in Latin America. And it will do nothing to curb resistance in Iraq.
As casualties mount, there is bound to be increasingly militant opposition to White House war policies among a widening spectrum of US citizens, including serving GIs. My friend in Brooklyn fears for his children's future. He sees them growing up in a benighted, detested land, their liberties, living standards and security menaced by the triumphant neocons. He's right to dream of danger.
But the millions of US voters who queued for hours to register their protest against Bush should reflect in their hour of despair that they are by no means alone - not within their own country and not within the human community at large.-Dawn/Guardian Service
The 2004 elections: view from the left
The reelection of George W. Bush, achieved largely through the mobilization of the evangelical Christian vote on the basis of overtly religious appeals, will have far-reaching and disastrous consequences for American democracy.
Notwithstanding the platitudes and bromides dispensed by Senator John Kerry in his stereotypical concession speech, the results of the 2004 election will not give rise to a rebirth of national unity. The 2004 election represents a further stage in the decay and crisis of the American political system. It is the culmination of a strategy, developed by the Republicans over the past three decades, of cultivating religious fundamentalists to create a mass base for social reaction and militarism. The corporate and financial oligarchy has fashioned its own Frankenstein monster - a force whose political and social agenda is incompatible with the secular constitutional foundations of the United States and the maintenance of traditional democratic norms.
Mr Bush and the Republicans ran a deeply reactionary campaign, employing lies and political smears and playing on the fears, insecurities and confusion of key sections of the electorate. But even with the advantage of incumbency, a friendly media, and the relentless exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy, Mr Bush was barely able to eek out a 51 per cent majority of the popular vote.
Whatever the media pundits may say, the election is anything but a popular endorsement of the Bush administration and its policies. Historically, presidents who have won reelection have been able to utilize the benefits of incumbency to obtain decisive victories. This was the case with Roosevelt in the 1930s, Johnson in the 1960s, Reagan in the 1980s, and even Clinton in 1996. Yet Mr Bush gained little more than an absolute majority.
Looking at the electoral map, it is immediately clear that the Republicans, four years after the disputed election of 2000, were not able to shift any sizable population centres to their side. With a few exceptions, those states that went for Gore in 2000 - including the most industrialized and urbanized states on the East and West coasts and in the Midwest - went for Mr Kerry in 2004. In other words, the Republicans, despite pulling out all stops in the use of fear-mongering, lies, and other tricks from their grab bag of political reaction, have reached a limit on their ability to extend their base socially and geographically.
The electoral map shows another aspect of the crisis of American democracy-the balkanization of US politics. Neither of the two major parties can be truly said to be national parties.
The election once again revealed a starkly polarized country, and a broad and deeply felt opposition to Mr Bush and the Iraq war. The sharply increased voter turnout, and especially the spike in voting by young people, most of whom cast ballots against Mr Bush and the war, reflected the immense social opposition that exists to the Republican right.
Yet the result of the vote will be to further concentrate political power in the hands of the extreme right, which will control all three branches of government - the executive, the legislative and the judiciary - with the Republicans increasing their majority in the Senate. The stage is set for a series of Supreme Court appointments that will further shift the axis of the court to the right, and lead to the overturn of Roe v. Wade on abortion rights and other anti-democratic rulings of a far-reaching character.
The election was less a victory for Mr Bush than a colossal, historic defeat for the Democratic Party. In the midst of an unpopular war, massive job losses, declining living standards, growing poverty, a series of corporate corruption scandals alongside huge tax breaks for the rich, the Democrats have proven themselves unable to oust an administration that was installed by undemocratic means and viewed by half the population as illegitimate, and has since been caught in monstrous lies. Mr Kerry and his party were unable, despite the mass opposition to Mr Bush, to expand their social base of support and make serious inroads in the working class electorate.
Running on the basis of a hypocritical and two-faced campaign appealing to anti-war sentiment, while supporting the war, appealing to the economic concerns of working people, while promising fiscal austerity, criticizing the Patriot Act, while demanding stronger police-state powers in the "war on terror" - Kerry and his party were incapable of effectively countering the Republicans' strategy of exploiting fears, prejudices and political disorientation.
The Republicans have a coherent electoral strategy. They seek to create a popular base for social reaction and militarism by sponsoring Christian fundamentalism and utilizing so-called "wedge" issues such as gay marriage, abortion and school prayer.
They were able to effectively exploit the contradictions that riddle the Democratic Party. Mr Kerry, for example, was never able to answer Mr Bush's basic point that his opponent was now criticizing as "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" a war for which both Mr Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, had voted. Indeed, Mr Kerry's response was to repeat endlessly that he would prosecute the war in Iraq - and future wars - more effectively than the incumbent "commander in chief."The so-called "flip-flopping" of Mr Kerry flows from the contradictions of a party that claims to speak for working people, while defending the American ruling elite and its interests both at home and abroad.
Mr Kerry barely won a majority in such highly industrialized and urbanized Midwest states as Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. He hardly bothered to make an appeal to the millions of white workers and urban and rural poor in the South, in border states such as Tennessee and Missouri, and in former Democratic bastions like coal-rich West Virginia.
In the absence of any consistent and credible appeal to the class interests of working people, the Republican strategy of capitalizing on religious backwardness and confusion proved highly effective. The Democratic Party will not, and cannot, make a serious and direct appeal to the real social and economic needs of the working class, because it is a party of American capitalism and is beholden to the US financial oligarchy. The trade unions, which provide the Democrats with some manpower, phone banks, etc., are utterly useless when it comes to mobilizing the working class.
Just as the shift to the right by the Republican Party has been a protracted process, the collapse of the Democrats is the product of a long evolution. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has disassociated itself with any policies considered suspect in corporate circles. Its rightward movement has been marked by an almost comical effort to repudiate the "liberal" label - something Mr Kerry continued in his election campaign. As a result, the party has forfeited any ability to appeal to the genuine economic interests of the working class.
The response of the Democrats to their latest political debacle will be to move even further to the right. They will desperately seek to conciliate with Mr Bush and the Republicans, try to don religious trappings, and present themselves as a more "moderate" version of their bourgeois rivals.
Objective conditions will supply ample fuel for social and political struggle. The quagmire in Iraq and the future military adventures that will follow, the deepening economic crisis of American capitalism-marked by soaring deficits and a weakening dollar - will compel the second Bush administration to launch new attacks on the working class, including millions of workers who voted to return Mr Bush to power.- Condensed from the World Socialist Web Site