Category Archives: Politics

The Wheels of Indian Justice (Updated)

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News about the release of the Nanavati Commission report was in the Indian papers yesterday, but it wasn’t until this morning that I finally saw an coherent explanation of what it means, in the Indian Express:

NEW DELHI, AUGUST 8: Twenty years after hundreds of Sikhs were massacred in the Capital, a judicial inquiry has for the first time given a finding that Congress leaders were involved in it. The Justice G T Nanavati Commission, which was set up in 2000 to undo the “whitewash” by the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission in 1986, has indicted, among others, a minister in the Manmohan Singh Government, Jagdish Tytler, and Congress MP from the Outer Delhi constituency, Sajjan Kumar. But, having waited till the last permissible day to table the Nanavati CommissionÂ’s report in Parliament, the Government today rejected the finding against Tytler on a ground that is bound to trigger a legal controversy. The Commission concluded that there was “credible evidence against Jagdish Tytler to the effect that very probably he had a hand in organizing attacks on Sikhs.” In its action taken report (ATR), the Government however interpreted these carefully chosen words to mean that “the Commission itself was not absolutely sure about his involvement in such attacks.” And then, turning Indian jurisprudence on its head, the Government claimed that “in criminal cases, a person cannot be prosecuted simply on the basis of ‘probability.”(link)

If you were waiting for justice, too bad: as often happens with Indian justice, all you get is bupkis.

Incidentally, some of these guys faced criminal trials earlier, but no one has ever been convicted of anything. Sajjan Kumar, most famously, was acquitted for his involvement in 2002. Both Kumar and Tytler are still in the Congress government.

More recent coverage of Nanavati here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Update:: Jagdish Tytler has submitted his resignation. Continue reading →

How it begins

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Editorial cartoonist Sandy Huffaker published this toon today:

Sure, maybe it’s a stereotype, but 9/11 changed everything. We really need to sock it to the bastards.

Well, we’ll do it sensitively. We’ve learned from our excesses.

“If I see someone (who) comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over,” [Louisiana Congressman] Cooksey said. [Link]

Continue reading →

Hanif Kureishi and British Multiculturalism

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In the August 4 Guardian, the writer Hanif Kureishi weighs in on what British multiculturalism might mean in light of the atmosphere of extreme intolerance that prevails at some of the London Mosques. (Via Locana)

Kureishi’s name has been in the air a bit since it was revealed that the men behind the 7/7 bombings in London were second-generation Brit-Asians. The spread of an ultra-fundamentalist ethos amongst second-generation British Muslims was something Kureishi explored in his screenplay to My Son the Fanatic (which began as a short story in The New Yorker) as well as in The Black Album, a novel responding to the turmoil in the British Muslim community following the Rushdie affair.

But the interesting part of this essay isn’t really its central point about the poison of religious extremism –- which I think any moderate or progressive person would probably agree with. What is more intriguing is actually Kureishi’s unusual use of the word ‘multiculturalism’ in the context of British ‘faith schools’. There’s a lot of confusion about what these schools are and how they work (especially for us non-Brits), and in this post I’ll explore them a little. Continue reading →

Separation of Burger and State

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Dave Sidhu at the great blog DNSI has a very illustrative example of what stinks in the ethnic ghettos of Europe in my opinion.  It turns out that Muslims that have the munchies can now satiate their cravings at their own Beurger King Muslim (BKM).  The BBC reports:

Parisian Muslims can now enjoy halal meals in an atmosphere that mimics US fast-food joints after BKM, or Beurger King Muslim, opened its doors.

BKM has set up in the northern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where many locals are first or second generation Muslims from former French colonies.

And half of the suburb’s population of 28,000 are aged under 25, the Agence France Presse news agency reported.

Beur is slang for a second generation North African living in France.

So let me understand this.  It mimics the atmosphere of the U.S. by essentially being a segregated establishment?  I’m torn.  I HATE this idea because all it does is serve to further segregate a community whose children sometimes seem to turn fanatical because they feel segregated against.  At the same time however it helps fight the poverty that leads to and maintains the segregation:

For most of BKM’s employees, the restaurant had “ended a long period of unemployment”, Mr Benhamid said.

One BKM worker called Hakim explained that “young people in these suburbs have trouble finding work and this restaurant will allow the hiring of young people who have no diplomas or are looking for apartments”. 

Continue reading →

A profile of cognitive dissonance

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How people think subway bombers look:

How some of them actually look:

Here’s a Reaganesque guy in a suit:

That’s the Boston Strangler.

You can’t catch the black guy above by profiling those who ‘look Muslim.’ You couldn’t even get accurate racial ID before the bombings. To the confused masses, those who ‘look Muslim’ means those who ‘look Arab,’ which means Sikhs and other South Asians.

It works in reverse too: last month, a light-skinned man with brown hair was gunned down after being misidentified as South Asian.

At the subway station, you need to scan for the bombs, not the people.

Continue reading →

Torture on Diego Garcia? (updated)

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This tidbit about an Amnesty International report yesterday on extraordinary rendition caught my eye:

Others have suggested “high-value” detainees could be held secretly in Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United States rents as a strategic military base. [Link]

Torture is hardly a newcomer to the Indian Ocean. You only have to go a bit north of the atoll to see it in practice by both intelligence and garden-variety cops on the subcontinent. But has the CIA joined the party? The Toronto Star reported last month:

… intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia’s geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes… These prisoners are known as “ghost detainees” or the “new disappeared,” and they’re being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts…

Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world… one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out… the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean. “Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility,” says American defence analyst John Pike. “They want somewhere that’s difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal.”

The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lawrence DiRita didn’t deny it outright, saying only, “I don’t know. I simply don’t know.” [Link]

Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin), the leader of the Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, responsible for the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, is currently being held on the island. [Link]

Diego Garcia is a 6Å“-by-13-mile coral atoll in the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka. It’s as long as Manhattan and three times as wide, but with much less usable land. With a huge central lagoon protected on three sides by land, it’s an equatorial paradise. The lagoon reaches depths of 60-100 feet with coral underneath.

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In the early ’70s, the British government forcibly deported the 2,000 Iloi residents, mostly coconut farmers, to Mauritius to make way for a military base which it leased to the U.S.:

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All look same and sound like Apu

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The prosecution of various Indian store owners swept up by Operation Meth Merchant has run into some problems. For one thing, they’re having a hard time demonstrating intent on the part of the store owners:

… when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to “finish up a cook,” some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

In some cases, the language barriers seem obvious – one videotape shows cold medicine stacked next to a sign saying, “Cheek your change before you leave a counter.” Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informants dropped most often – that they were doing “a cook” – is a “common term” meth makers use. Lawyers argue that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with a limited grasp of English.

“This is not even slang language like ‘gonna,’ ‘wanna,’ ” said Malvika Patel, who spent three days in jail before being cleared this month. ” ‘Cook’ is very clear; it means food.” And in this context, she said, some of the items the government wants stores to monitor would not set off any alarms. “When I do barbecue, I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil.” [NYT]

Honestly, even having grown up in the US and knowing something about drug culture, I don’t know whether I would have caught the word “Cook” as drug slang in this context. The deeper root of the problem here, however, is that it’s very hard to write an effective law that says that something is legal unless it’s meant to be used to nefarious purposes. Sudafed, matches, camping fuel are either legal or illegal. You shouldn’t foist the burden on a convenience store owner to figure out how such common items will be used.

Another problem was that the prosecutors kept mixing up the different (unrelated) Patels involved:

Prosecutors have had to drop charges against one defendant they misidentified, presuming that the Indian woman inside the store must be the same Indian woman whose name appeared on the registration for a van parked outside, and lawyers have gathered evidence arguing that another defendant is the wrong Patel.  [NYT]
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The profiling myth

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The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):

Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]

… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]

Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:

I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]

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I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.

The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.

On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.

Continue reading →

Learning Hindi

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hindi.jpg Manorama has a great post about her experience taking Hindi at her university. She is a Bangladeshi-American graduate student, and is studying the language mainly for scholarly/ academic purposes, as I understand it. Her post dovetails nicely with one of the issues raised in my post yesterday — how and whether South Asians in the diaspora end up learning Hindi — and gives me the chance to research and reflect on the status of Hindi and other South Asian languages at American universities in general.

Manorama’s university decided it needed to separate the ‘Heritage’ Hindi students from the ‘non-Heritage’ (i.e., white, in this case) students. Students who grew up in households where Punjabi, Hindi, Gujurati, etc. were spoken generally go in the Heritage section, where less effort is spent on pronunciation and some basic vocabulary, while more effort is spent on grammar and so on. It’s arguably a good idea, though it results in de facto segregation. Continue reading →