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Who went Where and How are they doing?
Pakistanis and Indians outside South Asia
The beginning
In the space of a few months during the Partition of India in 1947,
twenty million people were displaced, a million died, seventy–five
thousand women were said to have been abducted, raped, and families were
divided, properties lost, homes destroyed and countries (India and
Pakistan) exchanged. Excluding the internally displaced, today South
Asia has the fourth largest concentration of refugees in the world.
Going back to 1940s, Partition’s refugees/migrants during the last five
decades have had a long and complex history in the course of reaching
respective homelands, some of them more than once (in the 1940s-60s and
then in 1970s onwards) and some of them found themselves disowned by it
in 1971 when Bangladesh came into being. Those who could afford, turned
diasporic, those who could not, await repatriation to Pakistan and still
others have decided on lives of constant border crossings.
By December 1951, 6,597,000 refugees had moved from India to West
Pakistan, and 7,94,127 refugees moved to what was then East Pakistan. Of
the Indian Muslims headed for Pakistan during 1947-48, 95.9% of the
migrants from Assam, West Bengal and Bihar moved to East Pakistan and
3.2% to Karachi. According to the 1951 census, 66.69% of the migrants in
East Pakistan came from West Bengal, 14.50% from Bihar, 11.84% from
Assam and 6.97% from other places in India. A passport and visa scheme
was introduced only on 15 October 1952. But travel documents were not
even required until 1953-54, several years after India and Pakistan
became two separate countries. Several government employees opted for
Pakistan, although some changed their minds later and returned to India.
Following riots in Khulna and Calcutta in January 1964 and as a
reaction, in Jamshedpur and Rourkela in March 1964, there was a yet
another spate of migrations in both directions. After the December 1971
India-Pakistan war Pakistan was no longer a migrant destination.
Meanwhile the Middle East had emerged as an alternative.
When the autonomy movement picked up in the 1960s some ‘Biharis’ openly
sided with the Pakistan regime. By December 1970, attacks on non-Bengali
shops and properties by Bengali mobs were quite common in Dhaka and
Chittagong. Many were killed at Chittagong, Jessore, Khulna, Rangpur,
Saidpur and Mymensingh in early March 1971, even before the military
action. Subsequently the Bangladesh government declared them to be
Pakistanis who should be returned to their home country. Of the 534,792
Biharis who applied for repatriation only 118,866 were accepted by the
Pakistan government. Since the early 1970s, the Bihari Muslim diaspora
in the U.K. and U.S.A. intervened to salvage the Biharis from their
existence in the 66 refugee camps across Bangladesh, initially through
voluntary organizations, then the Asian Committee of the British Refugee
Council and the Mecca based Rabita al Alam al Islam. In February 1972,
Ghulam Sarvar, the editor of Sangam (Patna) floated the Bihari Bachao
(Save the Biharis) Committee, which urged the Indian government to allow
the uprooted Biharis to return to Bihar. While some of them did, others
made Bihar a temporary base, en route to Pakistan, via Nepal, Sri Lanka,
Burma and Thailand.
Across the shores
It may be mentioned that earliest group of immigrants from South Asia to
the U.S.A. were Punjabi men who settled mainly in California’s
agricultural valleys in the 1910s and 1920s and constructed a "Hindu"
ethnic identity which in those days simply meant "from Hindustan or
India", even though 90% of the men were Sikhs and 8% were Muslims. They
married Mexican and Mexican American women. After Partition, there was a
rupture among California’s "Hindus". In ethnic representations at county
fairs, a "Pakistani Queen" joined the "Hindu Queen" and many
Muslim-fathered families renamed themselves "Spanish Pakistanis". On the
east coast, in 1951, the New York based Pakistan League of America
intervened against the deportation of "illegal" Pakistanis working as
agricultural, factory, hotel and restaurant workers in New York, New
Jersey, Michigan and California, and worked for a separate country quota
for Pakistanis in the context of "millions" having been rendered
homeless and refugees by Partition.
Across the Atlantic, in Southall, London, the fallout of Partition was
found to be "as intense" as on the subcontinent and had tangible
consequences in the public sphere. Thus Pakistani Southallians were only
entitled to associate membership in the powerful Indian Workers’
Association. Muslims set up their separate community organizations,
either inclusively Muslim or specifically Pakistani or Bangladeshi. An
anthropological study of London’s Punjabi Hindus which did not solicit
thoughts on the Partition found its memory underpinning the narratives
of both migrants and their British born children. Despite the increasing
public privileging of an Islamic identity, diaspora Pakistanis continue
to valorize their national roots.
The Stranded Pakistani General Repatriation Committee[SPGRC], formed in
1977, links the Bihari muhajirs in the 66 refugee camps and has had
representatives in London, Chicago and Paris. Its overseas support
network comes from the Bihar Muslim, rather than just the muhajir
diaspora. The focus has been on working out the funding of their
repatriation as a "humanitarian", rather than a "political" project. The
SPGRC has during its career authored several, simultaneous recastings of
the muhajirs. As ‘refugees’ threatening to do a Vietnamese, by moving
from coast to coast to get across their statelessness to an unmoved UN,
which slots them instead as "displaced persons". As ‘Muslim Refugees’ to
get the support of the Mecca based Rabita al Alam al Islam. And
trilingually, as Stranded/Mehsoor/Aatkay Pora Pakistanis to address
their case more widely in English, Urdu and Bengali. While it shares the
MQM’s perspective that it was migrants from undivided India’s Muslim
minority provinces who created Pakistan there is a significant
difference. It squarely blames the politics of the Muslim League for the
uprooting of the Biharis and their being sacrificed three times over: in
1946, 1947 and 1971, and retrospectively idealizes Bihar, the pre-1947
homeland. In this 1980s reconstruction of the Pakistan movement, it is
emphasized that the bulk of the railway employees opted for East
Pakistan only in response to Jinnah’s call to get Pakistan going.
The new nation abroad
According to Tariq Meer, an organizer of the MQM in Europe, following
the army crackdown in Sindh in 1992, in the space of a couple of months
"thousands" had gone underground to escape death and torture, "hundreds"
claimed refugee status in Britain alone, and "hundreds" more had gone to
the U.S. and Germany. "Much of our work (these days) is dealing with
governments across the world checking with us about the claims for
asylum and refuge... We are beginning to get inquiries also from
countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Thailand and many others".
Many also escaped to Afghanistan to look for ways out from there. About
a year later the MQM protested to the British Home Office, the French
and German Interior Ministries, that the refusal to consider the
political asylum applications of the MQM cadres was in serious conflict
with the UN conventions of 1951 that dealt with the rights of the
refugees. The British Home Office, on its part, had turned down the
applications because the MQM had become a coalition partner of the
government in 1997. The MQM then argued that the army had launched its
operation against its cadres in 1992, despite its being a coalition
partner of the Nawaz Sharif government.18 The U.S. and Canadian
governments too have over the years been in touch with the MQM to check
out political asylum applications.19 Meanwhile several MQM leaders on
the run have been in hiding in the Gulf and the U.S. since 1992.
Occasionally, whenever possible, their supporters arrange for them to
meet the diasporic constituency. However, many hold back from coming out
in the open as MQM supporters for fear of repercussions on their
families back home. There are of course others, who either reject its
politics or have come to distance themselves from its "terrorism", after
having initially supported it, or are plain indifferent to its career,
domestic or diasporic. Significantly, in a couple of cases Pakistani
community organizations have split along muhajir/Punjabi lines in the
1990s.
The hardening of ethnic boundaries in Pakistan has over the years
tightened the definition of muhajir, to produce "a revised category"
which incorporates Urdu-speaking Pakistanis above all, to the exclusion
of other ethnic groups who were similarly uprooted at independence. Thus
migrants from East Punjab gradually came to be labelled primarily as
‘Punjabi’ rather than muhajir, a description which was reserved more and
more for refugees coming from northern India. Of the approximately one
million muhajirs who settled in Sindh by 1951, 85 % were Urdu speakers
from the pre-1947 provinces where Muslims were in the minority.
Initially they were dominant in the Muslim League and the government.
Not long after however, the party self-destructed and virtually
vanished. With the late 1950s domination of the army in the Pakistani
polity, the muhajirs came to be edged out by the Punjabis. Around 1984
when the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz was formed, it cut into the Jamat e
Islami’s support among the migrants in Sindh. More recently the MQM has
been described as "an excellent example of a movement that is diasporic,
transnational and anti-state", with a leadership in exile in London,
since the army operations began in 1992.
According to the MQM leader Altaf Hussain, guiding the movement from its
international secretariat is expensive but adequately funded by
supporters the world over. His outreach inside and outside Pakistan is
maintained with a combination of telephonic speeches and video
addresses, with titles like Hum Door Nahi (I Am Not That Far Away). In
1996 the Overseas MQM had nineteen branches in the U.S.A. (started in
1988 and afresh in 1991) and two in Canada. In its estimate about 15%
and 10% of the Pakistani diaspora in Chicago and New York are muhajirs ,
and some 10% of this strand is post-1992. The introductory comments of
the 1994 Chicago annual banquet edition of MQM Vision, described
diasporic muhajirs as its "natural constituency", who could provide
“decisive” support in restoring human rights in Pakistan.
Some support has been forthcoming. In 1995 the Coalition of Muslim
Organizations of the greater Houston area, an umbrella group of 15
organizations in Texas wrote an open letter signed by 1,821 community
members to all Pakistani leaders to resolve the Sindh situation with "an
open mind" and passed a resolution against the massacre of citizens in
Karachi. The Overseas MQM was on the panel of a seminar organized by the
Pak-American Task Force for the Solidarity of Pakistan in 1995, in
Detroit. Likewise, in June 1995 the United Muslims of America (UMA),
together with the Pakistan Association of the San Francisco Bay Area and
the American Muslim Alliance, San Francisco organised a forum titled,
"Why Is Karachi Bleeding?" Rifat Mahmood, the UMA chairman, emphasized
that though muhajirs had built Pakistan for all Pakistanis, there were
still so many of them stranded in Bangladesh. A resolution was passed to
involve all political parties, "including the MQM", in a conference to
sort things out.26 A similar resolution was passed by the organizers of
the forum on 19 August 1995, at the Pakistan Independence Day Festival
at the Golden Gate park, San Francisco. Around December 1995, the UMA
made an offer to send a team of "highly skilled and qualified
arbitrators of eminent American Muslims to facilitate and enhance the
peace negotiation" in Sindh. The following year too, at the 49th
Pakistan Independence Day celebration at the Golden Gate, there was a
pointed rewind to the 1940 Lahore resolution and a similar offer was
repeated. On the east coast Dr Shafi Bezar, who headed the International
Council for Repatriation of Pakistanis from Bangladesh in the 1980s in
New York, floated the Mohajir International Forum in 1995. This has
links with the community in New York, Chicago and California. The
Forum’s solution lies in the creation of a muhajir subah in southern
Sindh comprising Karachi and Hyderabad. Bezar claims that his
cartographic intervention has received "tremendous support" in Karachi,
and though there was "no direct answer from Altaf Hussain", there was no
opposition either.
The focus of the overseas MQM has been on making a human rights case of
happenings in Sindh. In addition to its website updates, its twin
videos, Extrajudicial Execution and The Genocide include close-ups of
reports of Amnesty International, Asia Watch, World Organisation Against
Torture and excerpts from U.S. State Department reports. Also scenes of
tanks rolling on the streets of Karachi, morgue sequences, bereaved
families and crowds at the funeral of Altaf Hussain’s brother and
nephew. In 1996 the MQM published A Catalogue of the Victims (The
Mohajir Nation) of State Crime, a 134 pages account detailing state
action against MQM supporters, its leaders and rank and file during
1995. Death Warrant was an appeal to "the world conscience" against the
persecution of a "22 million strong" nation. Similarly Genocide of the
Mohajir Nation and Mohajir Rights Are Human Rights carry supportive
copies of reports of international human rights organisations and
western governments and stress that the MQM had been vindicated in
national and provincial elections in urban Sindh in 1988, 1990 and 1993.
However, several of the human rights groups invoked by the MQM have also
expressed their concern about its own human rights abuses, all of which
is deflected as "concocted" preludes to legitimizing state repression.
More recently the MQM organized protests in London, the U.S. (New York,
Washington and Chicago), Canada, Germany, South Africa, Australia,
Belgium and a couple of other countries to "internationalize" government
atrocities against muhajirs, "6,000" of whom had been killed since 1992,
in a terrain that it compares with Bosnia and Kosovo. Altaf Hussain
added that he was only emulating the Pakistani government trying to
internationalize the Kashmir issue through its action in Kargil. 30 The
MQM tracks muhajirs as being crushed by the state right from the
assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, but is more focused against the
post-1992 operations.
A major demand made by the MQM in 1987 was that muhajirs be recognized
as the fifth nationality (panchvi qaum) , along with the Punjabis,
Pathans, Balochs and Sindhis and that non-Sindhis and non-muhajirs
should not be allowed to buy property in Sindh. Today its position is
that if "national integration" is to be forged it is "imperative to
recognize and accept the constitutional rights of Sindhi, Punjabi,
Pakhtoon, Mohajir, Baloch, Saraiki , Brohi, Makrani and all other
nationalities, fraternities, lingual, cultural and religious units". Not
long ago however, around 1994, the MQM had moved close to creating a
province comprising the southern Sindh cities of Hyderabad, Karachi,
Mirpur and Thatta. This "reduced notion of Pakistan", i.e., Urdudesh/Muhajiristan/Jinnahpur
has been attributed to second generation muhajirs. A couple of months
ago the MQM had warned of ‘another Bangladesh’ in case the Nawaz Sharif
government extended job quotas on a rural-urban basis to pit the Sindhis
against the muhajirs. Simultaneously however, Altaf Hussain stated that
if Sindh continued to be "ruled from Punjab" then there would be no
choice left but to demand the right to self determination, as written
into the 1940 Lahore resolution. But he added that the basic
disagreement between the MQM and the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (part of the
World Sindhi Conference formation to be discussed below) is that "they
demand a separate ‘Sindho Desh’, whereas the MQM aims for full
provincial autonomy for Sindh within the (geographical) framework of
Pakistan". A point often made by the MQM leader, Altaf Hussain, not too
long ago was that when the muhajirs had a country they sought freedom;
now that they have freedom they are seeking a country. ["Watan thaa to
azadi dhoondta thaa; Ab azad hoon to watan dhoondta hoon"].
The WSC’s stand regarding the repatriation of Biharis from Bangladesh
has been that of opposing it stiffly. Thus in the late 1980s it sent a
backgrounder on the Biharis to Lord Ennals of International Alert and
the Asian Refugee Council to put its point of view across. In its recall
the Biharis had migrated to East Pakistan "of their own free will in
search of a better life". But "instead of merging with the native
population they tried to impose their language and culture" on the
Bengalis and later established terrorist organizations called Al Shams
and Al Badr which were active in the massacre of Bengalis in 1971 and
then went on to become "unwanted parasites". It was ironic, according to
its then chairman, Halepota, that the MQM had emerged along similar
lines and with the intention of turning Sindhis into a minority, to make
them "aliens in their own homeland". This continues to be the WSC
position and its meeting in London on 29th August 1999 passed a
resolution both against the repatriation of Biharis to Sindh and for the
return of "illegal migrants" to their countries of origin.
But very recently and perhaps significantly, the chairman of the WSC, Dr
Safdar Sarki noted, that it was a positive sign that Altaf Hussain had
for the first time "explicitly and resolutely expressed his views on the
injustice and wickedness inflicted upon Sindh and Sindhis after the
creation of Pakistan" by Punjabis [see above]. In response, he added
that the Sindhis had never trampled the rights of the Urdu-speaking
population, nor had they shut their doors to "the new settlers" in 1947.
He also recalled that G.M.Syed had seen in the MQM the debut of lower
and middle class leadership among the Urdu-speaking people, but
regretted that subsequently the MQM was turned against the Sindhis by
"Punjabi agents". That, he regarded as the "biggest mistake of the MQM
in its history". Was it not time, that the Urdu-speakers called
themselves Sindhis, fifty years after migration and when all of them
were born in Sindh?
Have we not seen a similar trend all over the world? Especially in the
UK and USA, many immigrants have accepted local identities in one way or
other, and many people proudly call themselves "British" or "American".
The same holds true for immigrants from Africa, China, and Latin
America, who made UK or USA their home. They keep their languages and
cultures intact and practice their customs. Yet, they are part of the
host nations. Why don’t we accommodate a comparable scheme in the case
of Sindh? Thus, for Sarki the possibility of retrieving the legacies of
Shah Latif and G.M.Syed towards resolving Partition’s migrant history is
to be sought in the pedagogy of diasporic formations.
Forefathers
Compared to overseas communities of other origins, the total number of
people of South Asian descent who are living outside South Asia is quite
small. Exact figures are difficult to come by because of major national
differences in census taking. But a decade ago the total number of South
Asians living outside Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka
was about 8.6 million, i.e. fewer than 1% of the combined populations of
these South Asian countries. Very briefly, the first wave of migration
from the subcontinent started around 1830 and lasted until 1920 and
consisted of indentured labour recruited for the plantations and
railways that were being established in the British and French colonies.
The second wave of emigration from the subcontinent occurred between
1920 and 1939 when small groups of traders and white collar migrants
travelled to British East Africa, South Africa and Malaya. The third
period of emigration began after the Second World War and includes the
following strands. Workers in the lowest levels in factories, foundries
and textile mills in the expanding British economy. Across the Atlantic,
South Asian immigration to both the U.S.A. and Canada has been
two-phased. One dating from the early twentieth century and more
staggered and discontinuous, comprising in the main of the labouring and
agricultural class and the second, around the mid-1960s, of mainly
middle class professionals. Following shifts in the world economy around
the mid-1980s, migrants from smaller towns and less privileged
backgrounds are now working at restaurants, news-stands and grocery
stores or driving taxicabs. In addition since the oil price rise in 1973
there has been a wave of migrants to the Middle East, totaling between
three and four million South Asian workers. On the whole, South Asians
comprise 0.5% of the U.S. population and about 2% of the Canadian
population.
According to one estimate South Asian Muslims in the U.S. add up to
between 250,000 and 450,000, with about 160,000 Indians, 80,000
Pakistanis and 10,000 Bangladeshis. Quite the reverse of the U.S., where
Muslims from the Middle East are in a majority, it is South Asians who
predominate in Canada as they do in Britain. Early South Asian Muslim
immigrants were mostly farm labourers from Punjab and moved to the U.S.
from western Canada, settling in California, Oregon and Washington. In
the 1920s and the 1930s, sailors, small traders and factory workers from
Bengal in particular Sylhet, settled in New York, New Jersey and
Connecticut, with a few moving to industrial centres like Boston and
Detroit. Several students who enrolled in American universities in the
1950s and 1960s just stayed on. The largest and most "homogeneous group
of Indian Muslims belong to Hyderabad . Numerically, Gujratis and
Mahrashtrians come next, followed by Muslims from Assam, Bengal and
Bihar. Though widely dispersed in the U.S., there are large
concentrations in California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey,
Connecticut and more recently in Texas , Florida and Georgia.
The Americas
Within this formation the emergence of the American Federation of
Muslims From India [AFMI} in 1989 was equally a statement on the
tokenism faced in the Indian community at large and the non-Indian
preoccupations of the umma, despite the fact that Indians add up to 12.5
– 13% of the community. Based in Detroit, it has regional presidents in
California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Texas, Washington DC and
Canada and an international liaison committee covering USA, Germany,
Australia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UK. Its intervention against the
Hindutva project is summed up in its statement submitted to the Indian
prime minister, Narasimha Rao in 1993 in which it summed up that India
stood torn between "those who want to turn the 46 years old republic
into a Hindu state... and those who are keen to establish secularism".
During the 1993 elections, it identified UP as the battleground between
fascist and secular forces. In its perception what had sharpened the
struggle was the fact that the citizenship of Indian Muslims was "still
under suspicion" years after Partition. Together with other Indian
American Muslim organisations it campaigned during 1994 for the release
of Muslims held without trial after the 1992-3 riots under TADA
(Terrorist and Disruptive and Activities Act). In 1994 it forged an
alliance with the International Dalit Sena, led by Ram Vilas Paswan of
the Janata Dal. It has simultaneously been taking on the Hindutva
ensemble in the U.S. through its newsletters and advertisements in
Indian American newspapers "to counter the myths and lies propagated by
Hindu extremists". Alerted by some Indian leftists it ran a successful
campaign against the phone company, AT&T in 1994, for being party to the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) fund-raising, by pointing out that this
would "only lead to the unleashing of more terror and death on
minorities in India."
Between 1994 and 1996 AFMI has organized educational meets in Delhi,
Lucknow and Patna to achieve its target of 100% literacy for Indian
Muslims by the year 2005. It has also urged the US government to
allocate "say 10-15%" of US investment specifically for minority
entrepreneurs. However, its response to economic liberalization has been
uncritical in its expectation that it will generate immense
"opportunities" for Muslims. And though its electoral watch was centred
on north India it did not engage with the shifts that have occurred
within the community both at the levels of leadership and agenda, in
particular the movements for affirmative action among the subaltern
Muslim biradaris since the 1990s. These movements have not only
challenged the ashraf leadership for having led the Pakistan movement
and subsequently focused on "emotive" issues mobilizing around
communitarian-identitarian symbols, but emphasized the lower caste
pre-conversion roots of 90% of the community. At least in Bihar, the
dalit and backward Muslims have intervened to inscribe their agency by
keeping track of AFMI’s projects. Thus the All India Backward Muslim
Morcha pointedly gave its literature to its delegation visiting India.
And the Amarat e Ahle Ansar associated with the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz
passed a resolution against AFMI for seeking reservation for "all"
Muslims.
Other organizations that have focused on contesting Hindutva and funding
relief and legal aid to Muslims arrested in the aftermath of riots of
1992-3 ("about 80%" of the "65,000 TADA detenus" were Muslims) and in
general campaigned for the human rights of Indian Muslims include the
Indian Muslim Relief Committee of the Islamic Society of North
America(IMRC) , the Consultative Committee of Indian Muslims in the U.S.
and Canada (CCIM), and the Association of Indian Muslims of America
(AIM).8 3 According to AIM , which represents over “100,000” Indian
Muslims in North America, though 60 million Muslims had rejected the
two-nation theory and stayed on in India in 1947, they have been victims
of the backlash of the formation of Pakistan during the past several
decades. Thus Indian Muslims are stereotyped as being fundamentalist and
"intolerant of the Hindu majority" both in the Indian and North American
press. Ever since the making of Pakistan, notwithstanding their having
cleared that "agnipariksha", they have been on the receiving end of
"unrelenting economic discrimination, injustices, humiliation,
intimidation, carnage of violent riots and considerable loss of life and
property". AIM intends to forge links with progressive Indians and has
been working on establishing links with Pakistani Americans. It supports
the search for a "new leadership" among progressive Indian Muslims who
"should definitely not wage campaigns on symbolic issues like the Shah
Bano affair or the Satanic Verses issue". More importantly it holds that
the "state of siege" in the Muslim community needs to be broken. In
January 1995 some AIM office bearers on a visit to England held meetings
with the Indian Muslim Federation (IMF), the largest organization of
Indian Muslims in the UK, and the Union of Muslim Organizations of UK to
work on joint campaigns and projects aimed at improving the situation of
Muslims in India. However, two years ago, the IMF (which had earlier
organized protests against the Bhagalpur riot in 1989) appeared divided
over its approach to the Bharatiya Janata Party, though it was still
dominated by people who supported the Janata Dal or the Congress.
The Canadian Council of South Asian Christians, established in 1991,
includes Christians from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and
has been working on overcoming their exclusion and discriminatory
treatment both within the South Asian and wider Canadian community. It
aims at dialogue with non-Christian South Asian organizations "to create
a better understanding between the communities". A representative
mention may be made of one of its community service awards in 1996. The
recipient was Shadab Khokhar of the International Christian Awaz, for
his five year long campaign against religious persecution in Pakistan
under the blasphemy law. Through his initiative protest rallies were
launched in Toronto and Ottawa in 1991 and 1993. A memorandum of
understanding was signed between the Canadian government and Awaz, as
result of which 200 families migrated to Canada by the end of 1996. Last
year the National Association of the Asian Indian Christians protested
to the UN to increase international pressure on the BJP-led government
to rein in right-wing Hindu groups who had made several attacks on the
community in India. The Bangladesh Hindu, Buddhist and Christian Unity
Council, UK, it may be mentioned here is in touch with the World Sindhi
Congress which has taken a stand against the rise of religious
fundamentalism and called for the immediate abolition of the blasphemy
law in Pakistan.
The elite Indian American organizations include the Association of
Indians in America, the Federation of Indian Associations [which split
into the FIA, the Federation of Hindu Associations and the FIA-Indian
Origin between 1994-7] and the National Federation of Indian American
Associations. They are known to have made efforts to win greater US
government support for India (and less favour to Pakistan), an effort
that has occasionally made the Indian community support right wing
politicians. In general, the leadership of the Indian immigrant
community is conservative. It has not sought to form alliances with
other ethnic groups. In the late 1980s, for instance, Chinese and
Koreans in the New York area made tentative moves towards a pan-Asian
combination against racial discrimination but there was no response from
the Indians. In fact most Indian immigrants express open prejudice
against African Americans and Hispanics and non-white migrants. By
contrast, many South Asian immigrants in both Canada and Britain have
chosen an alternative strategy, identifying themselves as ‘black’. It
has been argued the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie remembers the history
of the Indian community in the U.S. largely in terms of its own history
since the mid-twentieth century. This selective memory that deletes the
pre- first world war subaltern immigrants (the farmers, railroad
builders, workers and political refugees) from its narrative, is seen to
flow from its model minority self-image, one that seriously limits its
understanding of racism and its response to other communities. By
contrast, the history of the pre-first world war immigrants is summed up
as more radical in its awareness of the scope of western imperialism and
the diaspora generated by it. While this perspective does not mean to
devalue the importance of a minority group’s efforts at creating a voice
of itself, it points to its intense racism towards other communities and
its denial of the existence of marginalized Indians: the illegal
migrants, the ill-paid labourers and domestic workers, gays, lesbians
and battered women. Thus community events become the space in which the
bourgeois immigrant controls the fate of national culture and
appropriates Indian immigrant identity.
The Right
During the past two decades the Hindu right has been doing intensive
propaganda among the Indian immigrants in the US, UK and Canada. It is
against this backdrop that we documented the intervention of some Indian
American Muslims and will, later in this section consider that of some
leftist groups. But first a look at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America
(VHP-A). It is registered in thirteen states, mostly on the East Coast
and has a membership of around 2000. At the local level it has
"contacts" with about 10,000 families.
Much of its work focuses on children’s educational programmes and youth
camps. It publishes literature on the "Hindu way of life" and runs its
social service projects mostly in India. But its influence extends well
beyond its enrolment. According to one summing up, in the US religious
identity becomes a way of evading racial marginality. Moreover, support
for a strong nationalist state at home is seen to promise a better
status in the terrain migrated to. Unsurprisingly contemporary Hindu
nationalism articulates "a genteel multi-culturalist presence in the US
with militant supremacism in India".
At the "First Dharma Sansad in the Western Hemisphere" organized by the
VHP-A in Pennsylvania in August 1998 the achievements catalogued
included the setting up of the Hindu University of America in Orlando
and the expansion of the Hindu Students Council (HSC) to “almost fifty
campuses". It was added that , "it is because of the brilliant work of
some of the very bright people of the HSC, (that) the Hindu Dharma has a
major presence on the Internet and the World Wide Web". The report of
the Sansad detailed the antecedents of the contemporary "Hindu Diaspora"
to include the Buddhist dispersal at "the time of Emperor Ashoka" and
subsequently that of the Vaishnavs in South East Asia. "Then came the
darker time of foreign invasions... then came another Diaspora in the
nineteenth century, the forced one, when the British took Hindus
[completely overlooking the 15% of the jahazis who were Muslims] to
their colonies". It sees the "most recent", i.e. the second half of the
twentieth century one as likely to bring about "more far reaching
effects than any other Diaspora". The resolutions passed were
unmistakably homogenizing in intent. "The VHP-A should be the voice of
Hindus in the western hemisphere. All religious, spiritual, cultural
organizations, temples and ashrams should associate, endorse and /or
affiliate with the VHP-A, to make the Hindu Voice more effective"
(original emphasis). It also resolved to publish "an authentic history
book of India and its heritage for the benefit of the young generation
of Hindus in the Western Hemisphere". At the same meeting Ashok Singhal
regretted that the divisions of sect, caste and language were
"unfortunately retained even in the foreign lands" (sic). He stressed
that "Unifying Hindus is not sufficient, We must be assertive Hindus. We
have always been compromising... "
"Youth Ready to Induct Time Tested Hindu Values in Modern Society",
reads the title of a report on a youth conference in Boston in June
1998. The Hindu Heritage Day in Houston that May spent "some serious
moments at the mention of the more than 40 Kashmiri Hindus" killed
around that time, "just for being Hindus". The same issue of Hindu
Vishwa carries an e-mail reminding readers that "there may be so many
Hindus from Afghanistan, in the US & Europe who are waiting for some
help from us" and that the Taliban had imposed jizya on Hindus. It also
carried a notice that the Global Hindu Electronic Networks (GHEN) was
adding eleven new Amar Chitra Kathas to Freeindia.org , an educational
website which is a project of the HSC. The new additions included
Shivaji, Valmiki, Vidyasagar, Mirabai, Parshuram, Prithviraj Chauhan,
Harishchandra, Ganesha, Kumbakarana, Draupadi and Rana Pratap.55
Significantly over the last few years in universities and community
centres in Britain , the VHP has been targeting Hindu Asian youth with
the slogan, "Better to be a Hindu Asian than a British Asian" and
projecting Hindutva as the answer to the Muslim fundamentalism sweeping
the college campuses.
The Left
In response to the spread of the Hindutva movement in North America, the
Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL) was formed in 1995 as an organization of
overseas Indians to intervene "in the crisis generated by neo-liberal
economics and communalism - crises that find expression in the diasporic
Indian community and in the Indian nation". It collaborates with other
progressive individuals and groups active on similar issues in Europe,
North America and the South Asian subcontinent. The focus on India was
explained by drawing attention to the fact that "there are certain
issues that are bound by the nation-state and its products overseas
which are not identical with those of South Asia as such". It feels that
if other South Asians later want to become a part of it it would "change
accordingly”. Its pamphlet series include subjects like structural
adjustments, new capital flows into South Asia Area Studies and the
Indian left’s support for liberalization. Among its projects are the
coordination of a speakers bureau of intellectual-activists, putting
together a cultural collective and a progressive South Asia exchange web
project. Also a media project to appear in specific centrist newspapers
such as India Abroad, India Tribune and India West. It envisages summer
school internships to link second generation students with radical
non-governmental organizations and leftists in India. In 1997 it
organized a Youth Solidarity Summer programme in Atlanta, on the
occasion of fifty years of Indian independence and Pakistani nationhood,
to offer progressive perspectives on South Asian history, identity and
politics. This was to address a "growing" and "stark need" for
"alternative engagements with South Asia" so that the second generation
can learn about contemporary South Asia as well as the complexities of
the diaspora. As it summarizes, on the one hand reified notions of South
Asian "tradition" and "culture" are transmitted by immigrant parents. On
the other, the only South Asian studies offerings on the university
circuit are most often informed by orientalizing perspectives or
erasures of the knowledge of popular struggles for economic, religious
and gender equality in South Asia.
A few days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the Coalition
Against Communalism (CAC) was formed in the Bay Area in 1992. According
to one of its members, the right wingers in the South Asian community
are among the most effective organizers. "At the drop of a hat they can
get 40 people into a room to sit writing letters expressing outrage
about something or the other. So the idea was to form something to
counter that. And to say that there is an alternative point of view".
The group has Indians and Bangladeshis and some Pakistanis. But its
focus was mainly on India, "because Indian communalism was, at that
point" the problem that bothered them "the most". In 1998 a BJP
Government Watch group emerged in the US to monitor the HSC.59 The
recent right wing take over of institutions of research like the Indian
Council of Historical Research and the withdrawal of two volumes of the
"Towards Freedom" documents series from the publishers evoked web-site
interventions such as "Akhbar" and "South Asia Documents". There was an
appeal to take up the matter in academic associations and area studies
centres to express concern on this subject to the Indian government.60
There are several bibliographical resource pages against communalism on
the internet. Significantly the web-site of the BJP is in fact operated
from the US.
Based in the US, SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection )
is published twice a year. The term "South Asian", it elaborates, is
chosen "to bring attention to the fact that South Asians are a group of
people with a shared history and that this history provides a common
basis for understanding of our place in the contemporary world". It’s
statement goes on to add that "whereas most other South Asian magazines
are based on differences of region, religion and nationality within
South Asia", it has chosen to base itself "on a South Asian collectivity
that is now spread out across the globe" (emphasis added). Ranged
against the contemporary rightward political drift, it sees its basic
commitment as social and economic justice both in North America and
South Asia. In 1998 it began producing a regular radio programme as part
of the Asia Pacific Forum in New York (WBAI 99.5 FM). Subjects covered
included the Indian elections and nuclear test explosions in the
subcontinent and the taxi workers’ mobilization and strike (see below)
in New York.
Taxi drivers and others
The Lease Drivers Coalition (LDC), a community-based organisation of the
Committee Against Asian Violence (CAAAV,1986), which grew out of
feminist and leftist Asian American politics, was formed in 1992 and
organizes South Asians who form 50% of the New York’s 30,000 yellow cab
drivers. Subsequently called the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA),
the focus is on negotiating the racialized police force, the
exploitative garage owners, the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC)
inspectors and courts. Most drivers work about 84 hours a week in
12-hour shifts. In 1997 some drivers invested in citizens band radio
networks to bond themselves linguistically (about 31/40 are Punjabi
networks and around 5 Bengali). The organizing committee members meet
two or three times each month, and general members meet once in every
two months. Initially the bulk of the its roughly 700 members were
Pakistanis. On 13 May 1998 the NYTWA co-organised a taxi strike in New
York, during which 97% of the drivers are believed to have been off the
streets against 17 new anti- worker laws proposed by the TLC. The LDC
profiled itself as being different from other unions and driver
organizations in that it had "equal respect for Bangladeshi, Indians and
Pakistanis". This solidarity making is conceptualized as a prelude to
linking up with drivers of "all other communities", such as African
Americans, Latinos, Europeans and non-coloured Americans.
The Canadian counterpart of the South Asian movement is said to have "a
somewhat older history" than the American one. Thus for example, the
proliferation of South Asian materials emanating from Canada (films,
music, cultural events, journals, anthologies) has yet to be matched in
the US. This has been attributed to two factors. The significantly
larger concentrations of South Asian populations are in large Canadian
metropolitan centers such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. And the
unconscious promotion of ethnic identities through Canada’s declared
"mosaic" policy in multicultural affairs.64 In Toronto, the post-1960s
South Asian diaspora has recently expanded with the arrival of 100,000
Tamils, many of them asylum seekers. Here progressive activists, some of
whom belong to the South Asian Committee of the New Democratic Party
have been forging a collective. This includes the Progressive Pakistani
Committee, the North American Sikh League, the Tamil Eelam Society, the
Canadian Council of South Asian of South Asian Christians (mentioned
earlier) and the Scarborough Muslim Association .The agenda is to think
through participation in Canadian politics as well as to intervene
against racism both among South Asians and other metropolitan
communities.
The South Asia Solidarity Group (SASG) supports people’s struggles
against exploitation and oppression in South Asia and strengthening the
links between these struggles and those of Asian communities in Britain.
In Britain its activities have included supporting Asian women workers
demanding basic rights, organizing against racist attacks and opposing
racism in health and education policies, as well as fighting repressive
immigration and asylum laws. It also produces and distributes written
material. One of the events in its campaign of saying no war and fascism
in India and Pakistan included distribution of leaflets on mass scale
and collecting signatures at the World Cup final at Lord’s cricket
ground two years ago. Its quarterly, Inquilab, carries articles takes on
debates among the left in South Asia and Britain. Its conference on
"Globalization, Identity and Resistance" in October 1997, to mark 50
years of the end of British rule in South Asia drew nearly 200
participants, both activists and academics from South Asia, Britain and
Canada. The workshops examined themes such as workers’ struggles and
globalization; cultural production and globalization; gender and
nationalism; nationalism and refugees; communal/fascist parties rooted
in the denominational politics of Partition; and national liberation
struggles in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Sri Lanka and of the Jumma people in
Bangladesh. "In a period when erstwhile progressive writers and
intellectuals are becoming apologists for imperialism", the organizers
highlighted the significance of bringing together a coherent critique of
globalization. As a follow-up the SASG is "beginning to examine the
growth of communalism in the Asian community in Britain It is also
working on developing a coherent left perspective on workers’ struggles
in Britain. As it see it, "this will involve working with a wide network
of groups and identifying possibilities for unity".
A random look at the letters to the editor columns of newspapers in the
Gulf and a couple of interviews indicate that ethnic and communal
politics flowing from the Partition experience and the nation states
defined by it, avidly engage the South Asian community and explain
fund-raising initiatives and political affilitations. What became
sharply evident, since the early 1990s in particular, at several levels
and in different ways, both in the subcontinent and the South Asian
diaspora is that the denominational nation-making projects of the 1920s
–1940s are still around and are being worked on/
bypassed/questioned/transcended. It is a contested field, but given the
combination of transnational practices and transborder technologies, as
also the different, gendered layers of the Partition diaspora itself, it
is imperative for social scientists and activists to track events,
trends and debates in the subcontinent as well as in the diaspora.
Thus for example, the South Asia Citizen’s Web has emerged as an
"independent space on the net to promote dialogue and information
exchange between and about South Asian citizens’ initiatives [located in
Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and in their diasporic
communities]" (emphasis added). Likewise, the web-site of the Bombay
based journal Communalism Combat notes that its subscribers include
anti-communal Indian groups in the US, Canada and UK. Similarly, more
and more non-governmental organizations in South Asia are beginning to
forge regional networks to tackle issues like mass movements of refugees
and cross-border migration. In 1994 the South Asian Human Rights
community acquired a profile to work on discrimination against
minorities, women’s rights, torture and extra-judicial killings. It
should be added that one of the resolutions of the six year old
Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum For Peace and Democracy at its 1995
session in New Delhi decided that "future such people to people meetings
should include Indian and Pakistani diaspora."
The Pakistan-India People’s Forum is an attempt at making the
constituency for a subcontinental peace movement visible. It is ranged
against state-sponsored ideologies of demonizing the other that inform
the "national security" agendas of the post-Partition nation states. Its
five joint conferences in Delhi, Lahore, Calcutta, Peshawar and
Bangalore in 1995-2000 attended by representatives of trade unions and
mass organizations, academics, artists and activists got support from
members of the Pakistan-Indian Diaspora. Regarding Kashmir, it aims at
getting past the assumption that post-colonial nation-state boundaries
are sacred and that it is just a territorial dispute. This is seen as
basic to reducing communal and ethnic tension in the subcontinent and
scaling down defence expenditure and militarism Its re-definition of
political nationhood contests the minimizing of contact between the
people by governments that impose restrictions on travel between the two
countries and on the duration of each stay. The Forum is therefore
working for the granting of visas with greater ease, the reduction of
costs of telecommunications and postal exchange and facilitating the
free exchange of journals and information. It also proposes the joint
preparation of resource books and pamphlets and literature, alternate
people-to-people television channels and joint cultural productions and
securing the rights of cross-border migrant labour. Given the
connections that are made between the "border question" and the
"communal question" this is going to be uphill going. Significant
headway has however been made in linking up the women’s movements in
Pakistan and India. This will expand to include drawing up a charter of
women’s rights. The expectation is that Muslim women in Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka supporting this charter will support Muslim
women in India and women in Pakistan will get support in their demands
for women’s rights beyond the present focus on marriage, divorce and
personal laws.
By Papiya Ghosh
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