Nou Come By Mehak

India’s Parsis use technology to keep religion alive

2009-10-02T02:54:00.001-07:00

In India, the last national census in 2001 recorded just under 70,000 Parsis – Zoroastrians who follow the prophet Zarathustra and worship one god, the creator of the universe, Ahura Mazda. —AFP Photo

MUMBAI: India’s Parsis, the modern-day descendants of migrants who fled persecution in Iran more than 1,000 years ago, are turning to new technology to keep their ancient Zoroastrian religion alive.

Websites, blogs, on-line directories and matchmaking portals are being used by the close-knit but scattered and shrinking community to stay in touch and true to the 3,500-year-old faith.

‘The Parsis are a community without borders. We’re almost all over the world,’ said Yazdi Tantra, who runs a computer consultancy firm in Mumbai, where 70 per cent of the world’s Parsis live.

‘We have this technology so that we can keep in contact because our numbers are very small. If there was no technology, we wouldn’t communicate with one another... it keeps the community together,’ he told AFP.

Tantra runs several websites, including the www.zoroastrians.net portal, which includes everything from suggestions for Parsi baby names to traditional Parsi food, adding to a global network of sites on the community and religion.

What started out as being ‘just for fun’ and a way to catalogue Parsi contacts for his own use three years ago unearthed an enthusiastic online community in India and across the world, he said.

‘Our website does a lot of connecting people,’ he added.

Such connections are more important than ever as the largely prosperous, urbanised minority that produced the likes of Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, conductor Zubin Mehta and Queen singer Freddie Mercury gets smaller every year.

The editor of ‘Parsiana’ magazine, Jehangir Patel, told AFP that there were now only about 90,000 Parsis around the world ‘at most’, as a low birth rate, marriage outside the community and emigration takes its toll.

In India, the last national census in 2001 recorded just under 70,000 Parsis – Zoroastrians who follow the prophet Zarathustra and worship one god, the creator of the universe, Ahura Mazda.

They believe that good thoughts, good words and good deeds will triumph over evil and chaos, and the ancient religion is said to have influenced Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

But demographers predict that there could be as few as 32,000 Parsis left by 2051, based on studies of fertility rates.

In Mumbai, the influential Bombay Parsi Punchayat governing council is looking to young people to save the community by launching what has been called a ‘Facebook for Parsis’ website and a youth wing.

‘Interaction among youngsters will be encouraged so that they find partners through the social events and networking sites, and eventually marry within the community,’ trustee Khojestee Mistry told the Hindustan Times recently.

Zpeakerbox, an online youth magazine for the Zoroastrian community, and the social networking site www.ushtatebook.com already exist.

Elsewhere, Tantra’s theparsidirectory.com and the Parsi Yellow Pages on the ‘Parsiana’ website aim to log as many Parsis as possible plus listings for everything from Parsi accountants to Parsi yoga institutes.

‘As a minority, we tend to stick together,’ said Patel. ‘Almost 33 per cent marry out of the community, so we’re getting a situation about how long people will see themselves as Parsis and how long we exist as a community.’

A debate is raging about whether Parsi women who marry non-Parsis should still be considered part of the community. Traditionalists say they shouldn’t while reformists say they should if the community is to survive.

‘We are always under a cloud. That reflects the need for organisations and associations in the community... It’s a way of sticking together,’ Patel added.

Mumbai architect Arzan Sam Wadia runs parsikhabar.net, one of a number of blogs on Parsi matters. Half of his readers are from outside India, he told AFP from his base in New York.

Online news portals give an immediacy to community news and allow for a range of views that cannot be duplicated by existing print publications, he added.

‘Within Bombay (Mumbai) and outside, just the fact that people are spread out so far and wide geographically, there’s no mainstream publication in the traditional sense that can really do justice to it,’ he said.

Journalist Shernaaz Engineer said her blog, parsi-link.blogspot.com, and others like it were the latest sign of how one of the world’s oldest living faiths was adapting, she told AFP.

It was also a way of avoiding the ‘factionalism’ that has crept in to the Parsi media over issues like marriage outside the community, she said.

‘Patient capital’ and power

2009-08-25T00:09:00.000-07:00

By Bina Shah
Tuesday, 25 Aug, 2009 | 11:12 AM PST |

Jacqueline Novogratz is founder and CEO of Acumen Fund. –Photo by Flickr

What is America up to? This is the question on everyone’s mind these days. A piece of ‘news’ made its way from email lists to the mainstream media last week. Blackwater, the dreaded security contractors who have wreaked havoc in Iraq, has a presence in Pakistan, and an NGO in Peshawar is a front for their mercenary operations in the Northern Areas and tribal belt.

However, this news is probably better classified as ‘gossip’ because Blackwater has been disbanded (renamed Xe but certainly not the same company it was two years ago) and a further check into the NGO in question, Creative Associates International, reveals them to be a legitimate organisation that’s been operating in 15 countries for the last 32 years.

This incident deserves highlighting, though, because it encapsulates a fundamental conflict that characterises Pakistan’s relations with the United States: not the clash of civilisations, but the clash between hard and soft power. We’ll have to turn our attention from Samuel Huntington to Joseph Nye to understand what that means.

Nye is the origiNator of the phrase ‘soft power,’ and his book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics outlines the differences between hard, military power and soft power, ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.’

In a few short years, Nye’s work has had a profound effect on American foreign policy. Foreign policy experts, professors and government officials have understood that when American culture, politics and policies look attractive to a country, that country is more likely to move in America’s direction. History testifies to the truthfulness of this concept: the most recent example being the protests and demonstrations held by pro-western Iranians after the elections of 2009.

Young, urban and educated, these Iranians liked what America had to offer, while rural Iranians, less immune to the charms and attractions of the American political system and culture, held steadfast in their support of President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad’s government. It would have been a great victory for American soft power if the Velvet Revolution had triumphed, showing that major ideological shifts in countries traditionally hostile to America can be achieved without firing a single shot.

This may still happen elsewhere in the world; we can observe the two dynamics of hard and soft power battling it out in our own country, Pakistan. On the one hand, the classic hard power elements — armies, military support and drone attacks which ‘take out’ Taliban and other militants — are put to work in and around our borders, with varying degrees of success.

Baitullah Mehsud has been eliminated, the Taliban locked in a self-destructive succession struggle; but the grave price of this accomplishment is visible in every Gallup poll that shows exactly what Pakistanis think of America.

Soft power is more than just about filling our airwaves with rock and roll and our bellies with Coca-Cola, though, as in the Pakistan of the 1950s. Commerce, cultural exchanges, education and human rights and relief efforts are all the tools with which America is trying to win Pakistan’s heart and mind, although given the inconstancy of Pakistan’s heart and the fickleness of its mind, the US will have a harder task ahead than it anticipates.

As we all know, we are perfectly capable of enjoying all the benefits of America reaching out to us, and then thumbing our noses at them. Why? Because when you use soft power in conjunction with hard power, you have a hard time convincing people of your sincerity, your intentions.

All the good work done by NGOs, educational outreach and business groups wanting to promote trade between the two countries goes down the drain every time the news of another drone attack hits the headlines; the US runs the serious risk of looking even more diabolical by making the carrot and the stick so obvious to us here in Pakistan.

Furthermore, as nice as soft power looks on the outside, it still defines us by what we can get out of them and what they can get out of us, a mutually parasitic relationship that is no healthier than that of the conqueror and the conquered. My friend Zaheer Kidvai, wise in many more things than just computers, made an interesting observation about this: ‘When the British occupied the subcontinent, and their ‘troops’ were here, the only way Americans could ‘get in’ was to send out comics and movies that invaded what [educator and media pioneer Marshall] McLuhan referred to as our ‘space between the ears..’..

‘Now the US troops are here and the British want to ‘get in’ … so a variant of the same strategy has come into play. Organisations that we once admired for their tremendous support of indigenous activities and initiatives ... are beginning to become more active and — especially with their physical space, sadly, curtailed by risks of a different nature — are trying to own our McLuhan Space.’

Will we ever be able to move beyond what they want from us or what we want from them? Recognising our interdependence, and working with mutual respect to achieve goals that have nothing to do with strategic power or influence, can we come up with a relationship that benefits us without making us post-colonial slaves to the western power dynamic?

Perhaps the answer lies in the concept of patient capital. I learned about this from Jacqueline Novogratz, whose company, the Acumen Fund, uses patient capital to ‘build transformative businesses’ that serve Pakistan’s poor in the fields of water, health, housing, energy and agriculture. The hallmark of patient capital is that the investor makes a long-term investment in a business with no expectation of turning a quick profit. You make the investment, but you don’t want an immediate return; you can afford to wait and allow the business to achieve self-sustenance, and then you will see a return on that initial investment.

It’s primarily a business term, but think about the implications of applying it to US-Pakistan relations. The US invests in our education, health or power crisis, but with no short-term expectations, no pressure, no demands. They act as a friend helping out another friend in need. They wait, patiently, for the long-term dividends of this investment: an improved opinion of the US and the elimination of resentment and suspicion between the two countries. This kind of patient capital will pay off in ways that will benefit us both for generations to come.

Revisiting the Kargil conflict

2009-07-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

General Pervez Musharraf’s claim to an Indian TV channel last week that the Kargil war forced India to negotiate the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan would be laughable had he not been responsible for so much suffering on both sides, suffering that any military conflict brings with it. Gen Musharraf’s perspective makes no sense at all. —AFP/File phot

War and jingoism go together, and the Kargil conflict was no different. India on Sunday celebrated the 10th anniversary of the end of the lacerating Himalayan conflict, which it claims was a military victory. Some Indian journalists have raised questions about the conduct of the messy war and a brigadier lost his job for disagreeing with the higher-ups about the need to sacrifice more than 500 young soldiers and officers in the haste to evict the Pakistanis from their surreptitiously occupied strategic heights.

Pakistan’s perspective is more complex. There are quite a few who blame their army for the folly of triggering the military standoff with India, more so when the two countries were trying to resolve their differences in a serious way. Pakistan’s prime minister of the day and the army leadership are still offering opposite views of how it all happened.

In any case, General Pervez Musharraf’s claim to an Indian TV channel last week that the Kargil war forced India to negotiate the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan would be laughable had he not been responsible for so much suffering on both sides, suffering that any military conflict brings with it. Gen Musharraf’s perspective makes no sense at all.

And all he had to do to be better informed was to read the Lahore Declaration penned by the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers in February 1999, way before his misadventure flared into an untenable war. The declaration specifically recalled the agreement of 23rd September, 1998 between the prime ministers, namely that an environment of peace and security ‘is in the supreme national interest of both sides and that the resolution of all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, is essential for this purpose’.

On that basis they agreed that their governments ‘shall intensify their efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir’. They would also ‘refrain from intervention and interference in each other’s internal affairs’. They also resolved to ‘intensify their composite and integrated dialogue process for an early and positive outcome of the agreed bilateral agenda’.

Everything the two could ask for was there in the Lahore Declaration, including the prospects of an equitable and just solution to the Kashmir imbroglio. So it’s not clear what Gen Musharraf was trying to suggest in the interview.

Indian claims of the military victory in Kargil are just as far-fetched. All you have to do is to listen to the thunderous applause of hundreds of Indian MPs when President Bill Clinton addressed the Indian parliament in March 2000. The speech belies all claims of victory in Kargil by either side. Mr Clinton in fact announced unequivocally that it was he who had helped the Pakistanis to vacate their positions, and Indian MPs endorsed that with their applause.

Excerpts from Mr Clinton’s take in his own words: ‘Let me also make clear, as I have repeatedly, I have certainly not come to South Asia to mediate the dispute over Kashmir. Only India and Pakistan can work out the problems between them. And I will say the same thing to General Musharraf in Islamabad. But if outsiders cannot resolve this problem, I hope you will create the opportunity to do it yourselves, calling on the support of others who can help where possible, as American diplomacy did in urging the Pakistanis to go back behind the line of control in the Kargil crisis.’ (Applause)

Is there any room then to doubt how the conflict ended and who the victors were? There can be another view of the Kargil conflict and it doesn’t matter if it will not be the most popular one. On the one hand the war was seen by some official quarters in India as a consequence of the intelligence failure by the army to detect Pakistani camps on the heights earlier on. There is a good reason to disagree with the view. A book released by Mr Brajesh Mishra, who was Mr Vajpayee’s national security adviser around the time of the standoff, hints at a different possibility.

The book describes how Pakistani shells were falling 20 km inside Indian-administered Kashmir from across the Kargil heights much earlier, at a time when Indian and Pakistani prime ministers were holding a failed summit in Colombo in July 1998. That summit was held barely weeks after their globally denounced nuclear tests. It is difficult to digest that Kargil was in turmoil in July 1998, but the Indian prime minister made no mention of it during the Lahore talks in February the following year.

There was a distinct possibility that Mr Vajpayee needed the Lahore summit for compelling domestic reasons. Contrary to the expectations of his jingoistic supporters, the nuclear tests of May 1998 were electorally ruinous for his party, the BJP, which lost the key state elections in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to the Congress.

This was followed by another political disaster, which brought India into international disrepute. The gruesome murder of Australian missionary Graham Steins and his two young sons by BJP supporters besmirched India’s image and isolated it further in the international comity of democracies that looked up to the country’s secular and liberal traditions as worthy of emulation. The electoral rout and the shame of his own supporters being involved in the lynching of a family of an Australian Christian missionary preceded Mr Vajpayee’s dramatic overture of the bus journey to Lahore. The idea had come from Mr Nawaz Sharif though when he declared to an Indian journalist that bilateral talks were better than a third-party mediation. ‘Why go to Amritsar via Bhatinda?’ Mr Sharif had remarked. Mr Vajpayee accepted the offer at a news conference in Lucknow.

The people who are adept at subverting India-Pakistan peace initiatives – like those who did so in Mumbai last year and previously with the serial train blasts in India’s financial capital – killed 16 Hindus in Kashmir on the eve of Mr Vajpayee’s journey to Lahore.

But such was his compulsion to make the visit anyhow that the gruesome killings were ignored. Mr Vajpayee quoted from Sardar Jafri’s poem on India-Pakistan ties at the Punjab governor’s house in Lahore to make his pitch for peace. ‘Tum aao gulshan e Lahore se chaman bar dosh, hum aayein subhe Banaras ki roshni lekar, phir uske baad ye poocchein ke kaun dushman hai.’ (You bring the fragrance along from the gardens of Lahore, I shall bring light from the fabled dawn of Banaras. And then ask of ourselves, who is the enemy.)

Mr Vajpayee’s euphoria was short-lived but it wasn’t because of Gen Musharraf’s soldiers, who were in any case lodged on the wrong side of the Line of Control for days before his visit to Lahore. His own political ally, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu Ms J. Jayalalitha, pulled the rug from under his feet. Her MPs rebelled against him in the Lok Sabha and he lost the confidence test by one vote. Here was a man who tried everything to gain too much too quickly. The nuclear tests failed him; his own religious supporters failed him and now his crucial ally had let him down.

We know why Gen Musharraf staged Kargil. He has said why he did what he did. But India’s response will continue to remain a mystery. Had Mr Vajpayee not lost the vote of confidence in parliament, there would be no need to hold elections. Therefore, there would be no need for a lame duck government not to consult the Rajya Sabha – not even call it once during the course of the war – and to go into a full-blown conflict virtually unilaterally, with political rivals becoming mere spectators.

Had there been no elections there would be no need to cover up the government’s failure to anticipate the post-Lahore summit possibilities as they unfolded so bizarrely. Am I suggesting that India should have allowed the Pakistanis to remain in their positions in Kargil? Not at all. But, if President Clinton had to play the key role in driving out the Pakistanis, why would he not have done the favour without either side resorting to an unavoidable war? Moreover, it was Mr Vajpayee’s chance to rescue his friend Mr Sharif from the clutches of his hawkish general. Instead he put Mr Sharif in the dock as a villain.

They say truth is the first casualty in war. And everyone’s knowledge of the facts seems too limited to claim to know the entire truth. But we can at least continue to ask the unresolved, even unpopular, questions.

The unending ordeal of missing persons’ families

2009-07-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

They disappear without a trace. Their mothers, wives, children and families exist in torturous limbo. They lay awaken wondering where their loved ones have gone and in what condition they are. Scary thoughts come to their minds evoking tears and a sharp jab to their heart. Their meaning of life altered forever.

The families of missing people have been hoping against hope since 2001 when enforced abductions began. The highest number of such incidents occurred during 2003 and 2004. The last statistics said 279 persons were missing in Balochistan, 165 in Punjab, 78 in Sindh and 81 in NWFP. Of them 157 have been lucky to rejoin their families, 74 have been traced but there is no word or strand of information about 381. In the meantime 104 more have been abducted, bringing the total of missing persons to 650.

Gazen Khan’s brother Chakar Khan Qumbrani who was abducted in February this year said, ‘he was picked up by intelligence agencies taken to various locations. Some of the victims who were released, said they had seen my brother and were suffering unimaginable mental and physical torture. My brother’s children have gone on a hunger strike too, but that has made absolutely no difference. If he has done something wrong, all we ask for is a proper trial through court.’

Even though, Amina Janjua, who is raising a voice for the missing persons, and others had pinned high hopes on the reinstated CJ, their faith shattered as their cases reached a deadlock. However their hope has been ignited once again with the CJ’s instruction to the interior ministry seeking report about the missing persons in third week of July.

Their hopes fluctuate but their pursuit for tracing their dear ones remains strong in the face of despicable insensitivity of the government mandarins. For months on end Amina Janjua had tried to get in touch with Fehmida Mirza through phone calls, written applications, e-mails, postal mail and constant reminders finally landing an appointment only later to be deceptively told that the Madam Speaker was out of the country.

‘It really feels like our politicians are only in Pakistan for a short stint. Either they are inaccessible or when finally reached lend nothing but false hopes. It was a request to hand over a mural made by children of the victims to the Madam Speaker.’ Amina thought that if the mural were to be hung in the parliament it would be an artistic reminder of the suffering of families of the missing people — a nudge to the conscience of the people who were responsible for the safety and welfare of the people. But perhaps, that very reason met Amina and others like her with unnecessary aggression. In the brazen heat on 25th June as Amina, children and civil society walked towards the parliament, they were absurdly faced with contingents of police armed wearing gas masks and brandishing shields. In Pakistan if there is one aspect where there is no dearth, those are calamitous issues. Since 2007 Pakistan has been struck with a rise in suicide bombings, the surreal ‘take over’ of the Taliban and the subsequent operation displacing millions. And those who have been suffering due to abductions recognize the national issues that have caused the cases of missing people to be pushed in to the background.

Yet addressing the cases of the missing people and ending the suffering of so many Pakistani families should be way ahead of concerns such as sms jokes on politicians. As government representatives continue to exercise ‘delaying tactics,’ the families of missing persons have learnt that the government has no interest in the problems of the people and that their suffering will linger on.

Amina has met with a number of ‘influential’ personalities including Minister of Human Rights Mumtaz Gilani, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, DG Crisis Management Cell, Interior Secretary Kamal Shah and secretary defence. But they all seem to parrot the same lines of ‘we don’t have these people, but we are looking for them.’ On May 20, Rehman Malik told Ms Janjua that she will hear good news in two weeks. That high level meetings of officials, including all agencies, provincial government and home departments, were being held. Amina feels that there is more apathy concerning those who are in the custody of local agencies than those in foreign hands.

The family members of the victims have also approached international human rights organizations. ‘They are not as useful either, says Ms Janjua. ‘When it came to John Solecki, their representatives worked aggressively to get him back. But when it comes to us locals they simply submit written requests to find the missing people.’ After a pause she added ‘The world may forget the missing people, but we will not.’

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