Talking Tsunami: To Dissent This Time
By Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro
After the earthquake and tsunami, women and men assembled across Orissa to gather resources for neighboring states. Bins, of varied shapes, wrapped in white paper, tsunami at times spelled `sunami’, turned into collection boxes, at political events, movement meetings. A woman puts a banana in the bin. “For sustenance,” she says, “The workers need food.” “In Orissa,” she continues, “we have heard that a boy died, just one boy.” The youth, riding a buffalo during the tsunami, was thrown to his death, some say, as the animal, frightened by subterranean turbulence, started to run. “Not like the cyclone, when so many died. Today, I am collecting money for the survivors. I have been a political worker for a long time, we work to build, and when what we build is broken, we work to build again. I think about the boy. I did not know him. He died in Rayagada, perhaps in the currents of the tsunami. Is it all right to mourn one loss when so many have died?” I think about the boy as I wait for the meeting to commence. Was it the tsunami? Does it matter? Here is a life, mourned, remembered, and remembrance accompanies action, new memories, possibility. “It is as if through mourning the tsunami, the cyclone, the earthquake in Gujarat, we become a nation,” a friend says, “There is not much to celebrate as a nation. But we mourn together.”
As death tolls mount to over 294,000 human beings, as whole villages, ecologies and wildlife vanish from the landscape, as decimation and dislocation reverberate, as access to basic survival needs becomes contingent on national efforts, international mobilization, and heretofore unknown forces, as the tsunami survivors wait to identify and bury their dead, as the dead are buried without identification, an avalanche of words has arisen to contain and displace the grief, horror, incomprehensibility, and terror provoked by such an event. Words meant to console, reassert our sovereignty, restore us to our reason, account for the unaccountable, explain the inexplicable bombard us as discursive violence enframes and organizes the violence of social suffering.
Within the compounded disarray of armed conflict, displacements, gendered violence, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) seek to recruit displaced or orphaned children from camps in Batticaloa, Ampara, Trincomalee and Jaffna, to replace the soldiers they have lost. The state holds the LTTE responsible without reciprocally accepting accountability for the crisis in Sri Lanka.
In India, the ubiquitous interplay of caste, Hindu cultural dominance, and majoritarian nationalism act in concert, even, especially, in times of despair. The Sangh Parivar group of Hindu nationalist and extremist organizations preys on the disaster, promising assistance to the affected. About 2,000 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers’ Association) members are at work in tsunami affected areas, seeking to repeat their performance in Gujarat (after the earthquake in 2001) and Orissa (post cyclone), where relief work undertaken in an explicitly sectarian manner by Sangh organizations provided them with a foothold through which to exploit disaster to foster communal politics. The RSS expects to raise Rupees 25 crore for Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Andaman and Nicobar, through its organizations in India and abroad. In Tamil Nadu, higher caste fisher communities resist sharing emergency shelter and supplies with dalits (erstwhile `untouchable’ caste groups) affected by the tsunami. The state fails to insure equity in providing assistance and planning for rehabilitation. Government officials in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu discriminate while allocating monetary support to dalits who have lost family members. State agencies in certain areas have designated fewer survival resources for dalits than others. It is dalits who are often the last to receive electricity and water. What intersections between governance and political neglect frame such social violence as subaltern communities (subalternity made intricate by distinctions of culture and differences of power) are structurally located in opposition to the liberal state, their specific issues and claims largely absent in, and exterior to, the dominant imaginary. India initially rejected the assistance of the International Red Cross, even as the state struggled to respond, as non-governmental organizations and citizens scrambled to serve the affected. How is India, a nuclear and regional power in South Asia, accountable to its people? What environmental disaster mitigation and response mechanisms exist? How does the nation ensure the `security’ of citizens, particularly those disenfranchised?
Across the world, eight days following the tsunami, the Bush administration announced $350 million in aid. As the geopolitics of post-tsunami Southeast and south South Asia are violently transformed, Washington seeks to use this opportunity to propel its religio-military crusade. George Bush’s humanitarianism is framed by a neoconservative campaign seeking to eliminate sanctions against the Indonesian military implicated in the brutal suppression of the Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh) movement in Aceh, which with East Timor and Irian Jaya, has been struggling for an autonomous Islamic state in Aceh since the 1970s. The International Development Association, the World Bank’s financing institution, also promises to supply $660 million to enable Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives to transition from relief to reconstruction. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank propose to collaborate with the Government of India to evaluate `need’, and on that premise, formulate support for post-tsunami recovery. Shanty towns, multiple displacements, development related deaths, hunger and impoverishment are the legacies of World Bank funded maldevelopment in India, in the Narmada Valley, in mining, road and forestry projects that map the trajectory of violent progress in the age of the global information economy. The Bank’s consistent acceptance of forcible displacement, and inadequate resettlement and rehabilitation, violates its own policies, as well as international agreements on livelihood security and human rights. The Bank remains arrogant, planning a defiant return to financing high-risk infrastructure projects that allow governments and corporations to marginalize civil society in decision-making. Now, the Bank looks to use the tsunami to further its interventions. Without a critical and stakeholder based assessment of the effects of Bank lending, or necessary shifts in its policies and practice, the Bank’s burdensome commitments only continue to inflate the conditions of inequity brought about by dominant development in the Global South.
The premises of development, of charity and aid, of nation-keeping, of internationality, collide with the asymmetry of issues and histories that meet each other `post-disaster’, seeking to provide `relief’, a discouraging story of the disempowerment of communities, of persistent and invasive inequities that continue the brutalization of women, children, marginalized communities, ethnic and religious minorities. Multiple interpretive frames have flooded television screens, airwaves, and local shops in numerous spaces. One discourse presents itself as enlightened, compassionate, understanding, modern, active, and capable. It represents global powers, nations, international agencies, organized citizens groups, entertainers, corporations, and civic leaders. Another discourse is more alive on local street corners where lives are lived in fragile circumstances, close to horror, violence and death, largely defenseless in worlds of chaos, inadequately powerful to forge a fate or to direct destiny. These two significant discursive responses do not participate with each other in conversation. They emerge each from disparate, incommensurable worlds and do not speak together. The global speaks to them in a language it never names as foreign. The local has little interest or reason to listen to this voice of concern that it cannot escape, and returns to its universe of endless labor, of words punctuated by silences of lament and fear.
The dominant global discourse is one of relief, rehabilitation, opportunity, promise, potential, knowledge, intervention. Reason and compassion keep it busy, discourse and action in perpetual motion. The time to act is now. Now is the time for improvement. Now (this disaster) allows an accelerated march to the future. This global discourse speaks of disaster management, coordinated efforts, debt relief, mangrove planting, early warning systems, reconstructing cultures, trade concessions, silver linings. Among the casualties of this mad rush are the poor, the marginal, the indigenous, the displaced, as plans made for them are not made by them or with them. Plans provoked by the tsunami bypass their lived concerns to implement `bigger’ plans that negate their lives, aspirations, histories. In a world where to be the object of concern or be ignored seem to be the options available, the latter may be preferable. We (those in dissent) witness another casualty, in the realm of thinking and feeling. This calculated frenzy to take advantage of new opportunities, to show our humanity and compassion, to turn catastrophe into progress, to reassert authority over the temporary loss of control, leaves no time to mourn, to be humbled, to be lost, broken, to feel the pain of the open wound, blood, tissue, scar, flesh visible to the frightened eye. Ours is a world of power, action, resource, will. Dominant global discourse asserts as much in asserting itself. It also already knows and as such has no need to think. To think the daily violence of structural inequity and injustice. To think the complicity in violence inherent in political, economic, cultural relations. Global discourse knows how to improve systems, how to accumulate knowledge, how to tame nature, enhance security, and build a better tomorrow. It already knows, it just needs to do, following at full speed the groove in the road.
Local discourses, in contradistinction, often know no future progress. In such spaces, disaster signifies disharmony in the present. God has been angered or nature has been moved to wrath. In Sri Lanka, where Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians all reside, this horror is retribution, readjustment, purification. A Buddhist baker whose whole family survived says, “We earn money the correct way. That’s why it didn’t happen to us.” A Roman Catholic reverend who lost a nun and eighteen members of his congregation says, “The dead have sacrificed their lives to teach us a lesson: to be together, to treat one another as human beings.” A Muslim cleric in Indonesia states, “Natural disasters are an indication that man has strayed from the path of God. We believe it is an examination and we face it with passion and submission.” A Hindu in India states, “If you forget nature, this is the way nature reminds you. Crime and stress punish nature.” Religious discourse intimately implicates itself in everyday cultural practices. In contrasting culturescapes of the local, a socialist grassroots activist in India intervenes, “This event would affect the marginalized differently if their rights to land and livelihood were restored. This disaster is as much the making of elite leaders and politicians who keep the poor unsafe and in poverty, as well as of our own fear of revolt.” In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, certain adivasi (indigenous, tribal) peoples survived the worst impact of the tsunami, drawing on a 20,000-60,000 year repository of knowledge toward endurance and sense-making. Calling forth a particular attentiveness, the intervention of not forgetting. Memory that sustains cultural survival literally saves lives.
Southeast and South Asia and East Africa grieve their dead. In Indonesia, 240,774, many in the predominantly Muslim province of Aceh, and in North Sumatra; in Sri Lanka, 30,957, a majority in Tamil Tiger territory; 16,413 in India across Tamil Nadu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Pondicherry, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh; 5,393 in Thailand; 61 in Myanmar; 68 in Malaysia; 2 in Bangladesh; 82 in Maldives (where $27 million has been pledged in international aid but none yet delivered); 298 in Somalia; 10 in Tanzania; 1 in Kenya. People who died traveled as well from over 45 countries in Europe, South and North America, the Middle-East/West and Central Asia. Many are missing, and over 1.5 million are homeless and without livelihood. The axes of history through colonization, modernization, state-building in postcoloniality determine who lives where, with what access. Terror, inflicted by states, groups, environmental onslaughts, by dreams and memories constitute the road map of the present. In Darfur, a genocide continues, in the Narmada Valley, in Nigeria, Nepal, Palestine, Israel, Kashmir, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan; Kurds, Tibetans, Native Americans. await (im)possible justice. The distance between `natural’ disaster and political oppression blurs. Familiar words protect us from strange happenings. In other places, familiar worlds evaporate as we awake to strange happenings.
Agency, suffering, assertion are made real within nationalist imaginaries that betray difference, and seek to consolidate, assimilate, and coerce our becoming. Interpretative frames explain, justify, rationalize, and return the universe to an ordered, purposeful, balancing whole. Image-making is its twin, the relentless industry that produces and sustains representations. Suffering distanced. Lived terror repressed toward the salve of forgetting. Lives with no less right to be than ours, swept away, reduced to moralisms, accusations, discursive regularities. Grief, mourning, loss, made manageable.
We need ways to think, feel, care, grieve, mourn, remember, respond, act. We need to challenge the discourses that make violence tolerable, necessary, explicable in ways that absolve us, establish moral certainty, and return us to the known. In other words, in other worlds, the wound is not covered over. Grieving accompanies action. Mourning ignites memory. Death inspires care. Let us strengthen such languages and worlds. Let us live there, in a possible or impossible `after God and man’. How to be such an after? How badly do we need this `after’ to live? Differently? In a strange terror and freedom we know not. Where, no longer, some lives mean a lot, others, not very much.
Note: The act of our writing, thinking together is made possible through shared lives that live in relation to difference and history, in alliance. We would like to thank Amitava Kumar, for this invitation, for large-hearted solidarity, and Annie Paradise, for reading.
References
1 Of 1999.
2 `I’ — Angana.
3See Awaaz, South Asia Watch Limited (2004) In Bad Faith? British Charity & Hindu Extremism. London and Mumbai: Awaaz – South Asia Watch Limited and Sabrang Communications & Publishing Private Limited. URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.awaazsaw.org/ibf/; and The South Asia Citizens Web (2002) The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva. France and Mumbai: The South Asia Citizens Web and Sabrang Communications & Publishing Private Limited. URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.stopfundinghate.org
4 One crore =10 million rupees.
5 See URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=40873
6 Including the Bush Presidency’s domestic strategy that prioritizes political support and federal funds for conservative faith-based social action efforts.
7 See Peter Bossard (2004) The World Bank at 60: A Case of Institutional Amnesia? Berkeley: International Rivers Network.
8 These quotes are taken from a newspaper article. See Amy Waldman (2005) Faith Divides Survivors, It Unites Them, Too. In The Times of India (2005, January 15), Bhubaneswar.
9We include these figures with a cautionary note that they are not final, and that the numbers, many say, are fewer than actual, and reflect the politics of silence and visibility that underpin information collection.
Talking Tsunami: To Dissent This Time–Angana Chat
Talking Tsunami: To Dissent This Time
By Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro
After the earthquake and tsunami, women and men assembled across Orissa to gather resources for neighboring states. Bins, of varied shapes, wrapped in white paper, tsunami at times spelled `sunami’, turned into collection boxes, at political events, movement meetings. A woman puts a banana in the bin. “For sustenance,” she says, “The workers need food.” “In Orissa,” she continues, “we have heard that a boy died, just one boy.” The youth, riding a buffalo during the tsunami, was thrown to his death, some say, as the animal, frightened by subterranean turbulence, started to run. “Not like the cyclone, when so many died. Today, I am collecting money for the survivors. I have been a political worker for a long time, we work to build, and when what we build is broken, we work to build again. I think about the boy. I did not know him. He died in Rayagada, perhaps in the currents of the tsunami. Is it all right to mourn one loss when so many have died?” I think about the boy as I wait for the meeting to commence. Was it the tsunami? Does it matter? Here is a life, mourned, remembered, and remembrance accompanies action, new memories, possibility. “It is as if through mourning the tsunami, the cyclone, the earthquake in Gujarat, we become a nation,” a friend says, “There is not much to celebrate as a nation. But we mourn together.”
As death tolls mount to over 294,000 human beings, as whole villages, ecologies and wildlife vanish from the landscape, as decimation and dislocation reverberate, as access to basic survival needs becomes contingent on national efforts, international mobilization, and heretofore unknown forces, as the tsunami survivors wait to identify and bury their dead, as the dead are buried without identification, an avalanche of words has arisen to contain and displace the grief, horror, incomprehensibility, and terror provoked by such an event. Words meant to console, reassert our sovereignty, restore us to our reason, account for the unaccountable, explain the inexplicable bombard us as discursive violence enframes and organizes the violence of social suffering.
Within the compounded disarray of armed conflict, displacements, gendered violence, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) seek to recruit displaced or orphaned children from camps in Batticaloa, Ampara, Trincomalee and Jaffna, to replace the soldiers they have lost. The state holds the LTTE responsible without reciprocally accepting accountability for the crisis in Sri Lanka.
In India, the ubiquitous interplay of caste, Hindu cultural dominance, and majoritarian nationalism act in concert, even, especially, in times of despair. The Sangh Parivar group of Hindu nationalist and extremist organizations preys on the disaster, promising assistance to the affected. About 2,000 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers’ Association) members are at work in tsunami affected areas, seeking to repeat their performance in Gujarat (after the earthquake in 2001) and Orissa (post cyclone), where relief work undertaken in an explicitly sectarian manner by Sangh organizations provided them with a foothold through which to exploit disaster to foster communal politics. The RSS expects to raise Rupees 25 crore for Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Andaman and Nicobar, through its organizations in India and abroad. In Tamil Nadu, higher caste fisher communities resist sharing emergency shelter and supplies with dalits (erstwhile `untouchable’ caste groups) affected by the tsunami. The state fails to insure equity in providing assistance and planning for rehabilitation. Government officials in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu discriminate while allocating monetary support to dalits who have lost family members. State agencies in certain areas have designated fewer survival resources for dalits than others. It is dalits who are often the last to receive electricity and water. What intersections between governance and political neglect frame such social violence as subaltern communities (subalternity made intricate by distinctions of culture and differences of power) are structurally located in opposition to the liberal state, their specific issues and claims largely absent in, and exterior to, the dominant imaginary. India initially rejected the assistance of the International Red Cross, even as the state struggled to respond, as non-governmental organizations and citizens scrambled to serve the affected. How is India, a nuclear and regional power in South Asia, accountable to its people? What environmental disaster mitigation and response mechanisms exist? How does the nation ensure the `security’ of citizens, particularly those disenfranchised?
Across the world, eight days following the tsunami, the Bush administration announced $350 million in aid. As the geopolitics of post-tsunami Southeast and south South Asia are violently transformed, Washington seeks to use this opportunity to propel its religio-military crusade. George Bush’s humanitarianism is framed by a neoconservative campaign seeking to eliminate sanctions against the Indonesian military implicated in the brutal suppression of the Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh) movement in Aceh, which with East Timor and Irian Jaya, has been struggling for an autonomous Islamic state in Aceh since the 1970s. The International Development Association, the World Bank’s financing institution, also promises to supply $660 million to enable Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives to transition from relief to reconstruction. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank propose to collaborate with the Government of India to evaluate `need’, and on that premise, formulate support for post-tsunami recovery. Shanty towns, multiple displacements, development related deaths, hunger and impoverishment are the legacies of World Bank funded maldevelopment in India, in the Narmada Valley, in mining, road and forestry projects that map the trajectory of violent progress in the age of the global information economy. The Bank’s consistent acceptance of forcible displacement, and inadequate resettlement and rehabilitation, violates its own policies, as well as international agreements on livelihood security and human rights. The Bank remains arrogant, planning a defiant return to financing high-risk infrastructure projects that allow governments and corporations to marginalize civil society in decision-making. Now, the Bank looks to use the tsunami to further its interventions. Without a critical and stakeholder based assessment of the effects of Bank lending, or necessary shifts in its policies and practice, the Bank’s burdensome commitments only continue to inflate the conditions of inequity brought about by dominant development in the Global South.
The premises of development, of charity and aid, of nation-keeping, of internationality, collide with the asymmetry of issues and histories that meet each other `post-disaster’, seeking to provide `relief’, a discouraging story of the disempowerment of communities, of persistent and invasive inequities that continue the brutalization of women, children, marginalized communities, ethnic and religious minorities. Multiple interpretive frames have flooded television screens, airwaves, and local shops in numerous spaces. One discourse presents itself as enlightened, compassionate, understanding, modern, active, and capable. It represents global powers, nations, international agencies, organized citizens groups, entertainers, corporations, and civic leaders. Another discourse is more alive on local street corners where lives are lived in fragile circumstances, close to horror, violence and death, largely defenseless in worlds of chaos, inadequately powerful to forge a fate or to direct destiny. These two significant discursive responses do not participate with each other in conversation. They emerge each from disparate, incommensurable worlds and do not speak together. The global speaks to them in a language it never names as foreign. The local has little interest or reason to listen to this voice of concern that it cannot escape, and returns to its universe of endless labor, of words punctuated by silences of lament and fear.
The dominant global discourse is one of relief, rehabilitation, opportunity, promise, potential, knowledge, intervention. Reason and compassion keep it busy, discourse and action in perpetual motion. The time to act is now. Now is the time for improvement. Now (this disaster) allows an accelerated march to the future. This global discourse speaks of disaster management, coordinated efforts, debt relief, mangrove planting, early warning systems, reconstructing cultures, trade concessions, silver linings. Among the casualties of this mad rush are the poor, the marginal, the indigenous, the displaced, as plans made for them are not made by them or with them. Plans provoked by the tsunami bypass their lived concerns to implement `bigger’ plans that negate their lives, aspirations, histories. In a world where to be the object of concern or be ignored seem to be the options available, the latter may be preferable. We (those in dissent) witness another casualty, in the realm of thinking and feeling. This calculated frenzy to take advantage of new opportunities, to show our humanity and compassion, to turn catastrophe into progress, to reassert authority over the temporary loss of control, leaves no time to mourn, to be humbled, to be lost, broken, to feel the pain of the open wound, blood, tissue, scar, flesh visible to the frightened eye. Ours is a world of power, action, resource, will. Dominant global discourse asserts as much in asserting itself. It also already knows and as such has no need to think. To think the daily violence of structural inequity and injustice. To think the complicity in violence inherent in political, economic, cultural relations. Global discourse knows how to improve systems, how to accumulate knowledge, how to tame nature, enhance security, and build a better tomorrow. It already knows, it just needs to do, following at full speed the groove in the road.
Local discourses, in contradistinction, often know no future progress. In such spaces, disaster signifies disharmony in the present. God has been angered or nature has been moved to wrath. In Sri Lanka, where Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians all reside, this horror is retribution, readjustment, purification. A Buddhist baker whose whole family survived says, “We earn money the correct way. That’s why it didn’t happen to us.” A Roman Catholic reverend who lost a nun and eighteen members of his congregation says, “The dead have sacrificed their lives to teach us a lesson: to be together, to treat one another as human beings.” A Muslim cleric in Indonesia states, “Natural disasters are an indication that man has strayed from the path of God. We believe it is an examination and we face it with passion and submission.” A Hindu in India states, “If you forget nature, this is the way nature reminds you. Crime and stress punish nature.” Religious discourse intimately implicates itself in everyday cultural practices. In contrasting culturescapes of the local, a socialist grassroots activist in India intervenes, “This event would affect the marginalized differently if their rights to land and livelihood were restored. This disaster is as much the making of elite leaders and politicians who keep the poor unsafe and in poverty, as well as of our own fear of revolt.” In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, certain adivasi (indigenous, tribal) peoples survived the worst impact of the tsunami, drawing on a 20,000-60,000 year repository of knowledge toward endurance and sense-making. Calling forth a particular attentiveness, the intervention of not forgetting. Memory that sustains cultural survival literally saves lives.
Southeast and South Asia and East Africa grieve their dead. In Indonesia, 240,774, many in the predominantly Muslim province of Aceh, and in North Sumatra; in Sri Lanka, 30,957, a majority in Tamil Tiger territory; 16,413 in India across Tamil Nadu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Pondicherry, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh; 5,393 in Thailand; 61 in Myanmar; 68 in Malaysia; 2 in Bangladesh; 82 in Maldives (where $27 million has been pledged in international aid but none yet delivered); 298 in Somalia; 10 in Tanzania; 1 in Kenya. People who died traveled as well from over 45 countries in Europe, South and North America, the Middle-East/West and Central Asia. Many are missing, and over 1.5 million are homeless and without livelihood. The axes of history through colonization, modernization, state-building in postcoloniality determine who lives where, with what access. Terror, inflicted by states, groups, environmental onslaughts, by dreams and memories constitute the road map of the present. In Darfur, a genocide continues, in the Narmada Valley, in Nigeria, Nepal, Palestine, Israel, Kashmir, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan; Kurds, Tibetans, Native Americans. await (im)possible justice. The distance between `natural’ disaster and political oppression blurs. Familiar words protect us from strange happenings. In other places, familiar worlds evaporate as we awake to strange happenings.
Agency, suffering, assertion are made real within nationalist imaginaries that betray difference, and seek to consolidate, assimilate, and coerce our becoming. Interpretative frames explain, justify, rationalize, and return the universe to an ordered, purposeful, balancing whole. Image-making is its twin, the relentless industry that produces and sustains representations. Suffering distanced. Lived terror repressed toward the salve of forgetting. Lives with no less right to be than ours, swept away, reduced to moralisms, accusations, discursive regularities. Grief, mourning, loss, made manageable.
We need ways to think, feel, care, grieve, mourn, remember, respond, act. We need to challenge the discourses that make violence tolerable, necessary, explicable in ways that absolve us, establish moral certainty, and return us to the known. In other words, in other worlds, the wound is not covered over. Grieving accompanies action. Mourning ignites memory. Death inspires care. Let us strengthen such languages and worlds. Let us live there, in a possible or impossible `after God and man’. How to be such an after? How badly do we need this `after’ to live? Differently? In a strange terror and freedom we know not. Where, no longer, some lives mean a lot, others, not very much.
Note: The act of our writing, thinking together is made possible through shared lives that live in relation to difference and history, in alliance. We would like to thank Amitava Kumar, for this invitation, for large-hearted solidarity, and Annie Paradise, for reading.
References
1 Of 1999.
2 `I’ — Angana.
3See Awaaz, South Asia Watch Limited (2004) In Bad Faith? British Charity & Hindu Extremism. London and Mumbai: Awaaz – South Asia Watch Limited and Sabrang Communications & Publishing Private Limited. URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.awaazsaw.org/ibf/; and The South Asia Citizens Web (2002) The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva. France and Mumbai: The South Asia Citizens Web and Sabrang Communications & Publishing Private Limited. URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.stopfundinghate.org
4 One crore =10 million rupees.
5 See URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=40873
6 Including the Bush Presidency’s domestic strategy that prioritizes political support and federal funds for conservative faith-based social action efforts.
7 See Peter Bossard (2004) The World Bank at 60: A Case of Institutional Amnesia? Berkeley: International Rivers Network.
8 These quotes are taken from a newspaper article. See Amy Waldman (2005) Faith Divides Survivors, It Unites Them, Too. In The Times of India (2005, January 15), Bhubaneswar.
9We include these figures with a cautionary note that they are not final, and that the numbers, many say, are fewer than actual, and reflect the politics of silence and visibility that underpin information collection.