Chaman Lal

BABA Bhagat Singh Bilga, lone surviving Ghadrite revolutionary of India breathed his last on 22nd May 2009 in England at his son’s house. He was 102 years old last month. He was as alert as ever when I met him last on Ist November 2008 at Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall, of which he was President. He had unfurled the Ghadar[Revolutionary] party flag on that day as usual to mark the Ghadar party memorial day, formed in USA, way back in 1913.

Baba Bilga was born on 2nd April 1907, six months prior to martyr Bhagat Singh in village Bilga of Jalandhar district. He became involved with Ghadar party activities in his youth and went to Argentina in Latin America. British colonial Government of India in its Ghadar directory published in 1934 recorded him as ‘most dangerous revolutionary’. In Argentina, he hosted exiled freedom fighter and uncle of martyr Bhagat singh, the legendary Ajit Singh. Baba Bilga was one among those Ghadarite revolutionaries, who were sent to Communist University for the Eastern countries in Moscow for ideological training in Marxism.

After return from Moscow, Baba Bilga became active in Congress Socialist party and was elected member of All India Congress Committee. He and other leftist members from Punjab like Mubark Saagar sided with Subhash Bose in 1938 Congress meet. He remained part of Communist party or communist revolutionary groups throughout his life. He never compromised on his ideology. Even at the age of 100 years, he used to make a fiery speech against communalism and economic liberalism.

He wrote four books in Punjabi, last at the age of almost hundred years. His major book is ‘Unfolded sheathes of Ghadar Movement’. This book, published in 1989 is history of Ghadar party and Kirti Party from 1908 to 1952, when Kirti party finally merged with Communist party of India. His other books include—‘My Country’ and ‘My Thinking My Understanding’. His last but another major book was published in 2004, when he crossed 97 years of age. This is biography of legendary Ghadarite revolutionary Baba Gurmukh Singh Lalton, who edited ‘Desh Bhagat Yaadan’ in Punjabi and ‘People’s Path’ in English on behalf of Desh Bhagat Yaadgar committee, of which he was President also for many years during seventies.

Baba Bilga was President of Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Committee Jalandhar for past one decade. Prior to that he was elected General Secretary of Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Trust in 1977-78 and worked with Baba Gurmukh Singh, who was President of the Trust. In his able leadership, the committee started holding Ghadari Babas memorial mela every year on Ist November every year to propagate the ideas of revolutionaries. Punjab and India will surely miss the resounding voice of Baba Bilga. But his life is a source of inspiration and guide for action. Hope Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall will continue to further promote Baba Bilga’s mission to make people aware of the need for liberation of Indian masses from poverty and exploitation.

Whatever the tradition of Ghadarite revolutionaries and Bhagat Singh like martyrs was, Comrade Vimla Dang was following the same with sincere zeal. She was a committed trade unionist and worked among Chhehrata workers. Both, she and her husband Satya Pal Dang, despite remaining MLAs and Minster, lived a simple life and never yearned for any comfort. Vimla Dang, born on December 26, 1926 in a Kashmiri family of Lahore and became student federation activist in Lahore.

Though a brilliant student of Economics, she left academics to work for liberation of Indian masses by becoming part of communist movement. She married Satya Pal Dang and both continued to work whole time for the party in most dedicated manner and under trying cirumstances. She and Satya Pal Dang took part in relief work in Bengal during 1943 famine. Both of them fought against Khalistani terrorists as well. Vimla Dang remained President of Chhehrata Municipal committee during 1968-78. She was elected MLA from here in 1992. She was awarded Padam Shree in 1998 in recognition of her service to the nation. Vimla Dang remained active in women movement also and held positions in National federation of Indian women, CPI frontal organization of women. She wrote her autobiography edited by her elder brother and retired Professor of Russian from JNU, New Delhi, Prof. Ravi M Bakaya as ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, which was published in 2007. She preceded Baba Bilga in saying goodbye to this world on 10th May 2009.

The democratic movement of Punjab would remember the contribution of these two eminent personalities.

[The writer is a Professor at Centre of Indian Languages, J.N.U, New Delhi]

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Will U.S. make a difference on Human Rights Council?

Thalif Deen

WILL the election of the United States to the 47-member Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC) make a significant difference to the cause of human rights worldwide, or will Washington be thwarted by the Council's politically-repressive countries accused of being serial abusers?

Both questions will be put to a test when Washington takes a seat on the HRC for a three-year term beginning Jun. 19.

Elizabeth Sepper, U.N. advocacy fellow at Human Rights Watch, told IPS: "We expect to see the United States bring energy and enthusiasm to the Council's work."

She said she was hopeful Washington will be able to build a coalition of rights-respecting countries committed to confronting rights abusers.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Asian diplomat told IPS that U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice had rightly pointed out that the HRC may be flawed but it is better to work from within and with other members to improve the existing human rights machinery.

"It is not an impossible task. But it will not be easy," he predicted.

On Tuesday, the 192-member General Assembly elected 18 countries for three-year terms: Belgium, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, the United States, Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Jordan, Mauritius, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Uruguay, replacing outgoing members.

This was the first time the United States ran for a seat in the HRC since its creation three years ago.

The administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush refused to run for a seat on the ground that HRC had lost its "credibility" for focusing primarily on one country – Israel - and ignoring "human rights abusers" such as Burma (Myanmar), Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.

But at that time, some U.N. diplomats suggested that the United States avoided running for fear it would be embarrassingly defeated because of its own dismal human rights record, including the much-publicised abuses in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

When the United States ran for a seat back in May 2001, it was ousted from the former 53-member U.N. Human Rights Commission (the predecessor to the Human Rights Council) for the first time since the Commission's creation in 1947.

At Tuesday's election, Norway garnered the largest number of votes (179) while the United States and China received 167 each, falling behind Jordan (178), Belgium (177), Mexico (175), Kyrgyzstan (174) and Bangladesh (171).

Asked how effective the United States can be in the context of a possibly overwhelming majority of human rights violators holding seats in the Council, Sepper told IPS: "A handful of spoilers at the Council at times have been highly effective at blocking Council action and persuading others to go along."

Many Council members however are genuinely committed to promoting human rights, she added.

"The United States should go to the Council prepared to engage with these countries on pressing situations like Sri Lanka and Somalia," Sepper noted.

The Asian ambassador had a different take on it. The HRC, he said, is not supposed to only include one school of thought on human rights. It has to reflect the diversity of views on human rights. "So, I think it is not fair to criticise anyone as a human rights violator. Such branding doesn't help," the diplomat said.

"All of us have room for improvement in the area of human rights and no one, including countries from the West, can claim to have unblemished human rights records," he added.

Despite appeals by several human rights organisations to vote against "human rights violators", the General Assembly Tuesday elected several countries that fall into that category, including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The Asian diplomat also said the HRC has been around for three years and has acquired some "bad habits" which will be difficult to discard.

"But, we have no choice but to give it a try. The fact of the matter is that human rights is an important pillar of the U.N. machinery and if there was no HRC, we would be creating some machinery to deal with this important question of human rights."

The United States, by participating, would have a voice in shaping some of these changes, he said. At the very least, it would be able to make clear its concerns about aspects of the HRC which it deems to be not functioning well.

And these concerns, as well as concerns articulated by other members, could be taken up during the five-year review in 2011.

"Hopefully, we can make some changes then to improve the HRC and the human rights machinery in general," the diplomat said.

Sepper said: "Representatives from countries around the world have expressed to me their enthusiasm at the candidacy of the United States and their willingness to work closely with the U.S. in Geneva."

The HRC replaced the Human Rights Commission back in June 2006 and is the only inter-governmental body mandated to promote human rights worldwide. [Courtesy IPS]

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Tata car rides on government subsidies

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

INDIA’S Tata Motors, makers of the ‘cheapest car ever made’, say they have received more than a million bookings for the first batch of cars said to roll out of its factory in a few months.

The company is a part of the Tata Group, an industrial empire with interests in steel, hotels, chemicals, computer software, telecommunications, energy and various consumer products, with an annual turnover exceeding 60 billion dollars.

The Nano is a rear-engined, four-passenger car aimed primarily at the Indian market. Pitched at between 2,500 and 3,500 dollars, the manufacturers claim the car provides affordable transportation together with a low carbon footprint.

Little is said about the direct and indirect subsidies given by various government agencies to Tata Motors for manufacturing the Nano car.

Environmental activists and concerned citizens have argued that these would be tantamount to supporting relatively privileged sections of the second-most populous country on the planet and would go against principles of equity in the world’s largest democracy.

With per capita income at 1,000 dollars, a bicycle is even today a prized possession for the poor while a two-wheeled scooter or motorcycle is what many middle-class Indians aspire for. While petrol is not directly subsidised, car owners (mainly middle and upper classes) pay very little or almost nothing for parking, on road tax or for cleaning the environment - in other words, their personal transport is indirectly subsidised.

According to an internal document that was leaked to the media, the Gujarat government is providing Tata Motors subsidies worth a substantial 600 billion dollars for locating its plant in the western Indian state.

"The total subsidy element work out to roughly half the market price of the cheapest Nano car model," says Anumita Roy Chowdhury, associate director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-government organisation.

In an interview with IPS, she adds that over and above the direct subsidies that have been provided there are various indirect subsidies that Indian government agencies are giving to providers of personalised transport thereby discriminating against public transport like buses.

The document referred to is an internal note that was prepared by state government bureaucrats for the Gujarat cabinet headed by Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The total subsidies given by the Gujarat government to Tata Motors adds up to more than 30,000 crore rupees (600 billion dollars).

The state government has granted Tata Motors 1,100 acres of land at a subsidised price of 400.65 crore rupees (80.13 million dollars) to be paid in eight equal installments at 8 percent compound interest with a moratorium of two years.

There was no charge for transferring the land from agricultural to non-agricultural purpose. Registration fees, too, were not charged, while the state government met the entire infrastructure cost of developing roads, electricity and gas supply and also allotted an additional 100 acres of land on the outskirts of Ahmedabad to build a township for Tata Motors employees.

The state government agreed to provide a soft loan of 9,750 crore rupees (1.95 billion dollars) at an interest of 0.1 percent per annum to set up the project and additionally allowed deferred repayment of the principal amount of the loan spread over 20 years.

The Nano project has been a topic of controversy virtually from its inception. The car was not merely meant to be the cheapest in the world, it was supposed to create many employment opportunities.

In May 2006, Tata Motors announced its decision to manufacture the Nano from Singur in the eastern-Indian province of West Bengal that has been ruled by a Communist coalition for over three decades.

Soon thereafter, the company and the state government had to encounter stiff opposition from agitating farmers claiming that their lands had been acquired forcibly; even those who voluntarily sold their land wanted higher compensation.

The agitation against the Nano project was spearheaded by Mamata Banerjee, who leads the All India Trinamool Congress, a regional political party opposed to the incumbent Left Front government in West Bengal.

As work on the project got delayed, in September 2008, Tata Motors stated it was suspending work at Singur.

Within a few months it had signed a new memorandum-of-understanding with the government of Gujarat for allocation of land for the Nano factory at Sanand near the state capital, Ahmedabad.

The Gujarat government also met the cost of shifting the project to the tune of 700 crore rupees (140 million) - this amount includes expenses for bringing machinery and equipment from Singur to Sanand.

Among other facilities provided by the state government are provisions for power supply of 200 KVA up to the project receiving station, exemption from electricity duty, 14,000 cubic metre water supply per day at the project site, facilities for disposal of hazardous waste, facility for a transport hub, and a pipeline for supply of natural gas to the project site.

"We can afford a car because our government pays for it," says Sunita Narain of CSE in Down to Earth magazine. "… We are not asked to pay the price of its running - the tax on cars (for instance) is lower than what buses pay …" [Courtesy IPS]

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Can't stop the beat: Bhangra on U.S. college campuses

Erica Lee Nelson

EVERY spring, around the same time as the Baisakhi festival in Punjab, college students from across America gather in a historic theater a few blocks from the White House. Some hail from India, some from Pakistan, and others from New Jersey, but today they are united in a common purpose: bhangra.

You can spot them from a mile away. Wearing shocking pink and green turbans and sparkling dupattas, the girls and boys of the top U.S. university teams make quite a spectacle as they pass the gray and white stone buildings of downtown Washington, D.C. They are here to compete in George Washington University's Bhangra Blowout, the biggest intercollegiate bhangra dance competition in America. The first prize is $4,000, a chance to appear in British bhangra singer Juggy D's new music video, and, of course, the right to brag all year long.

While bhangra has long been popular in the United Kingdom, it also has a substantial force on U.S. campuses-with a good portion of major U.S. universities, as well as many smaller colleges, hosting bhangra teams. Other competitions that have followed in the wake of Bhangra Blowout include Bruin Bhangra, hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles and Dhol di Awaz, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley.

"Bhangra is popular on campuses nationwide mainly because of the pride of our culture and our dance. People love the sound of the music and are very curious," says Sohail Hasnain, a George Washington University senior who helped organize Bhangra Blowout in April. "It is also a very fun dance for spectators," he adds.

Bhangra Blowout started in 1993 as a small event organized by the university's South Asian Society in the school's cafeteria. It then grew to fill the university's theater, and finally to the biggest concert hall in D.C., the DAR Constitution Hall, an American national historic landmark. What makes this event even more unique is that it is organized entirely by the university's undergraduate students. With costs at an average of $100,000 each year, a nearly 4,000-person capacity concert hall, a DJ flown in from London and a singer from India-it is truly a large undertaking.

All proceeds from the event go to Pratham, a Mumbai-based charity whose mission is to teach children in the slums how to read and write, the organizers say.

The night before
The eight teams chosen to compete this year read like a glossy catalog of top U.S. schools: Columbia, New York University, Cornell, University of California, Drexel, San Diego, Virginia Commonwealth, the University of North Carolina and Northwestern. Duke University and the hosts, George Washington University, put on exhibition performances.

The night before the competition, the competitors are feted at a welcome dinner on a rooftop terrace. Yet, despite the glamorous atmosphere, there is real work to be done-picking the team order. "It's very important," says Shahrukh Khan, a Virginia Commonwealth University sophomore of Pakistani descent. "The best is at the very end, or just before intermission. It gives the judges time to have the performance sink in."

Khan is happy to oblige skeptics with a look at his student I.D. card to prove his famous name is real. "Everyone is always asking me," he says, smiling.

He reports that being on a bhangra team is like a full-time job, listing the many competitions he's been to this year-not to mention the exhibition performances. Talking about the next day's event, he says, "We're the defending champions...and the founding members of our team are graduating, so it's a pretty emotional thing this year."

He's been coming to Bhangra Blowout since 7th grade, and sees it as an important East Coast event that draws the South Asian community together. Bhangra Blowout co-director Madiha Malik, a George Washington University sophomore, says that it has been going on "for the past 16 years, so it's a huge part of the culture. It's become like a family tradition."

Bhangra dancing is also a way to bring people together from the diverse South Asian diaspora-and beyond. Malik notes that while she is from Karachi, her co-director, Anugna Kasireddy, is from South India. "Punjab is just where the dance originated. But at this point, it has become so much of a sport at schools...a lot of people are not even Indian or Pakistani," she says.

After a dinner of butter chicken and dancing with BBC's DJ Kayper, it's time to pick the team order. During this long process, chaos ensues. Arguments break out. This is a serious competition, and these teams are willing to fight for the best spot. Eventually, the organizers get everyone on board, and the final placements are made. As the teams make their exit, Hasnain predicts that he will get only a few hours of sleep as he still needs to do some last minute promotions to help sell tickets.

The competition
Bhangra is one of the few dance forms in which the women's costumes are less complicated than the men's. Backstage, one hour before the show, all the girls are dressed and ready while the guys adjust the length of their chadars and sit patiently as teammates wrap turbans around their heads. They are tired from traveling, but overcoming it all with pure excitement.

Out in the theater, two giant video screens run advertisements for the Bhangra Blowout sponsors: including McDonalds, a matchmaking Web site, MySpace, a travel company and Tanmit Singh's Roots Gear, a Punjabi T-shirt company.

Still only a senior at Virginia Commonwealth University, Singh sponsors events across the United States, hauling along humorous T-shirts that say things like "Real Girls Do Bhangra." Earlier in the day, at a free bhangra event for the community, his table was easily the most popular spot.

"We want to create an urban culture within our community," he says, describing his business mission. "We've found people in our culture alter themselves in order to be cool and fit in." Singh hopes to show Punjabi youth that they can honor their roots and still be considered cool.

Bhangra Blowout was certainly the cool place to be that evening, which was illustrated by the turnout for the event-more than 3,000, a mostly full house on a holiday weekend. The show begins at 8 p.m., with the opening act, a trio of dhol players rushing down the aisles. When Juggy D comes on stage in an Indian tricolor jacket, the girls in the audience go crazy, shouting his name and waving their hands.

Soon, the Northwestern team is on: a cacophony of color, jumping, prancing and props. Each of the teams incorporates traditional instruments such as the supp clapper into their dances. Some of the songs are traditional, others are more hip-hop oriented, and some are from completely different cultures-such as the Spanish song Macarena. Basically, anything goes, as long as the audience and judges enjoy it.

All of the teams try some sort of acrobatics and feats of strength. Columbia spins its dancers around in circles on the shoulders of their fellow dancers, and other teams form tall and complex human pyramids.

Soon, it's Virginia Commonwealth University's turn, and they come out with a real surprise: the Joker from Batman. After a brief appearance in the beginning of the dance, he reappears at the end, asking the audience "You wanna see a magic trick?" He then disappears behind a curtain, only to reappear as a fully-costumed bhangra dancer-in complete Joker make-up. Again, the girls go crazy, and many audience members get out of their seats to dance along with him.

In the end, it may have been the Joker trick that did it; Virginia Commonwealth University defended its title and won first prize, with Drexel second and Cornell third. New York University won the viewers' choice award (voting was conducted via audience SMS) and seemed almost more excited, shouting through the organizer's speeches.

With the giant trophy in hand, Shahrukh Khan marched triumphantly off the stage into the adoring arms of his team. The next day, they would have to travel back to school to begin preparing for their finals-but tonight, they were champions.

Erica Lee Nelson is a Washington, D.C.-based writer. She and her husband, Indian photographer Sebastian John, married in New Delhi. [Courtesy SPAN magazine, New Delhi]

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Means, ends and penance

Anupam Mishra

AT the very outset I must confess that these Hindi words are difficult to translate. They represent the means, the ends and a kind of penance. I did not choose this title to score a point or satisfy my ego. I chose it because all NGOs, their coordinators, workers, generous funding agencies- whether desi or foreign- and people's movement, regardless of size and reach, should ponder over these three words.

A debate rages over the question of funding. It gets particularly stormy when it comes to foreign funding. Invariably the debate centers on the ends and the means. Perhaps there would be some clarity if we stopped for a moment to consider sadhna or penance as well. For only penance will tell us what the people really want. And, when we know that and direct our energies at achieving it, the means and the ends will fall in place.

In my opinion the source of funding is not very important. The money can be raised from the local village, mohalla or city, it could be sent across the seven seas. There can be divergent opinions on the best sources of funding. What is more important is the outcome. The end result must be what we the people want. Apart from a few exceptions we don't have a clear idea of what we wish to achieve. NGOs or civil society movements keep shifting their focus.

Most of us will recall at one time social forestry fetched a high price on the environment stock market. Funding came from four corners of the globe and we rounded up a few million dollars. The best among us started implementing social forestry projects without first debating what precisely “unsocial forestry” was.

And then suddenly this flag was brought down. In its place, one fine morning, the brand new flag of wasteland development was unfurled. This time, too, nobody cared to define wastelands. A lot of money, energy and time were spent by eminent members of society in the wasteland development venture. Initially, a small department in the central government handled the idea. It was replaced by a new ministry. Lots of NGOs, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, began doing wasteland development.

But like its previous avatar, wasteland development died in its infancy. There were no condolence meetings to mourn the death of this "marvelous" scheme and we soon started celebrating the birth of new movement called watershed development.

This programme has been translated and adapted into various languages. In Hindi-speaking states, watershed development is called "Jalagam Vikas". In Maharashtra, it is termed "Panlot" and elsewhere it is called "Pandhal". Despite the desi badge, the programme does not touch our hearts.
For the moment, our best NGOs are putting their most talented people, from urban areas, into developing a few watersheds here and there. Nobody knows when we will begin shedding tears over this programme.

Running neck and neck with watershed development is Joint Forest Management (JFM). Here, too, some NGOs are ahead of the rest in providing a desi touch. So JFM is called "Sanyukt Van Prabandan" in some regional dialects. Grassroots NGOs who object to the Sankritised word sanyukt, opt for the more colloquial sanjha. But essentially JFM is a programme and its end result has been dictated by the World Bank or some similar institutions.

I do not wish to narrate all this to poke fun. These are serious matters. If our society really needed the JFM programme, we should have first seriously reflected on the administration of forests by individual agencies and their managers. Who were they? How long did their authority last? Whom did they snatch these forests from? How did the country's forest cover dwindle to 10% when it should have been 33%? We have paid a price for deforestation. Floods in Orissa, Chattisgarh and Bihar and drought in 18 states are the net outcome.

The people who mismanaged these forests and the political leadership which protected them should have apologized publicity before JFM was launched.

We must also remember who the true managers of the forests were, how they were dispossessed by the British and looted of their green gold.

It is much the same story with programmes in areas other than the environment. Numerous plans exist on women's empowerment, child rights, reproductive health and formation of self-help groups. Every NGO implements the same programmes, regardless of political ideology. The leftists, the rightists, the Gandhians, the missionaries, even the RSS display a rare consensus. The monoculture of ideas is alarming. It seems there is an invisible mint somewhere in the West, which constantly coins new terms for us to fill our pockets with.

So should we believe everybody has sold out? No, there are some heroes who have bravely fought the idea of monoculture. After the emergency in the 1970s, a few drove out Coca-Cola and IBM. To commemorate this great victory, a cold drink called double Seven was introduced. But Coca-Cola re-emerged, in the garb of our heroes, drowning Doubles Seven and our original champions. This is a beautiful example of co-existence.

So this debate on ends and means, funds from here and there, will lead us nowhere. The answer is to find a good mission and for that to happen we have to look within. Once we have our own ends, the means will follow.

A small example can be narrated from a village near Jaipur. In this drought prone area a routine NGO constructed a tank to harvest water. It invested some 30,000 rupees in the project. The tank narrowed the distance between the NGO and the community. At one of the meetings an elderly person suggested constructing a small temple and a chhatri on the embankment of the tank. But the cost of constructing the chhatri and the temple was not in the NGOs budget.

The NGO explained that it could get a grant for the tank but not for the chhatri. But the elderly person politely replied that the village was not asking for money from the NGO. Within a month the villagers collected the amount and the chhatri was constructed.

Most of our NGO friends will consider the money spent as wasteful expenditure, but for the villagers this is the difference between a house and a home. They need water structures that belong to them. And when they own something they protect and maintain it. Otherwise it's a kind of PWD structure.
We should not forget in this land of 500,000 villagers and few thousand towns there two million water structures before the British came. There was no water mission, no watershed development programme. Society created these structures using its own resources. There was no Zilla Bank or World Bank at that time, but the Village Bank. There was an invisible and invincible structure to carry out this job in a country that has a Cherrapunji as well as a Jaisalmer.

Now we talk about people's participation and PRA- Participatory Research Appraisal. We get funds from within and outside, but our aims and ends do not represent the needs of the people. We keep on pushing a different agenda. If we were to invest half our energy in understanding our society, we would generate enough means from within. But that requires a kind of penance.
[The writer, a well known social activist is with the Gandhi Peace Foundation]

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