Letters sent to people, organizations, officials of nation governments
Dear President Pervez Musharraf:
Back at the time when the British were in the process of moving out of India, they created Pakistan out of India territorial boundaries. In many ways they have help a community, mostly made of Muslem people, to govern itself as a nation. The partition of India is a signal event in world history, not merely in the history of the Indian subcontinent. British rule became established in eastern India around the mid-eighteenth century, and by the early part of the nineteenth century, the British had tightened their grip over considerable portions of the country. The suppression of the Indian revolt of 1857-58 ushered in a period, which would last ninety years, when India was directly under Crown rule. Communal tensions heightened in this period, especially with the rise of nationalism in the early 20th century. Though the Indian National Congress, the premier body of nationalist opinion, was ecumenical and widely representative in some respects, Indian Muslims were encouraged, initially by the British, to forge a distinct political and cultural identity. The Muslim League arose as an organization intended to enhance the various -- political, cultural, social, economic, and religious -- interests of the Muslims. Outside South Asia, the partition of India evokes little recognition. As the British left India, the largest single migration in history took place: well over ten million, and perhaps as many as fifteen million, people crossed borders, and a million or more became the victims of murderous assaults. Both the Governments of India and Pakistan established commissions for the "recovery" of abducted women who numbered in several tens of thousands. Numbing as these figures are, they barely register in world histories: perhaps that indifference to the calamity that afflicted India and Pakistan betokens the view that life in South Asia has never had much value, and that the violence of the partition can be seamlessly assimilated into a narrative that pitches the Hindus and Muslims as foes locked into battle ever since Islam became a dominant political force in India in the early part of the 13th century. Partition came, moreover, in the aftermath of the most immense bloodbath in European history, and the emaciated women and men liberated from concentration camps were so palpable a testimony to the holocaust unleashed within Europe that many other holocausts would be all but invisible to European eyes and ears. There is, howsoever loathe we may be to acknowledge it, an hierarchy of suffering, and the industrial killing of Jews was construed as the paradigmatic experience of genocide in modern history. On 15 August 1947, India acquired its independence from Britain. The newly-appointed Constituent Assembly was given the task of drafting a constitution for India, and the greater part of this onerous responsibility fell upon the shoulders of B. R. Ambedkar, who was elected chairman of the drafting committee. There was much irony in this: as the leader of the "Untouchables", as they were then called, Ambedkar had been the most unremitting foe of Gandhi, the "Father of the Nation". Ambedkar, who was Law Minister in the Government of India, and his colleagues made a careful study of the constitutions of various countries, besides considering the common law traditions of Britain and the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Constitution of India guarantees equal rights to all citizens, and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, caste, and religion; it also allows universal franchise, thereby making the Indian electorate the largest in the world. The Fourth Part of the Constitution contains what are called "directive principles of state policy", which require the government to set goals for the welfare of the people, such as a minimum wage, jobs for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and subsidized medical care. The Indian Constitution is one of the largest in the world, and comprehensive and sweeping in its scope. The Indian state, however, has been ax in its commitment to enforce the "directive principles", and constitutional rights have been abrogated much too often. During the internal emergency of 1975-77, proclaimed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Constitution was sadly rendered ineffective. In recent years, the Supreme Court of India, as well as the higher courts, have shown much daring in so interpreting the Constitution as to advantage the oppressed, the poor, and the victims of state and police brutality. Indeed, the Supreme Court has become renowned for its judicial activism and what is termed Public Interest Litigation or Social Action Litigation. The Constitution remains a vital and living document, and the political awareness of recent years suggests that it will continue to be a source of inspiration for those who strive valiantly to make Indian society more egalitarian and just. The bulk of the scholarly literature on the partition has focussed on the political processes that led to the vivisection of India, the creation of Pakistan, and the "accompanying" violence. Numerous people have attempted to establish who the "guilty" parties might have been, and how far communal thinking had made inroads into secular organizations and sensibilities. Scholarly attention has been riveted on the complex negotiations, and their minutiae, leading to partition as well as on the personalities of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Azad, Patel, and others, and a substantial body of literature also exists on the manner in which the boundaries were drawn between India and Pakistan, on the western and eastern fronts alike. (In general, however, the partition in the Punjab has received far more scholarly attention than the Bengal partition.) There has been much speculation about the role of the British in hastening the partition, and Gandhi’s inability to prevent it; indeed, some Hindu ideologues have even suggested that, whatever his stated opposition to the bifurcation of India on religious grounds, Gandhi is more properly viewed as the ‘Father of Pakistan’ rather than the ‘Father of the Indian nation’. Whatever the "causes" of the partition, the brute facts cannot be belied: down to the present day, the partition remains the single largest episode of the uprooting of people in modern history, as between 12 to 14 million left their home to take up residence across the border. The estimates of how many people died vary immensely, generally hovering in the 500,000 to 1.5 million range, and many scholars have settled upon the nice round figure of 1 million. There is nothing nice or comforting about this somewhat agreed-upon figure, and it is interesting as well that few scholars, if any, have bothered to furnish an account of how they came to accept any estimate that they have deemed reasonable. We know only that hundreds of thousands died: in South Asia, that is apparently the destiny of the dead, to be unknown and unaccounted for, part of an undistinguished collectivity in death as in life. In recent years, the scholarly literature has taken a different turn, becoming at once more nuanced as well as attentive to considerations previously ignored or minimized. There is greater awareness, for instance, of the manner in which women were affected by the partition and its violence, and the scholarship of several women scholars and writers in particular has focussed on the abduction of women, the agreements forged between the Governments of India and Pakistan for the recovery of these women, and the underlying assumptions -- that women could scarcely speak for themselves, that they constituted a form of exchange between men and states, that the honor and dignity of the nation was invested in its women, among others -- behind these arrangements. Earlier generations of scholars hardly bothered with oral histories, but lately there have been a number of endeavors to collect oral accounts, not only from victims but on occasion even from perpetrators. These accounts raise important questions: should the partition violence be assimilated to the broader category of genocide so widely prevalent in the twentieth century? or was the violence of the partition something very different, a kind of uncalculated frenzy? was it really a time of insanity? can the partition justly be differentiated from the bureaucratized machinery of death installed by the holocaust perpetrated against the Jews? why do we insist on speaking of the violence as merely "accompanying" the partition, as though it were almost incidental to the partition? There was a time, not long ago, when scarcely any attention was paid to the partition. Perhaps some forms of violence and trauma are better forgotten: the partition had no institutional sanction, unlike many of the genocides of the twentieth century, and the states of Pakistan and India cannot be held accountable in the same way in which one holds Germany accountable for the elimination of Europe’s Jews or Soviet Russia accountable for the death of millions of peasants in the name of modernization and development. It is also possible to argue that the partition theme gets displaced onto other forms of expression. But it can scarcely be denied that now, more than ever, it has become necessary to adopt several different approaches to the partition, taking up not only the questions covered in the more conventional historical literature -- the events leading up to the partition, the ideology (indeed pathology) of communalism, and the immediate political consequences of the partition -- but also the insights offered by film, literature, memoirs, and contemporary political and cultural commentary. Of course, the consequences of partition are there to be seen: India and Pakistan continue to be embroiled in conflict, and Kashmir remains a point of contention between them. The psychic wounds of partition are less easily observed, and we have barely begun to fathom the myriad ways in which partition has altered the civilizational histories of South Asia. If the partition appeared to some to vindicate the idea of the nation-state, to others the partition might well represent the low point of the nation-state ideology. Will the people of South Asia ever leave behind their partitioned selves?
We are asking nations to justify their actions in the Earth Court of Justice. We want Justice for all and universal. We want a process for the creation of new nations as well as to help resolve conflicts. We want the Earth Court of Justice to be an independent and impartial body that will create the process and verify it for the case of the creation of the conflicts between the peoples of Kashmir, India and Pakistan. GCEG is promoting that the creation of a new nation and resolving conflicts between nations do not have to be at the expenses of human lives and destruction of an entire world. It can and should always be done through a decision made by a higher Court. We are promoting the immediate use of this higher Court, the Earth Court of Justice ![]() * nation states The Court will also be asked to decide on * the formation of a new nation in the world, The Court decides in accordance with: * the Scale of Human and Earth Rights, There are many instances where the Earth Court of Justice can be successful. GCEG is inviting everyone to the global dialogue to create sustainable communities and a permanent peace movement in the land through the process of the Earth Court of Justice. The concept of a global community being the street where we live in and surrounded by a definite geographical and political boundary has originated 2000 years ago during the Roman Empire period. An entire new system of values was then created to make things work for the Roman Empire. Humanity has lived with this concept over two thousand years. Peoples from all over the world are ready to kill anyone challenging their border. They say that this is their land, their property, their 'things'. This archaic concept is endangering humanity and its survival. The Roman Empire has gone but its culture is still affecting us today. We need to let go the old way of thinking. We need to learn of the new concept, and how it can make things work in the world. There is a similar situation with the province of Quebec here in Canada. Quebecers form a very distinct community and, following a referendum with a 50% plus one win, they may decide to separate from Canada. The Federal Government would have no other choice but to line with a new reality without the province of Quebec. This is call 'direct democracy' on the Scale of Human and Earth Rights, section 4. It is a community right to affirm its willing to govern itself. Something like that could happen in the United States. The people of the State of California might decide to separate from the United States. They are very different people and they may not like to be dragged into WWIII by the White House. They may not like having to face terrorism in their home land because of the White House policies creating problems oversea. GCEG is inviting the peoples of Kashmir, India and Pakistan to dialogue about the disputed territory of Kashmir by settling the disputed land through the process of the Earth Court of Justice. The Earth Court of Justice will be created for the purpose of deciding on the future of Kashmir. Members of this higher Court will be chosen to reflect the Peoples involved here. In today's Earth Government it is important for our survival to cooperate globally on several aspects such as peace, security, pollution in the air, water and land, drug trade, shelving the war industry, keeping the world healthy, enforcing global justice for all, eradicating poverty worldwide, replacing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the Scale of Human and Earth Rights, and entrenching the Global Constitution as a way of life for the good of all. Keep in touch! Germain Dufour Project Officer and Adviser to the GGNA President Global Community Earth Government (GCEG) http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GlobalConstitution/ ![]() Global Community Earth Government recommendations to humanity http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/gceg/ ![]() globalcommunity@telus.net ![]() GlobalConstitution@telus.net ![]() Global
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