BASAVA

 12th Century Socialist and Religious Reformer

 by Kwesi Bacchra

© NTP Trust July 1997

India's greatest gift to the world in the 21st century could well be a social system that couples a deep sense of spirituality with a sensitivity to the needs of the poorer masses while permitting economic and political progress. It is after all the home of four of the world's great religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, while having nurtured Islam since the 12th century and Christianity since St Thomas arrived in India as a missionary in the first century.

However Hinduism, which is followed by 83% of the population of India, embraces a multitude of sects, the beliefs of some being so divergent as to suggest a completely different religion. Such a sect is Veerashaivism, the devotees of which worship no multiplicity of gods or stone images but instead the Linga as a symbol of the sole and unique deity, Siva. Found mostly in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, the forty million Veerashaiva followers, or Lingayats as they are otherwise known, are opposed to the caste system, eschew temples and priestcraft, bury their dead and do not believe in reincarnation.

The Linga, very ancient examples of which have been found in the ruins of the 3rd millennium BCE Indus Valley civilisation at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, has been incorrectly and disdainfully described in western dictionaries and encyclopaedias as no more than a phallic symbol. According to Lingayat teachings, nothing could be further from the truth. Although there are many of different sizes and other materials, the Linga usually found in monasteries and at village sites is usually of polished black stone formed as a cylinder of about 12 inches diameter with a spherical top and having a height of about 18 inches (45 cm). In its near shapelessness it represents the universal, infinite, timeless and eternal force, the extent of which is beyond Man's comprehension.

The prime exponent of the Lingayat doctrines was the remarkable 12th century saint and guru, Basava, who, because of his absolute honesty, had been promoted to the position of First Minister in charge of the treasury by King Bijala of the Chalukian dynasty, who ruled over most of what is now the state of Karnataka. Although born into a Brahmin family, he had refused to wear that caste's golden cord unless his sister could do the same, a proposal which was anathema to the priestly caste which regarded all women as inferior and little better than untouchables.

Basava (1105-1167) as a religious reformer taught his followers that they had no need of temples, priests or idols and that, by wearing a small black Linga (an Ishtalinga) in a 'karadige' (casket) around the neck and paying meditational respect to it several times a day as well as leading an exemplary life, they could aim eventually to achieve an absolute state of self-realisation, so becoming themselves the embodiment of divinity. The disciples of Basava learned the principles of 'Kayaka', the holiness of work, and 'Dosoha', the principle of donating any surplus income beyond one's needs to the community. His religious teachings he wrote as poetry called vachanas in the local language, Kannada, on hundreds of palm leaves and so started a literary revolution as many of his devotees over the next 300 years followed suit. In the main these were only ordinary, uneducated folk of both sexes who were inspired by a social and religious philosophy which is now claimed to have considerable relevance to the political problems of the modern world.

Combining his political authority, his religious philosophy and his rigid egalitarianism with a deep concern for the impoverished conditions of the dispossessed he saw all around him, Basava in 1141 founded the Anubhava Mantapa, the first Speaker-led Parliament, one hundred years before Simon de Montfort established England's own first Model Parliament, then just a council of nobles. This evolved into what Englishmen now claim to be the ''Mother of Parliaments'', although only admitting women less than a century ago. The Anubhava Mantapa was from the beginning open to all irrespective of caste, profession, status, gender, colour or age, and amongst the most important debates were those on how to achieve the emancipation of women and the elimination of caste discrimination.

Such a socialistic and anti-clerical agenda, promoted by a man so close to the King, aroused a great deal of anger amongst those who were jealous of his position and fearful of the loss of their privileged life-styles. Following the marriage approved by him of a Brahmin woman with a man who was an untouchable Sudra, which was permitted according to Basava's teachings, his enemies plotted against him forcing him to flee to his spiritual home at Kadula Sangama. There he was either brutally murdered or, it is claimed, achieved 'Aiyoka', the yogic voluntary separation of the spirit from the body and unity with the Deity. Following this the followers of Basava were massacred, and devotees of the religion were persecuted for centuries.

However the ideals of Basava, both political and religious, are beginning to enjoy a renaissance especially since large numbers of Lingayats have migrated to Europe and North America. His political ideals present a significant social agenda which, although they have been compared to Marxism, incorporate the spirituality which the followers of Karl Marx rejected. Thus modern followers argue that Basavism may offer to disillusioned socialists a political creed which, while retaining the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", does not lose the importance of the individual, while total equality of each person remains paramount. Indeed, while on a visit to what was then the state of Mysore, Mahatma Gandhi said of Basava, "If I could achieve one tenth of what he has been able to do, I would be more than happy".

RACISM ON NATIONAL HOLOCAUST DAY

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, 
26th January 2003, 

let us rededicate ourselves to fight against racism and anti-Semitism.

Let all of us, especially the Jews, also remember that Arabs are Semitic too. Jews and Arabs all claim Abraham as their forefather which means that they are all brothers.

Racism is not only discrimination against a particular ethnic group, race or nation; it is also discrimination in favour of a particular group, race or nation. Thus the attitude of the Anglo-Saxon countries (UK, US, Australia and Canada) which allows them to argue that, while Iraq and Korea etc. must give up weapons of mass destruction, USNA. UK, Russia, France and China must be allowed to keep theirs and indeed to use them as they see fit. 
This attitude is RACIST.

George Robertson , NATO Secretary General, argues that the credibility of the United Nations is "on the line", and failure to disarm Iraq would be a "recipe for international disaster". This is because every 'rogue state' would see Iraq getting away with defying UN Security Council resolutions as permission for them to do the same. But why does that not apply to the terrorist state of Israel which, backed by its Yankee sponsor, continuously flouts UN resolutions ? 
This discrimination in favour of Israel is RACIST.

During the last half-century Yankee presidents have waged terrorist wars against Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Grenada, Namibia, Tanzania, Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Iran, to name just a few of the victims of US terrorist activity. The US has employed weapons of mass destruction over and over again, yet not one Yankee president has been brought before any international tribunal for his crimes against humanity.

After his defeat by the African revolutionary guerillas led by Robert Mugabe, rebel leader Ian Smith was allowed to retire quietly to his farm in Zimbabwe without having to face any criminal charges. This was in spite of the fact that he had rebelled against the Queen, had tortured and murdered thousands of African prisoners and had waged terrorist war against the citizens of Zimbabwe. Now there are calls for Mugabe to be put on trial for his failure to stop his war veteran supporters from seizing 'white-owned' farms and brutally murdering a few farmers and farm workers. Why should the sons of the killers, who murdered and raped the African owners in order to steal their land, be compensated for having to hand it back to the sons of the original owners?

Indictments have been handed down for a number of the leaders of the various regions of the former Yugoslavia to stand trial on charges of ethnic cleansing, yet the 'Butcher of Beirut', the current premier of Israel, Arial Sharon, has never been charged for his numerous war crimes, including the massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon by militia under his command.

On this Holocaust Memorial Day let us remember the millions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, religious and political dissenters who lost their lives in that atrocious policy of absolute sadism. But let us also remember those two collective crimes which carried European savagery to even deeper hellish depths, the near annihilation of so many Native American nations and the unspeakably dreadful atrocity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which absolutely devastated the continent of Africa, utterly ruining the lives of the robbed families as well as those of the captured victims. Too often the descendants of those who committed these crimes try to cast the blame onto the victims while refusing to acknowledge their own guilt. 

It is time for proper memorials to be raised and genuine apologies offered with full reparations to those who still suffer from the effects of these crimes.

KB  26.1.2003

A MESSAGE FROM JENIN, PALESTINE
    by Rebecca Murray       Courtesy of the Institute of Race Relations

I have been in Jenin for over a week now and it has taken me this time to find an internet connection and also to absorb the devastation around me so I may write. In Jenin, we are under a total curfew, which gets lifted every day for a few hours like now - though shortly the Israeli tanks and jeeps will come rolling through the city centre. During curfew the streets are completely deserted; houses and storefronts are shuttered. Nobody goes outside for fear of being shot. This is the reality here.

In April of this year, Jenin suffered two weeks of bombing by Israeli F16 and Apache attack helicopters. The devastation of the camp from this bombing stretches about the length of three football fields. Where there used to be streets and houses, there is now only rubble that stretches about 30 feet high - resembling New York's ground zero before the clean up. But unlike New York there will be no clean up here and, instead, the Israeli soldiers with their tanks and jeeps have moved back in to reoccupy the town.

The Israeli military has systematically ripped up all water pipes and sewage mains and have shot down water tanks. There is a shortage of water and there are pools of sewage everywhere. During the few hours that curfew is lifted, children, desperate just to play after having been locked inside for so long, play here amongst the rubble and the sewage. We don't know how many bodies may be underneath the huge pile of rubble, nor do we know if there are any unexploded devices.

When I first arrived in Jenin, the Israeli soldiers had already rounded up and taken away all of Jenin's men that they could find, between the ages of 15 and 55. There are only women, children and old men left, but still the Israeli soldiers insist on continuing their house-to-house searches with dogs. They are in the habit of entering the houses, harassing residents and wrecking and vandalising their homes. As an example of the constant harassment to residents, in one case, a family I know was left with no water after soldiers had taken the last of their water supply and given it to their dogs. Last night I walked by as soldiers were just leaving a house that they had basically succeeded in gutting. With them they were taking the 70-year-old father who has a heart problem. By arresting the old father they hoped that the son that they are looking for will come out of hiding and turn himself in.

I am staying in the house of a wonderful woman (whose name I shall not mention) and her family in the Jenin Camp. In April, Israeli soldiers shot her brother in the back and killed him. Her mother was also shot by soldiers and died two days later in her house because all ambulances were refused entry into the camp. Missiles then demolished her house. Now she is staying at her brother's house. The very morning that I arrived, her husband and her two brothers were taken away by the Israeli soldiers and the house was subsequently surrounded by tanks. Her husband and one of her brothers have since been returned. The other brother still remains 'disappeared'. People in the camp are terrified. This story is not special. It is a typical experience in almost every household throughout the camp.

On my second day in Jenin, at about ten in the morning, all the tanks withdrew to the periphery of the town. Thinking that this was a sign that the curfew had temporarily been lifted, people ran out of their homes to the market to get badly needed food and water. The tanks automatically moved in and opened fire into the civilian crowd at the market, wounding many and killing three children and one old man. Remember, all men had previously been arrested and taken out of Jenin.

I am here with a group of members of the International Solidarity Movement, helping to get food and medicine to people where needed under curfew and following the Israeli solders as they go from house to house trying our best to make them at least moderate their behavior and not vandalize people's homes. In one such case, the soldiers decided to put on a show for us and told us that they were in fact very kind to people. As we were standing outside being told this, other solders went into the house and vandalised it. The soldier then told us that the Palestinian family who lived in the house had vandalised it themselves before the soldiers had arrived.

Ambulances here are being stopped at checkpoints and are often prevented from proceeding further, even though they may be carrying the wounded or women giving birth. During the two-week missile attacks in April, all ambulances were grounded for the two weeks. Yesterday, I was outside the hospital when an ambulance arrived carrying the body of a seven-year-old child, shot in the back with live ammunition and killed for having thrown a stone at a tank. Fifteen minutes later, another ambulance sped up, being chased by two tanks. While one tank had its guns trained on the ambulance and the hospital (and me), the other tank managed to rip up the electricity lines to the hospital, causing black-outs at all three of Jenin's hospitals.They are now running off generators.

Last Wednesday, the Israeli soldiers blew up the offices of the Al-Razi hospital, claiming that guns were being hidden in the hospital office safe. After they blew it up there was money everywhere, but no guns. The Aman-Cairo bank suffered the same fate. After its safes were blown up, no guns were found there either.

Today I spent my morning at the boys' school where they are taking end of year exams. Although the schools have been closed, the Israeli military allowed the exams to take place. In Bethlehem and in Ramallah, the Israeli soldiers rounded up all the teenage boys sitting exams and arrested them. We were afraid the same would be true in Jenin, but the students completed the exams and went home.

What is most disturbing to me, being here over the past few weeks, is the scarcity of journalists and relief organizations. There are virtually no outside witnesses to the horrible destruction of Jenin and its residents. Everything lies untold and untouched. This fills me with so much sadness, especially when the people of Jenin have welcomed me here so warmly. They take great pains to make sure that I understand that they do not harbour resentment against the American people but, rather, the American government for financing what is a war of terror against them. And truly I have witnessed nothing but a brutal war that is being waged by the Israeli military against an unarmed civilian population whose spirit the solders are systematically trying to break. As one man said to me: 'The tanks have broken the roads, they have broken the fields, they have broken the buildings, and now the tanks are trying to break me.' 

To all of my friends in the United States, please help do something to wake up the American people to the terrible war crimes that are being played out here as I am writing to you. We must take responsibility and not sit quietly while it is our tax dollars that are making this dirty war possible. Israel must be made to withdraw its military immediately from Gaza and the West Bank. Israel must dismantle all its illegal settlements and implement a two state solution where a Palestinian State will exist alongside an Israeli state. Palestinians must be allowed to live as people, as we do. They must be given the opportunity for hope, rights, freedom, dignity, water and a future worth living!

Genocide of First Americans and Slaves from Africa
There are many significant atrocities which deserve memorialising far more than the outrageous but courageous attack on the Icons of Yankee capitalism a year ago. The genocidal murder of many millions of Native Americans in order to dispossess them of their lands, by an immigrant nation which sought freedom for themselves by enslavement and murder of others, has no day designated to remember one of the worst crimes ever perpetrated by so-called civilized men. Nor is there any monument to the millions of African slaves who were forced to donate their lives to the creation of the immense wealth now enjoyed mainly by whites as well as the making of military power used to oppress the majority world including the lands from which those slaves were stolen.

Africans enslaved by England
Meanwhile the ‘mother country’, England, also refuses to acknowledge that the immense wealth so slanderously squandered on European tribal wars was generated by slavery and fuelled by the blood of Africa while ruining the economies and infrastructures of that great continent. Suggestions that the spare plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square should be devoted permanently to the memory of up to 100 million Africans, whose lives were wrenched from them by deportation of themselves or families across the Atlantic Ocean, by a significant sculpture have been rejected by the authorities. Meanwhile the leaders of the racist New Labour Party refuse even to apologise for their evil deeds over half a millennium while demanding that the Japanese say sorry, though not requesting adequate compensation, for the ill-treatment of British prisoners of war in the Pacific War of 1940/45.

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Bhopal Disaster
A more recent atrocity which the perpetrators would wish to forget, has been the subject of pressure brought on the Indian government by Washington, which has obstructed the arrest and trial of an economic terrorist by the name of Warren Anderson. "Becoming invisible is a talent he clearly shares with that other fugitive from justice, Osama bin Laden." b Anderson was the CEO of Union Carbide, one of whose insecticide plants eighteen years ago emitted clouds of deadly poisonous gas over the city of Bhopal, capital of Madhya Pradesh in central India with a population of 900,000.

"On the night of 23^rd December 1984, a dangerous chemical reaction occurred in the Union Carbide factory when a large amount of water got into the methyl isocyanate storage tank." "Thousands of people were killed (estimates ranging as high as 4,000) in their sleep or as they fled in terror, and hundreds of thousands remain injured or affected (estimates range as high as 400,000) to this day. The most seriously affected areas were the densely populated shanty towns immediately surrounding the plant. The victims were almost entirely the poorest members of the population."c

A report in May 1982 by a team from the Union Carbide headquarters in the US drew attention to "a serious potential for sizeable releases of toxic materials in the MIC unit …" d The Ted Case continues: "Carbide had dropped the safety standards at the Bhopal plant well below those it maintained at a nearly identical facility in West Virginia." e Indra Sinha writes, "The tank had not been refrigerated for some months, in order to save 500 rupees a day on freon gas. 500 rupees is about 7, or $11. The scrubber was in bits because parts of it had become badly corroded and needed replacing, but the work had not been done. The alarm siren stayed silent because it had been switched off."f  So "on ‘that night’ in Bhopal three times as many people died as were killed in New York on September 11^th" g But the good citizens of the United States of North America prefer to forget the crimes of some of their compatriots who have been aided by their government to avoid justice for about the same time as Sadam Hussein has dodged responsibilities imposed on him by the United Nations.

The Indian government has failed its citizens, although it took power to represent all claimants against Union Carbide, and it settled out of Court for the grand total of US$470million. "The families of Bhopal’s dead were paid $1,250 per corpse. Of the injured, those who received anything at all, got on average $500. During the Exxon Valdez disaster, Alaskan sea-otters were kept glossy by feeding them fresh lobster at the cost of $500 per day per otter."h

Warren Anderson has avoided appearing in court in India on charges of culpable homicide but had he "been cross examined in court, it would have emerged that in the run up to the disaster he and his board had demanded a programme of ruthless budget cuts in their Indian factory. The moneysaving drive was prompted by directives from US head office. It involved a drastic reduction in the number of safety staff, cutting the duration of staff safety training from six months to two weeks, turning a blind eye to the storage of unsafe amounts of MIC, ignoring the shocked reports of their own visiting American engineers. On the witness stand, Anderson would have had to explain why his company had endangered the lives of thousands of people to save 7 a day on freon gas." j

Recently, as a result of pressure from Washington, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation has tried to dilute charges against the economic terrorist, Warren Anderson, from homicide to negligence, but the Indian Supreme Court has ruled that this must not be done. Union Carbide’s response to corporate charges against it has included having an activist, Sathyu Sarangi, arrested for distributing leaflets about Bhopal at its AGM in Houston, Texas, where he was visited the following day by an executive of the company. "Where you and I have eyes" Sathyu writes, "he had frozen cubes".k

Where is the celebration of this awful atrocity by Yankee capitalism, and where is the integrity of president Bush in not seeking out and extraditing Warren Anderson and his henchmen to stand trial for their crimes in India? Union Carbide has now been acquired by the transglobal conglomerate, Dow Chemicals, and, although the subsidiary may not any longer own any assets in India which a court could seize on behalf of the disaster victims, the parent company has. It is to Dow Chemicals as well as the governments in New Delhi and Washington DC that protests should be addressed.

aim a blowtorch at my eyes
pour acid down my throat
strip the tissue from my lungs.
drown me in my own blood.
choke my baby to death in front of me.
make me watch her struggles as she dies.
cripple my children.
let pain be their daily and their only playmate.
spare me nothing. wreck my health
so i can no longer feed my family.
watch us starve. say it's nothing to do with you.
don't ever say sorry.
poison our water. cause monsters
to be born among us. make us curse god.
stunt our living children's growth.
for seventeen years ignore our cries.
teach me that my rage is as useless as my tears.
prove to me beyond all doubt
that there is no justice in the world.
you are a wealthy american corporation
and i am a gas victim of bhopal.
                                                                sathyu sarangi

 

a     The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p 326, William Shirer, Redwood Press Ltd. London 1970
b     Shadows of ‘that night’: the struggle foe justice for Bhopa, 10 July 2002 letter by Indra Sinha published on
          http://www.newint.org/features/bhopal/120702.htm 
                 (New Internationalist)  
c    TED Case Studies – Bhopal Disaster published on 
            http://www.american.edu/ted/bhopal.htm 
d      idem
e      idem
f      Shadows of ‘that night’
g      idem
h      idem
j       idem
k      http://www.corpwatchindia.org  

Kwesi Bacchra 18 September 2002

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24 September 2002

A DUBIOUS DOSSIER

On 24th September the UK parliament was recalled from its summer recess to debate the intelligence (but hardly intelligent) dossier on Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry drawn up by Britain's secret services at the urgent request of social capitalist prime minister Tony Blair.

The dossier contained little that was new and was mainly a rehash of the propaganda put out over recent months by cowboy president George W Bush and his poodle, Tony Blair.

The purpose of the debate was for Tony, not grinning quite so widely today, to try to convince a large number of his errant backbenchers that it was right and just for England to bravely shoulder its traditional responsibility to decide how countries far away should be governed especially if they are not white. As the Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic are in agreement (as they always will be so long as Tony's long yellow tongue lolls in the bush ready to lick), the royal prerogative waving wannabe capitalist dictator of Great Britain croons in delight the tune written for him by the USurper Bush. This stumbling cowboy, who still falls up stairs almost as often as he did when he was a drunk before he became a born-again Christian, only has to whisper in Tony's ear for his poodle to show his loyalty.

So by divine right the Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic will determine the new world order as is their manifest destiny. The trouble with these AS racists, who believe they are superior to all of the rest of mankind, is that they do not understand that their attitudes are racist in the extreme. Sad to say a number of Uncle Tom, self seeking, Black politicians like Condoleeza Rice in the US and Paul Boateng in the UK like to see themselves as honorary Anglo-Saxons and spout the racist mantras almost more stridently than their bacra-massas. I hope the coconuts enjoy the rich sunshine!

KB 24/9/02 

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A somewhat retiring man, Shashi has been behind almost every achievement of the local Hindu community during the last few decades, especially the Wellingborough District Hindu Association and its fine community centre in Highfields Road. For many years he has been a school governor, currently of Wrenn School.

Shashi has played an active role in various local groups, including the Race Equality Council, the Victoria Centre, Wellingborough Citizens Advice Bureau and the Wellingborough Volunteer Bureau.

On leaving college in 1976 he joined Northamptonshire County Council's trading standards team, where he is now senior officer enforcing consumer and fair trading law and dealing with breaches of legislation. Shashi has become the scourge of local businesses which try to get away with trading unfairly, but he could be just as mean on the cricket pitch, where he played for the local team for 30 years and once took 10 wickets in a match.

In 1990 Cllr Dholakia became the first Asian to be elected to the Wellingborough Borough Council and was the town's first Asian Mayor in 1996/97. During that year he raised a record £12,000 for mayoral charities and persuaded the mayors of Wellingborough's twin towns in France and Germany to sign anti-racism declarations. 

In a region where the county council has spent the past year trying to smother Black groups with the filth of racism, Shashi Dholakia shines as a jewel in a pigsty. His work has not only benefited Asian townsfolk but all its citizens, for which he is held in the highest regard by all races.

The "Jewel of India" award, which will be presented to him by the President of India, Dr Abdul Kalam, recognises the achievements of Indian citizens who reside outside the country, which in Shashi's case are many.

KB   17/12/2002

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Wanted for War Crimes and Crimes against the People

In Iraq's war against Iran its cruel dictator, Sadam Hussein, committed war crimes by using chemical weapons which killed up to a million men. 

The raw materials and means to make these appalling weapons were supplied by western countries such as the United States and Great Britain which supported Iraq in its attempt to achieve regime change in Iran.

For the murder of thousands of Kurdish citizens of Iraq with chemical weapons, the murder and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Marsh Arabs and the murder of innumerable Iraqis who had opposed or just offended him, Sadam Hussein should stand trial in his own country where the penalty would be death.

 For this and other war crimes, Sadam Hussein should be tried before an appropriate international court, and the leaders of those countries which supplied the weaponry should be tried for aiding and abetting mass murder. Included would be Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr.