[Apart from a Feb. 10
stampede at the nearby Allahabad railway station in which 36 people were
killed, the Kumbh Mela itself has so far gone smoothly. Fresh water comes out
of the taps. Toilets are disinfected. Trained police carefully shepherd the
crowds to the bathing ghats. The lights come on at night.]
@ The Washington Post
DEATH TOLL FROM BANGLADESH UNREST REACHES 44
[The protests for and
against Jamaat have convulsed Bangladeshi politics, demonstrating that the
country has still not healed from the bloody 1971 conflict, in which an estimated
three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped. Before the
war, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of that country by a
wide expanse of India. The war pitted Bangladeshi separatists against Pakistani
soldiers and local collaborators, who were known then as the Razakar Bahini.]
By Victor Mallet
 |
ALLAHABAD,
India — Onno Ruhl, head of the World Bank
in India, calls it “an incredible logistical operation.” Harvard researchers
describe it as “a pop-up megacity”.
On the sandbanks of the Ganges River at
Allahabad, bureaucrats and workers from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous
state and one of its poorest, took less than three months to build a tent city
for 2 million people — complete with hard roads, toilets, running water,
electricity, food shops, garbage collection and well-manned police stations.
Organizers do much the same every three years –
although on a particularly large scale every 12 years, as in 2013 – for the
Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival celebrated in turn at four different locations on
the Ganges.
This year’s event, a combination of religious
worship and medieval funfair, has attracted millions of pilgrims from across
India who come to wash away their sins in the Ganges at its confluence with the
Yamuna. During its two months to mid-March, the mela will have attracted 80
million to 100 million faithful. Up to 30 million attempted to bathe on Feb. 10
alone, officials say.
Precise numbers are hard to estimate, but
devotees and foreign visitors are generally full of praise for the organizers
of what is arguably the largest gathering of humans on earth.
Apart from a Feb. 10 stampede at the nearby Allahabad
railway station in which 36 people were killed, the Kumbh Mela itself has so
far gone smoothly. Fresh water comes out of the taps. Toilets are disinfected.
Trained police carefully shepherd the crowds to the bathing ghats. The lights
come on at night.
In the minds of both Indians and foreigners,
this raises important questions: How? Why? Or, if the authorities can build
infrastructure so efficiently for this short but very large festival and its
instant city, why can they not do the same for permanent villages and towns?
The World Bank’s Ruhl, who was moved to bathe in
the Ganges himself when he visited the Kumbh Mela this year, says the city on
the sandbanks, soon to be dismantled before the river floods, “has water,
sanitation, power, solid waste management, everything, actually, that many
Indian cities lack”.
“To somebody who does projects, it’s like a
mega-refugee camp that came up overnight and gets sustained and managed for two
months with people filtering [in and out] at a rate of millions a day. I’ve
never seen anything like it in my life. . . . It’s managed by the UP [Uttar
Pradesh] government. . . . If somehow we could translate that capacity to
day-to-day business, you could transform UP. It’s a really powerful thought.”
Uttar Pradesh is often seen as the epitome of all that is wrong with India. With a population of more
than 200 million – larger than Brazil’s – the state is notoriously corrupt and
inefficient.
Take sanitation. In the decade to 2011, the UP
government reported steadily rising construction of latrines in rural areas
with the help of $600 million in public funds. But the 2011 census showed
that almost no toilets had actually been built. Most of the money was stolen,
leaving tens of thousands of children to die each year as a result of diarrhea
spread by what one aid worker called “appalling” sanitation.
There are few such problems at the Kumbh Mela,
however. Devesh Chaturvedi, a senior official who is divisional commissioner of
Allahabad, is proud of the “huge task” that he and perhaps 100,000 workers have
completed in organizing this year’s festival.
He mentions 100 miles of roads made by placing
steel plates on the sand, 18 pontoon bridges, 347 miles of water supply lines,
400 miles of electricity lines, 22,500 street lights and 200,000 electricity
connections, as well as 275 food shops for essential supplies such as flour,
rice, milk and cooking gas.
Chaturvedi agrees there is a contrast between
the successful provision of these services and the way life continues in the
rest of the state, and has two explanations. First, the authorities ensure that
all those working on the project are accountable for their actions and the
money they spend. Second, those involved are highly motivated.
“They feel it’s a real service to all these
pilgrims who have come here, the sadhus [holy men] and the seers, so it’s a
sort of mission which motivates them to work extra, despite difficult working
conditions.”
Good organization and efficient infrastructure,
in short, are no more impossible in India than anywhere else. “The lesson is,
it can be done,” says Bhagawati Saraswati, a Californian-born Hindu devotee
camped on the river bank with other members of an ashram based on the upper
Ganges.
She notes the “phenomenal” number of man-hours
and employees devoted to the Kumbh Mela, but says the event still shows that
India can organize itself.
“It’s an amazing lesson,” she says. “What it
means is: India can do it. All of the villages, all of the cities can have
electricity, they can have running water, they can have roads. That attention,
that focus, that clarity, that commitment, just has to be there.
DEATH TOLL FROM BANGLADESH UNREST REACHES 44
[The protests for and
against Jamaat have convulsed Bangladeshi politics, demonstrating that the
country has still not healed from the bloody 1971 conflict, in which an estimated
three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped. Before the
war, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of that country by a
wide expanse of India. The war pitted Bangladeshi separatists against Pakistani
soldiers and local collaborators, who were known then as the Razakar Bahini.]
By Julfikar Ali Manik and Jim Yardley
 |
Reuters
The police used a baton on a protester in Dhaka on Thursday.
|
DHAKA, Bangladesh — The
death toll from violent clashes between protesters and security forces in Bangladesh reached at least 44 on Friday,
one day after a special war crimes tribunal handed down a death sentence to an
Islamic leader for crimes against humanity committed 42 years ago, during the
country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
The verdict against
Islamic leader, Delawar Hossain Sayedee, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an
Islamist party, resonated across the country. It was celebrated by the hundreds
of thousands of young protesters who have taken to the streets in recent weeks
to condemn Jamaat and demand justice in the war crimes cases against other
party leaders, insisting that those who were convicted be hanged.
“This verdict is a
victory for the people,” declared Imran H. Sarkar, a blogger and an organizer
of the protests, during a rally on Thursday afternoon.
But followers of Jamaat
reacted with fury, saying the case brought against Mr. Sayedee and others was
politically motivated and tainted by judicial irregularities. The police and
witnesses said that of the 44 people killed in the unrest, six were policemen.
Jamaat leaders had
called a nationwide strike on Thursday to protest the verdict, and by afternoon
bloodshed had erupted across the country, as party workers fought with the
police in the streets.
The protests for and
against Jamaat have convulsed Bangladeshi politics, demonstrating that the
country has still not healed from the bloody 1971 conflict, in which an estimated
three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped. Before the
war, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of that country by a
wide expanse of India. The war pitted Bangladeshi separatists against Pakistani
soldiers and local collaborators, who were known then as the Razakar Bahini.
“As judges of this
tribunal, we firmly hold and believe in the doctrine that ‘justice in the
future cannot be achieved unless injustice of the past is addressed,’ ” Justice
A. T. M. Fazle Kabir commented in a written summary of the judgment.
The war crimes tribunal
has convicted three Jamaat leaders in connection with the war, and other cases
are under way, including some against defendants not affiliated with the party.
Mr. Sayedee, 73, is a well-known
religious speaker with a bright red beard who became a member of the
Bangladeshi Parliament after the war. Prosecutors accused him of involvement in
looting and burning villages, raping women and forcing members of religious
minorities to convert to Islam during the war.
His defense lawyer,
Abdur Razzaq, scoffed at the court’s verdict and accused the authorities of
deliberately prejudicing the trial and preventing an important witness from
testifying.
“This is unfortunate,
and this is unexpected,” Mr. Razzaq said of the verdict and sentence in a
telephone interview. “This is a perverse judgment. It is inconceivable that a
court of law awarded him a conviction. This prosecution was for a political
purpose.”
Jamaat leaders and other
opposition politicians have said for months that the government was
manipulating the war crimes process to go after political rivals, accusations
that the authorities deny. The proceedings have already created dissent and
some international criticism. The chief presiding judge resigned after reports,
based on hacked Skype conversations, that the judge had improper contacts with
a legal expert linked to prosecutors and the government.
But to many
Bangladeshis, the real injustice has been that war criminals have remained free
for decades. On Feb. 5, the tribunal convicted another Jamaat leader, Abdul
Quader Mollah, and sentenced him to life in prison. Furious
that the tribunal had not sentenced Mr. Mollah to death, protesters gathered in growing numbers,
surpassing 200,000 on some days.
The protests have become
known as the Shahbagh movement, named for a large intersection in central Dhaka
where the main demonstrations have taken place. Many political analysts say the
Shahbagh protests are the most significant spontaneous political movement in
Bangladesh in decades. Though the movement may be suffused with idealism and
proud nationalism, it also bears a hard edge, with demands for the execution of
convicted war criminals.
Sultana Kamal, a
prominent human rights leader in Dhaka, said that she disagreed with the calls
for the death penalty, but that they reflected the cynicism of Bangladeshis who
have seen war criminals evade punishment for decades. Many people were
infuriated when Mr. Mollah flashed a victory sign after receiving his life
sentence.
“We have a problem in
accepting that they are demanding the death penalty,” Ms. Kamal said in a
telephone interview. “But we understand that it was from a nervousness among
the people here that unless they are given the highest penalty in the land,
these people will come back out.”
Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Jim
Yardley from New Delhi.