In the ten years of insurgency in the Kashmir valley and the border hill districts girdling the epicentre of conflict, more than half a million people have been displaced on both sides of the Line of Control (LOC). The exodus includes, 200,000 Kashmiri Pandits, 70,000 Kashmiri Muslims to India and 120,000 to Pakistan. From Kargil and the border districts some 35,000 people have been displaced in Pakistan and 100,000 in India.

As the guns fall silent along the LOC, after the Kargil war, the people of the border districts will return to bury their animals, rebuild their homes and replant their crops till the artillery duels across the LOC erupt again. But for the thousands of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, can there be a return home? Can there be a return to the ‘homeland’, a return to a remembered society imbued in the ethos of Kashmiriyat i.e. a common Muslim–Pandit identity constructed around a shared history, language and culture?

The mass exodus of Pandits from the valley in 1990 played into the hands of the propagandists on both sides and people who had grown up in a culture of social and economic interdependence have been communalized. The poison of communal politics has constructed negative images of the Pandit as abandoning his Muslim brethren to the guns of the Indian state and the Muslim as waiting to grab the property of his Pandit neighbour.

The post-election violence in Bangladesh (2001) specifically targeted the Hindu minority population though in a broader frame it also encompassed Awami League (AL) supporters and other progressive forces in the rural areas. The violence has largely been known to be initiated by Bangladesh National Party (BNP) supporters in various localities. The backlash after the elections was systematic and severe. Bangladeshi press has reported that attackers have entered Hindu homes, beaten family members and looted their property. Rape and abduction of women too were reported. Though these attacks were condemned by national as well as international institutions, a silencing process has also been at work both as a result of terrorising policies of the ruling party as well as the self-censoring practices of the liberal civil society. It is the roots of this silencing process, which I wish to highlight in this article, because it unpacks questions of class hegemony in the current Bangladesh state. I therefore locate the question of religious minorities in Bangladesh in the broader frame of the class discourse.

CLASS FORMATION THROUGH EXTORTION: A BACKGROUND

In the aftermath of independence, it was thought by some scholars that Bangladesh had a ruling class but it was not a hegemonic one. The reason behind this proposition was that the power base of the then AL who had an absolute majority in parliament, was predominantly petit bourgeois and the rural rich, who did not have enough control over the military–bureaucratic oligarchy traditionally controlling the ‘overdeveloped’ Pakistan state.

FDI has played a major role in Argentina's economic transformation. During the 1990s, a period of deep structural reforms largely based on the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” Argentina was one of the main destinations for FDI among “emerging markets.” MNCs were already a major presence in the Argentine economy. With the surge in FDI during this period, the role of MNCs reached unprecedented levels. In 2003 more than 80 percent of the value-added generated by the 500 leading Argentine firms belonged to MNC affiliates.

In the view of the reformers, FDI was to play a significant role in the needed restructuring of Argentina's economy. At the macroeconomic level, FDI was to help finance current-account deficits. Since MNCs often follow long-term investment strategies and, once installed in a host country, have large sunk costs, the reformers believed FDI would be less volatile than portfolio investment and other types of international financial flows. Last but not least, FDI was supposed to contribute to investment, and therefore to economic growth and increased employment, not only directly, but also indirectly; that is, by fostering investments by local firms competing with, serving as suppliers to, or making purchases from MNCs (so-called “crowding in” effects discussed by Agosin in the Chapter Two).

At the microeconomic level, foreign firms engaging in FDI usually have ownership advantages (Dunning 1993) over local firms in the host markets where they invest.

As Alessandro Dal Lago wrote recently (‘Rogo d'Europa’, il manifesto 28-10-2005), ‘it is just the beginning’. It concerns Europe. It is only a warning. Angry desolate French males in the depressing suburbia and some city centres have vandalized public or private property, burnt thousands of cars, scorched schools and kindergartens, terrorized their neighbours, public opinion and the well meaning universalist France de souche. Triggered but not caused by the (not so) accidental death of two boys fleeing the police (as they are constantly confronted with identity checks), the violence is inevitably perceived by the mainstream protectionist discourse, unwilling to catch its political gist, as blind and irrational. Those rioters and their movement are the symptom of a very serious malaise. To one coming from the former Yugoslavia, the French events and situation is reminiscent of unpleasant recent memories, toute proportion gardée. There, like here, since the fatal series of wars (I am leaving aside their history and complex reasons) which, far from being caused by ethnicized identities, had produced them – it has become impossible to claim multiple belongings and crossed identities. […]

The ‘unexpected’ appearance of suddenly visible revolted bodies and of their direct, unmediated violent action beyond language cannot at all be received as carrying political claims within the existing public space. It is a wild demand to topple the existing hegemony and replace it with a new, a just one.

Since independence, India has followed a development policy based on large-scale creation of infrastructure and industries, all of which required acquisition of land. As it happens, a large part of our natural resources lie in the hilly and forest areas, mostly inhabited by tribals and backward castes – some of the most disadvantaged sections of the population. Following past colonial practice, land has been acquired in exercise of the principle of ‘eminent domain’, which confers upon the government the power to take over private property for public purpose. Thus, involuntary resettlement has been the unintended companion of development. […]

Displacement for marginal communities is a catastrophe: it disrupts an entire way of life. It involves a trauma, which can never be fully compensated in economic terms. This realization, along with the fact that they did not share in the fruits of the sacrifices they were called to make in the name of the nation, increase the sense of alienation of these marginalized victims of land dispossession giving rise to protest movements, holding up the development process, causing destruction to life and property and generally imposing an efficiency cost on the system.

This chapter traces the genesis of one such mass movement in the districts of North Bengal, led by the Kamtapuri People's Party (KPP) demanding a separate state of Kamtapur. The Kamtapuri movement, which has seen a recent upsurge in the Jalpaiguri, Dhupguri, Cooch Bihar, Naxalbari, Fasidewa and other neighbouring districts of North Bengal, is an ultimate outcome of the struggle for power and the associated privileges between the indigenous communities (particularly the Koch/Rajbanshi's) and the Bengali and Marwari immigrants.

Pakistan in spite of being a developing country has hosted millions of Afghan refugees since the 1970s. Although in the following paragraphs, an attempt has been made to highlight the impediments and shortfalls in Pakistan's Afghan policy, one must keep in mind that the country itself faced a lot of hard times during the Soviet occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan. With inherent problems of its own and usual dilemma faced by a developing Third World country, there was a time when Pakistan had to single-handedly support a burgeoning refugee population, with no donor aid or help coming from any quarters.

Since that time, the Pakistani government has engaged in sporadic efforts to register refugees and to provide some legal protection. In the early 1980s refugee families were issued passbooks. (The issuance of passbooks and identification documents was done according to Article 25 of Chapter 5 dealing with administrative measures in the 1951 Refugee Convention). The passbooks entitled refugees to receive assistance, and they were also used as identity documents. On a sporadic basis for a few years thereafter, the Government of Pakistan issued passbooks to newly arriving refugees for assistance purposes only. The passbooks did not provide identification for the refugees, and as such, provided no legal protection. […]

In spite of the fact that it hosts the largest of the world's refugee population for the past three decades, Pakistan is neither a party to the Refugee Convention, nor its follow-up 1967 protocol.

‘I am a novelis, writer, doctor, a psychiatrist and president of Arab Women's Solidarity association. I live in Egypt’ – she describes herself. It does not do Dr Nawal El Saadawi justice, for she is much more. The ultimate humanist, she looks beyond the injuries specific to her own gender. So, she is a harsh critic of both female and male circumcision, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the Taliban's treatment of women in Afghanistan or the ‘allied’ Anglo-American onslaught on Iraq. And of course, she continues to challenge her own government and clergy of the Islamic society that she belongs to. She has been imprisoned, exiled, censored and her books banned. She was director of Health and Education in Cairo, but was dismissed in 1972 for her political writing and activities. In 1981, she was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat for writing against the government's policies and the growing religious fundamentalism in Egypt. A fatwa hangs over her head even now, but she continues to write and speak out against injustice, wherever she senses it. Many of her books are taught at prestigious western universities where she often lectures.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the recent dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over the installation of two pulp mills near the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, on the bank of the Uruguay River (a resource shared by the two countries). At present, only one of the pulp mills (involving investment by the Finnish firm Oy Metsä-Botnia Ab) is under construction at the originally planned location, since the other project (involving the Spanish company ENCE) has been relocated to another Uruguayan region. The Argentinean government claims that the Fray Bentos pulp mill will have severe environmental consequences, in particular for the nearby Argentinean city of Gualeguaychú, while the Uruguayan government argues that it will have no noticeable environmental effects.

This case has garnered increasing regional and international attention, as the dialogues, technical analyses, and legal disputes of the past two years have failed to arrive at a solution to the bilateral crisis.

In fact, the conflict has been intensifying over time. Bilateral relations have been deteriorating even within the framework of MERCOSUR, the regional trade agreement into which Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay entered (with Bolivia and Chile as associate members) in 1991.

In an attempt to move the analysis beyond the details of the conflict and the opposing views of the two countries, this chapter adopts a regional perspective.

It's often overlooked that the revolution in film taste promulgated in the '50s and '60s by Cahiers du Cinéma (and, to a lesser extent, by Positif) was at least as much a matter of interviews as it was a matter of reviews and essays. Admittedly, the most consequential broadside by the most prominent Cahiers critic-turned-filmmaker was François Truffaut's, “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” (“A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema”), which first appeared in the 31st issue (January 1954). But if that opening salvo established an important polemical position, it must be conceded that Truffaut's clinching victory came a dozen years later with Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (1966), his book-length interview with his avowed master, published in English the following year with the simpler title Hitchcock.

“Une Certain Tendance” was at most a warning shot–a contentious article that created waves in the Parisian film world, but still a local event, appearing in an oddball monthly with a thenmodest circulation. Hitchcock, on the other hand, marked an international paradigmatic shift from the position that commercial cinema was basically a form of light entertainment to the more controversial notion that Alfred Hitchcock, the most recognizable director of light entertainment in Hollywood, was also one of the medium's most serious, accomplished, and even experimental and thoughtful artists.

Truffaut set out to prove this premise by engaging Hitchcock himself in the discussion–an undertaking requiring the services of an expert translator, Helen G. Scott, because neither speaker was fluent in the other's language.

I used to go to a slow-open group about once a week. The number of group members varied. I realised how important the others were one Sunday afternoon when I was the first one there, and for a while I stood and waited and watched the smooth undisturbed water, so clear that I could see through it and imagine that I was about to dive into a huge blue room. For a moment it was as if the very emptiness and silence had made the water disappear, as if only the activity of other people could make it visible and real enough for me to be able to drop into it and find my way across to the other side. On quiet days, the one or two other people who are there engaged in strange disconnected elements of activity, make stark echoes against the glass roof, but the splashing, which makes the water real, still serves to accentuate the bareness of the place. Then we studiously avoid each other and deliberately display the way we swim as being a solitary enclosed activity that needs let no one else into our space. It is only when the numbers get up to about nine or ten that the swimming pool really turns into a wet group.

This wet group could be a small group, sometimes turning into what might be termed a ‘median’ group (that is, what group analysts call a medium-sized group) – but usually no more than this for me when I have my contact lenses in.

The history of human civilizations is also the history of human displacements. Civilizations are both inclusive and exclusive. They foster a sense of unity among different social/cultural groups in given times and places; create loose yet culturally homogenizing identities, and, by the same token, alienate others, who could not be fit in the schemes of such homogeneity; identify them as ‘aliens’ and even ‘enemies’; and, in may instances, purge them from the so-called geopolitical territories of given civilizations, giving birth to ancient Greek words like ‘exodus’ and ‘diaspora’.

There have been displaced populations for millennia. We are told in the Exodus how the persecuted and enslaved Israelites fled Egypt. In the sixth century, persecuted Muslims fled Mecca for Medina in the Hijra and the fifteenth century saw the mass expulsion of Moors and Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.

However, in the contemporary world, World War II and its aftermath was the watershed event in the history of the refugee problem. The tragedy of forced exile still exists and is growing throughout the world, so the last century has in fact been described as the ‘century of refugees’. Many of them, like the Palestinians living in numerous camps, have endured this traumatic experience for years or even generations, without ever having known any other type of life. According to an estimate, there were about 22 million refugees in the world in 2001.