📰 Myanmar and the limits of pan-Islamism
The paradox of Muslim solidarity is that its global character is dependent on the West, conceptually and politically
•Since Myanmar’s latest bout of violence against the Rohingya began in 2012, there has been a slow uptick of outrage in the Muslim world. But it was only recently, once international observers described what was happening there as an ethnic cleansing, that Muslim concern became more vocal than protests in Europe or the U.S. In the past, Muslim-majority countries such as Bangladesh and Malaysia, at the receiving end of refugee flows from Myanmar numbering in the tens and even hundreds of thousands, have acted forcefully to prevent the Rohingya from entering their territories.
•But last year everything changed, with Bangladesh, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan at the forefront of international demands to stop the flight of refugees from Myanmar and alleviate their suffering. Behind this change lay a number of causes, from the humanitarian, political and economic emergency created by the influx of refugees among Myanmar’s neighbours, to growing Muslim protests around the world at the treatment of the Rohingya. The crisis also presented an opportunity for politicians to claim leadership in an otherwise fragmented Muslim world by demanding relief and justice for the Rohingya.
•Turkey’s President made strong statements about the crisis, putting it at the top of the agenda at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. His wife made a highly publicised trip to Bangladesh to be filmed and photographed in Rohingya camps, while donating and promising more Turkish aid. Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia also competed to deliver assistance in Rakhine state while engaging the Myanmar government in talks. The Bangladesh Prime Minister spoke about the plight of the refugees at the UN and demanded safe zones for the Rohingya in Myanmar.
•Yet both Turkey’s President and the Bangladesh Prime Minister use the same accusations of Islamic terrorism against their domestic opponents as are levelled against the Rohingya in Mynamar. And they do so for the same reason, in order to de-legitimise suspect minority groups and political opposition in their own countries. Like Myanmar, these states are all heirs to the ‘War on Terror’, deploying its language and practices to forge a new politics. What we are seeing is not disagreement between Muslim and non-Muslim states on the subject of the Rohingya, but instead fundamental agreement on a narrative of counter-terrorism that has been globalised beyond American control.
•The Rohingya cause represents the return of states to leadership roles within the Muslim world, and it has made Islamic unity possible for the first time since the sectarian bloodletting of the Syrian war, to say nothing of the divide between Saudi-led and pro-Iranian movements across West Asia. All over the world, bar Afghanistan and Somalia, states are triumphing over their religious critics to champion Islamic causes long held by the latter. By suppressing such groups in the name of counter-terrorism, however, these states have also adopted their narrative of Muslim victimisation.
The victim’s tale
•Non-state groups had been among the first to promote a narrative of Muslim victimisation, with jihadis as much as liberals drawing from a familiar humanitarian repertoire in which suffering demands an immediate and therefore violent response. But this storyline only dates back to the aftermath of the Cold War, beginning with Muslim mobilisations over the fate of the Bosnians during the breakup of Yugoslavia. International Muslim causes had earlier been political rather than humanitarian. They called for the establishment of certain kinds of states, rather than emergency measures to guarantee a people’s survival.
•In the ideologically defined conflicts of the Cold War, groups like the Palestinians emerged as political heroes rather than simply humanitarian victims. But nowadays they, too, are seen by their supporters as representing a humanitarian cause. This is due to their loss of an institutionalised political identity with the creation of the Palestinian Authority as an Israeli partner and the sequestration of Gaza. It is therefore their Israeli enemies who ironically are the only ones to grant Palestinians a political existence, by considering them actors motivated by ideas freely adopted rather than by purely biological needs.
•Humanitarianism today is premised upon a distrust of politics, which is blamed for every crisis humanitarians seek to resolve. This means that any relief or intervention deemed to be political is condemned as hypocritical. Indeed, hypocrisy has become the gravest charge in the lexicon of liberals and militants alike. And it is the humanitarian or anti-political character of Muslim outrage that has allowed states such as Bangladesh and Turkey to appropriate it, just as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State had done before them for very different reasons.
•It is not simply state violence that has muffled the voice of non-state actors in mobilising Muslims globally. Their outrage over Rohingya suffering has been viewed with suspicion among Muslims more widely. Pakistani newspapers have levelled accusations of hypocrisy against the religious and militant groups that specialised in charging others with it. And so Islamists outraged by the treatment of the Rohingya are reproached for their own violence against non-Muslim or sectarian minorities. Signalling the decline of such actors, this mistrustful response illustrates the internal shifts in Muslim opinion and protest.
European midwife
•The narrative of Muslim victimisation is arbitrary in its application. Palestinians, Bosnians and now the Rohingya might enjoy global attention as victims of this kind, but not Uighurs, Somalis, Yemenis or Chechens. The lack of Muslim solidarity in these cases cannot be attributed to politics understood as hypocrisy. Neither are they explained by the economic interests that are often thought to underlie such hypocrisy. They must instead be understood in terms of familiar storylines. Only a crisis that can be attributed to western imperialism, or Zionism understood as its surrogate, is a candidate for global Muslim solidarity.
•Muslim outrage over the persecution of the Rohingya follows a familiar script. Like all such global mobilisations, whether prompted by the victimisation of fellow believers or Islam itself in alleged insults to its prophet, these demonstrations of solidarity are midwifed in the West. This was the case with the first global mobilisation of Muslims in 1989, against Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. It is only books, cartoons, speeches or desecrations in Europe and America that give rise to Muslim protests globally, with similar publications or events in other places possessing merely local significance. Similarly, it is only those wars and humanitarian crises receiving either positive or negative attention in the West that end up as Muslim causes worldwide.
•This trajectory illustrates the consequences of Western political and economic dominance. Since colonial times, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans have had to relate to each other through Europe and America. But such mediation also suggests the intimate way in which Islam’s globalisation is linked to a West often seen as its enemy. As Myanmar but also Bosnia and Kosovo demonstrate, global forms of Muslim solidarity are not only prompted by calls for humanitarian relief in the West, but also favour the kind of military intervention whose deployment by western powers Muslims otherwise criticise.
•Linked as they always have been to the West, global forms of Muslim protest are transient and easily dissipated. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya having been accomplished by Myanmar, and Muslim politicians with their constituencies around the world having had the chance to denounce it, the matter can be dropped until Rakhine’s violence and refugees once again attract the interest of a European or American public. The paradox of Muslim solidarity is that its global character remains dependent on the West conceptually as well as politically, even and especially when it is explicitly anti-western in form.
📰 Another outbreak: on Rajasthan Zika cases
A proper awareness campaign is vital to contain the Zika outbreak in Jaipur
•With 80 laboratory-confirmed cases of the Zika virus already in Jaipur, including 22 pregnant women, the latest outbreak is India’s most severe so far. In January 2017, three confirmed cases of Zika were reported from Ahmedabad, including a pregnant woman, and in July the same year a single case was reported from Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri district. Unlike in the case of the Ahmedabad outbreak that was kept under wraps by the Health Ministry (even the World Health Organization was informed only in May), there has been more transparency in the last two instances. About 4.5 lakh people at the outbreak site in Rajasthan have been brought under surveillance. While steps to halt mosquito breeding have been initiated, it is to be noted that controlling the breeding of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits the Zika virus, is very challenging. Controlling the spread becomes even harder as the mosquito is widely prevalent in India, and the infection remains asymptomatic in about 80% of cases, allowing the virus to silently spread from one person to another. It can also spread from a pregnant mother to the foetus. Even when the infection manifests itself, the symptoms are very mild and non-specific, making it difficult to correctly and easily diagnose it. A study published in the journal Neurology India found 14 of 90 patients with the Guillain–Barré syndrome (a neurological complication seen in Zika-infected adults) in the Puducherry-based Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research tested positive for Zika virus antibodies. Four of the 14 patients also tested positive for an anti-dengue antibody. There is a remote possibility that the virus is circulating in some parts of India and could cause an epidemic at some point.
•It is not clear if the first person (index case) or others who had contracted the infection had travelled to any country where there is a Zika infection risk. The absence of travel history outside India in the recent past by any of the infected individuals indicates the virus is prevalent in the mosquito population. Spread through sex, without multiple instances of infection by mosquitoes is unlikely, given the spurt in the number of cases within a narrow time window in a small community. Since Zika infection during pregnancy can cause severe birth defects, particularly microcephaly (small size of the head), all the 22 pregnant women infected must be monitored. Also, as there is no cure for microcephaly at birth, there should be campaigns to educate people living in the outbreak area to avoid sex, particularly with the intent of getting pregnant, till the outbreak is under control. The long winter ahead in north India and the imminent onset of the northeast monsoon in the eastern coast of India is conducive for the mosquito to multiply and spread. This calls for a high level of alert.
📰 Understanding Zika
What is Zika?
•Zika, a flavivirus spread mainly by mosquitoes, belongs to the same genus as dengue and chikungunya. Some evidence that Zika has been in India for long comes from a 1954 survey, which found several Indians with Zika antibodies. However, this evidence wasn’t conclusive, because other flaviviruses, like dengue, can also trigger Zika-neutralising antibodies. The first confirmed Indian case occurred in 2016 in Gujarat. Later, three more cases were detected, before the 2018 Rajasthan outbreak. Despite its long presence in Asia, Zika outbreaks in this region have been benign. This changed with a large French Polynesian outbreak in 2013 and a larger Brazilian one in 2015.
What are the symptoms?
•In Rajasthan, where 72 have been infected, Zika is causing fever, rash, muscle and joint pain. But the French Polynesian and Brazilian outbreaks were linked to deadlier conditions such as microcephaly, in which the child of a Zika-infected mother is born with an abnormally small head. In rare cases, patients also developed Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes potentially fatal muscle weakness. Indian officials are watching out for these complications, since the Rajasthan strain is closely related to the Brazilian strain.
If Zika has been in India since 2016, why is there a large outbreak only now?
•First, Rajasthan’s residents may not have been exposed to Zika before, and thus lack immunity. According to Nathan D. Grubaugh, a Zika genomics researcher at the Yale School of Public Health, American studies show that if 50-60% of a population is exposed to the virus, herd immunity develops and transmission stops. Another possibility is that mutations in the Rajasthan strain are helping it spread. More research is needed to identify such mutations. The third explanation is that even though Zika has been around, it is being detected only now because we are looking. Until 2016, when Zika was declared a WHO global health emergency, India wasn’t testing for Zika.
How worried should you be?
•Not much, unless you are pregnant. Zika is usually short-lived. Pregnant women should be tested and should avoid travel to outbreak areas. Infection can be prevented through mosquito fogging and not allowing water to stagnate. There is no vaccine yet, but many vaccines are in trials, including one from Bharat Biotech.
📰 ‘Rajasthan’s Zika strain close to Brazilian one’
Though it is spreading quickly, most cases have been mild.
•The Zika virus behind the ongoing outbreak in Rajasthan is closely related to the virus that caused the Brazilian outbreak, according to Balram Bhargava, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Dr. Bhargava told The Hindu that the National Institute of Virology (NIV) had fully sequenced the Rajasthan virus’ genome, and this is the first time a Brazilian-like strain has been detected in India. Before this, a strain from a patient in Gujarat, sequenced partially by the NIV, was found to be close to a Malaysian Zika strain, isolated in 1966.
Different from Gujarat
•The Rajasthan outbreak is different from the Gujarat cases in several important ways. Firstly, this is the largest in India, having affected 72 people. Before this, only four Zika cases were detected by the NIV in 2016-17, despite widespread surveillance. These included three cases in Gujarat and one in Tamil Nadu. Secondly, in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the virus did not seem to be moving efficiently from person to person, via mosquitoes. Though researchers tested several people apart from the confirmed cases then, they were unable to find other infections, said Arunkumar Govindakarnavar, who heads Karnataka’s Manipal Centre for Virus Research. Thirdly, even though the ICMR has screened 50,000 mosquitoes at 8 sites across India since 2016, it did not detect the virus in mosquitoes until the Rajasthan outbreak, Dr. Bhargava said.
•“The current outbreak seems to be triggered due to uncontrolled mosquito breeding. Vector control is the key to prevention of outbreaks in future,” he said.
•Though the virus is spreading quickly, most Zika cases have been mild, with 60 out of 72 patients healthy after treatment. There have been no deaths.
•The biggest risk that officials are being watchful about is Congenital Zika Syndrome, in which babies of Zika-infected mothers are born with impairments such as microcephaly - an abnormally small head. Dr. Bhargava said pregnant women were being screened carefully for Zika infections in Rajasthan.
•Microcephaly was first linked to Zika during the Brazilian outbreak. This outbreak, which spread to 28 countries, was unusual because of its size, as well as the number of microcephaly cases. Even though Zika has been in Asia for several years, outbreaks here were small and saw no microcephaly. In contrast, at its peak, northeast Brazil saw 49.9 cases of microcephaly for every 10,000 births, compared to a historical normal of 2 per 10,000, according to a 2017 study in The Lancet. Eventually, researchers suggested several likely reasons behind the unusual Brazilian outbreak. Among them, the Brazilian population had never been exposed to Zika, and lacked protective immunity. Also, experiments showed that the south American strain was better at being transmitted through mosquitoes than older strains. One of the factors behind the improved transmission was a mutation called A188V in the viral genome, according to a 2017 Nature study. This mutation is not present in the Rajasthan strain.
•The NIV found another mutation called S139N in the Rajasthan strain, however. In a 2017 study published in Science, Chinese researchers linked this mutation to microcephaly. But this study has not be replicated by other researchers, said Kristian G Andersen, a Zika genomics researcher at California’s Scripps Research Translational Institute. Further, researchers have hypothesised that the unusual spike in microcephaly cases in Brazil could be due to other causes, such as co-infection with dengue. For now, Andersen says, S139N is not a cause for worry in Rajasthan.
📰 Unclogging our oceans
India can emulate innovative solutions from across the world to tackle the problem of ghost gear
•In March 2018, fishermen hauled 400 kg of fishing nets out of the sea in a few locations off Kerala’s south coast. There are many such reports of divers regularly making underwater trips just to extract nets that have sunk to the ocean floor off India’s coasts, ranging from Tamil Nadu to Maharashtra. The problem of ghost gear (any fishing equipment that has been lost, discarded or abandoned in water bodies) has grown from a fishing fallout that people had not heard of to one that is now difficult to ignore.
Consequences of marine debris
•And rightly so, for the consequences of marine debris are many. Between 2011 and 2018 alone, the Olive Ridley Project, a U.K. registered charity that removes ghost nets and protects sea turtles, recorded 601 sea turtles being entangled in ghost gear near the Maldives, of which 528 were Olive Ridleys — the same species that come in thousands to Odisha’s coasts to nest. Other casualties worldwide include whales, dolphins, sharks and even pelagic birds.
•In 2016, when a team of marine biologists reviewed 76 publications and other sources of literature on ghost gear from across the world, they found that over 5,400 marine animals belonging to 40 different species were recorded as entangled in ghost gear, or associated with it. This analysis also showed a huge gap in data from the Indian, Southern and Arctic Oceans, prompting the team to recommend that future studies focus on these areas.
•Yet, two years later, there are still no data pertaining to the extent of prevalence of ghost gear off India’s coast. And data is crucial here, for the detrimental effects of these nets also spillover into other countries and oceans. Ghost nets are often ‘ghost fishers’. Ocean currents carry them for thousands of km across the ocean floor, ensnaring, injuring and drowning marine life and damaging live corals along the way. Discarded Indian and Thai fishing nets, for instance, have been fished out of Maldivian coasts, reports a study that examined 74 separate ghost net collections between 2013 and 2014.
•The Hindu recently reported that scientists at Kochi’s Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Central Institute of Fisheries Technology studied ghost nets in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. However, the results of the report, which were submitted to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN in April, have not been released yet. According to the scientists, the government is also currently preparing a national ghost net management policy.
•While that would be an extremely welcome and timely move to tackle the growing ghost gear phenomenon, a larger question remains. When bigger violations, such as large vessels fishing where they are not supposed to, are not checked, would a policy on the management of ghost nets be implemented, asks Divya Karnad, a marine biologist. The effects of ghost nets are evident and tug at heartstrings. Images of turtles tangled in nylon and of beautiful blue oceans blemished by a mist-like white net floating about highlight the plight of marine life and prompt immediate action. But the consequences of overfishing, using nets of the smallest mesh size, and illegal fishing are far less visible, though more worrying. Entire fishing communities are affected by these actions, especially in developing countries like India where the demand for fish keeps rising.
Transforming used nets
•But that does not mean that the problem of ghost gear should not be addressed. There are numerous innovative solutions to tackle it, if we can learn from projects across the world. In countries like Canada and Thailand, fishermen retain their used nets; these are recycled into yarn to craft socks and even carpet tiles. For the first time in a developing country, a gear-marking programme is being tested in Indonesia so that the trajectory of gear, if it drifts away, can be studied better. Outreach and education among fishing communities would be crucial along with policy-level changes.
•In one instance in India, ghost nets hauled from Kerala’s Kollam have been used to pave roads. This shows that transformation is possible, though more efforts to make the process more organised across the over 7,500 km of India’s coasts, as well as inland water bodies, are the need of the hour.
📰 Cleanliness and godliness
Ganesh Chaturthi is an opportunity to see the failure of Swachh Bharat
•Across India, the celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi last month witnessed not only devotional joy but also public consternation at the environmental destruction caused by the immersion of idols in water. Notwithstanding the considerable media attention given to waste, fish-kill and pollution, the grandiosity of the idols and celebrations seemed undiminished.
•In a sense, this festival is an opportunity to see the failure of the Swachh Bharat campaign. In this, and many other related cases of public celebration, the apparent apathy to civic cleanliness is based on the belief that someone else will clean up. Unfortunately, this campaign appears to be pandering to this aspect of the Indian psyche. Keeping India clean is different from not dirtying it. The nuance may be subtle but its impact is writ large across this country’s landscape, be it in the sewer workers dying on the job or in the penchant to litter in public places.
•There are people employed to keep modern India clean. However, those tasked, willingly or via coercion, into this important role have never been respected. So, it should come as no surprise that political leaders sometimes choose to stand uncomfortably with brooms surrounded by artistically strewn waste to suggest the social value of sweeping. Maybe they are trying to simultaneously elevate the status of those who clean up after them.
•The polluter pays principle (PPP) is a philosophy that not only deters pollution but also incentivises alternatives. The Swachh Bharat campaign is not based on PPP; rather it emphasises certain generational roles and responsibilities. Thus, there is an uncomfortable silence in the aftermath of idol immersion, both by the devotee and government.
•Although clay is environmentally friendly, large statues of Ganesha tend to be made of plaster of Paris. So, it would stand to reason that concern for the environment would limit the Lord’s earthly dimensions for this period. Unfortunately, it does not. Our hubris raises the Lord to new heights for Ganesh Chaturthi and then our callousness brings the Lord crashing down.
•Sculptors of eco-friendly Ganeshas have become creative in the last few years — for example, by making idols out of chocolate and bananas, which they later distribute as prasad. However, efforts by some households to make this festival eco-friendly can’t compete with the size and numbers of plaster-of-Paris Ganeshas installed in homes and by various Ganesha mandals.
•If the Swachh Bharat initiative had a punitive element, it could potentially drive civic sense forward and change the way people consume, generate and dispose waste. It would ensure that the Lord is not forgotten after the idol immersion ritual, and thus save devotees the visual of idols as detritus. A secondary, if substantively meaningful, benefit would be additional protection gained for the environment.
