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Clarity in research is facilitated, among other things, by relevant and specific conceptualization. Conceptualization is required to explicate a certain phenomenon and/or phenomena. Again, in the present circumstances when academic exercise has undergone sea-changes a precise conceptualization is premised upon a relevant multidisciplinary approach. But such an exercise very often gets influenced by who does it. In other words, personal proclivities and predilections arising out of the socio-cultural milieu of which he is a part, gives specific contour to the assessments that he makes of a phenomenon. Historians are no exception to such a generalization. But nothing is more fundamental and critical to such exercises than precision and objectivity of the conceptualizations by which historical phenomena are characterized and explained. Such an objective, however, can never be achieved until the historian doing the exercise is imbued with the right historical spirit and equipped with proper analytical tools; and the lack of which has rendered many aspects of the history of the Indian subcontinent confusing and bereft of either clarity or precision. The school of history that characterizes Muslim political mobilization in British India by such pejoratives as communalism and separatism is an example of personal value-loaded and confusing exercise. A rereading of this history is in order in the context of true historical spirit. History, in reality, is a record of humans in time; and a tendentiously parochial approach robs history of its message and spirit. What is proposed here is a revisionist historiography in the specific context of the political mobilization of Muslims of British India.
   The discussion divides into four sections. The exercise attempted belongs to the genre of revisionist historiography with a multidisciplinary perspective; and opens with a relevant conceptual perspective. The following section surveys the existing literature to draw attention to how the Muslim political mobilization in British India has been pejoratavised by ascribing such terms as communalism and separatism. The third section, taking cue from the conceptual framework, offers arguments and analysis to suggest an alternative paradigm for a precise conceptualization of the phenomenon under discussion. The final section, while summing up the observations, rejects the pejoratives and comes up with an alternative terminology.
   
   Conceptual framework
   Since about the 1950s descriptive-normative approach to the study of political happenings have been criticized as inadequate. For one thing, such an approach failed to come up with rational explanations as to the extent of impact of personalities and groups on the twists and turns in a given society at a given time. The consequent empirical research model that social scientists developed came to be called the ‘behavioural school’. The behaviouralists maintain that political phenomena are to be described in terms of generalizations consonant with widely accepted theories of human nature and society. They also believe that this objective may best be achieved by stripping away the myths, legends, dogmas, and prejudices that mark the rationalizations and subjective value judgments of happenings in the socio-political milieu. This is because the political system is an integral part of the general social system. Thus, politics, in the final analysis, represents those human relationships in which power, influence, and authority are manifested. The personality structure of the individual and groups, their attitudes, and internal physical and psychological environment are of primary importance, as are his overt acts in the external environment. Behaviouralists are also interested in group dynamics. Such matters as why people join groups and the nature of groups, their size, structure, organization, programme and leadership are analyzed. The analysis of the nature of the struggle between groups searching for the same or mutually exclusive goals shows the nature of conflict in a society. Such group conflicts have to be understood as struggles over a share of resources, status, prestige, income, power and influence. Explanations are given of why resources and rewards are distributed unevenly in a society, so that some groups are advantaged and gratified, while others are disadvantaged and therefore remain marginalized.
   The analysis presented here refers only to overt actions of Muslim group in British India, and its marginalisation and conflictual relationship vis-à-vis the advantaged Hindu group. This behavioral approach to the Hindu-Muslim phenomenon and its analysis in the context of group dynamics leads to different kind of conceptualization and conclusion than the prevalent unscientific and tendentious ones.
   
   Literature survey: A revisitation
   A general survey of the relevant literature shows that these two terminologies have spawned at least four broad trends of historiography vis-à-vis Muslims of British India. The lead remains with some Hindu nationalist historians whose laboriously produced works represent the first trend representing the pejorative school. Discussion may be initiated by referring to Dr. Pattabhi Sitarammayya’s seminal work titled history of the Indian National Congress (first published in 1935; and expanded into two volumes in 1946). On the separate electorate granted to the Muslims in 1909 it has the following to say, ‘What was egregious was the different franchises set up for the different communities’.To the same category belongs Joachim Alva’s Men and Supermen (Bombay; 1943). On Jinnah the author remarks: ‘Mohammad Ali wrecked his nationalism on the rock of his fanaticism. Eternally-haunted by the idea that Muslims were Masters of India for centuries… he foolishly cried out for Muslim hegemony in the enlightened twentieth century. Hence the war for seats and percentages and safeguards to ensure Muslim domination to reduce Hindu majorities to impotent minorities’.
   Both are instances of a pejorative use of the concept of separatism lacking in the perception of group dynamics in a given socio-political milieu. Separate electorate could be unique to British India, but not to the British empire or some other places across the world. In Cyprus, for example, Greek-Cypriots and Turkish- Cypriots were given separate electorates by the close of the nineteenth century.
   (To be continued )

It is nice to see that up to this year, Finance Minister M. Saifur Rahman has set a remarkable and unique record of presenting as many as eleven national budgets. The proposed national budget of Tk. 64,383 crore, including a deficit of Tk. 15,356 crore, for the fiscal 2005—06 was placed in Parliament on June 9 amid boycott by the main opposition Awami League. The Finance Minister said that the proposed budget was aimed at accelerating the pace of poverty reduction and economic growth.
   The Annual Development Programme (ADP) has been set at Tk. 24,500 crore for the fiscal 2005—06 as against the revised ADP of Tk. 20,500 crore for the current 2004—05 fiscal. Economists say the new budget will not reflect the hope of the rural poor for economic emancipation as it is not sure that development allocations and special micro credit funds will go to the real poor. According to the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a civil society think tank, actual expenditure allocated as special block allocation for poverty reduction in 2004—05 fiscal under ADP revealed that not a single Taka was spent until March, 2005. On the other hand, data on utilization level of targeted programmes for poverty eradication and employment creation during FY05 is not available, and in the absence of utilization level, it is not known how far they were implemented in FY05 and what would be the fate of these allocations in FY06. So, isn’t the budget a manifestation of ambition and ‘sheer bluff’, which cannot be implemented at the end of the day? The budgetary measures have created opportunities as ever for making quick money by big businessmen of the ruling party.
   Since a vast majority of the people in this country live below the poverty line, they are quite ignorant about national economy or budgetary affairs. Whereas they vote the government to power and in return the government capitalizes on them in order to gain foreign aids in the name of poverty alleviation. But their lot never changes. Rather, they are becoming poorer being perpetually exploited and deprived of their basic needs. This vast majority of the population have always been the hot subject of politics in our country. On the other hand, a section of power hungry, inefficient and extremely corrupt political leaders together with their quite a few loyalist government officials have become very rich overnight, who certainly would have led a modest life hadn’t the country been liberated in 1971 at the cost of lives of millions. Unfortunately, this section of people are indeed the great beneficiaries of our liberation, a sizeabl e number of whom belong to AL and BNP as well as Jamaat now.
   The government has to face a major challenge during the next fiscal in effective utilization of the increased amounts of money proposed to be pumped into different sectors. The higher allocations will have to be matched by the availability of highly efficient implementation machinery.
   Admittedly, this does not exist in the organs of the government; it never did. There are no effective and stern measures to ward off corrupt practices and wasteful use of money that accounted for poor project implementation. The Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) is still limping. Anyway, it is to be seen how independently and boldly it will perform in the coming days; for, no effective steps are visible as yet in this regard. Even the Ombudsman’s office, despite the passage of law in this regard, is still ganging fire.
   Too many stages are involved in between project approval and implementation. Joining in this, projects are to face a lot of bureaucratic hassles coupled with free style, systemic corruption and lack of accountability, which are some of the major causes for slowing down the pace of project work. Moreover, projects are often taken up on political, rather than economic considerations, so that they are doomed to be non starters or abandoned halfway. Delayed project implementation has often led to cost overruns.
   The government should be careful so that debt burden does not increase sharply. There is dearth of resources that should be mobilized internally to finance the development programmes. The best way to do it is to reduce wastage, curb corruption, downsize the cabinet and above all confiscate ‘misappropriated’ state funds and properties from quite a few government officials as well as some politicians and their associates, not to tax the general masses. If the government can do that and could ensure honesty, efficiency and transparency of agencies responsible for revenue collection headed by the National Board of Revenue, the tax revenue will undoubtedly increase manifold. Rather in that case, taxes from essential items that hurt the common people very badly may also be exempted.
   The ACC, leading economists and business leaders severely criticized the Finance Minister for giving another year to wash the black money white. It is a ‘moral defeat’ on the part of the Finance Minister in establishing credibility of his own policy and an indulgence to legitimize corruption, they said.
   Before presenting the budget the Finance Minister had repeatedly stated that he would not allow this further. But he had to compromise under pressure from vested quarters. True, some countries in the world allowed this opportunity only once for revenue generation and those who did not comply with, the governments in those countries came down heavily on them.
   The Finance Minister in the proposed new budget extended up to June 30, 2006 the provision for bringing the undisclosed money into legal accounts by paying only 7.5 per cent income tax, while others will have to pay 25 per cent tax. That means corrupts are being rewarded. This is a very bad move indeed. This will encourage corruption greatly and ultimate4ly hamper revenue mobilization as well as incentives for tax payment.
   In another worst move, the minister’s proposal for imposing tax of Tk. 1,200 on new SIM cards will slow down the buildup of this upcoming important sector. We appreciate the reduction of duty on mobile handsets to Tk. 300 from Tk. 1,500. The telecoms sector is a strategic infrastructure for the economic development of the developing country. While the cellphone operators are charging cut throat call rate crookedly, arbitrarily; Mr. Saifur’s proposed tax on SIM cards will double the miseries of ordinary but necessary cellphone customers. The ‘crooked’ operators have already shifted the tax burden to their already hard pressed customers, due to lack of any explicit rule. No doubt, the government earns huge revenue from this sector and this ‘disastrous’ decision of imposing tax will directly hamper revenue mobilization with the decline of SIM card sale. Hence, the proposed duty on SIM card should be withdrawn considering the plight of the common customers of cellphone and the country’s low tele-density.
   However, this is the first budget tabled under the PRSP and the Finance Minister rightly dwelt on his strategy to fight poverty. But the budget’s nitty gritty does not match the PRSP’s dynamics and the disparity will hamper the country’s achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. And the trends noticed in the budget show that the Finance Minister compromised on some issues like any other finance minister. He spelled out a mantra for poverty alleviation and development of the non crop sector through a raft of measures. This sector will get a boost and the fallout will be a net generation of employment that will reduce poverty. In poverty reduction, the government claims success but actually the target is far behind. A survey of the government itself puts the actual poverty reduction rate at 0.52 per cent, whereas the UN MDGs set the target rate of poverty reduction to be 1.35 per cent.
   The Finance Minister’s political motive was clearly manifested in the budgetary allocation in the target to construct 10,000 km of paved roads and 9,500 km of dirt roads. A big chunk of the money spent on such works goes to ruling political hands, who are craftily used to ‘appropriating’ funds. Extension of tax holiday reflects his populist measure but this incentive is largely misused. Proposed Tk. 120 crore in the budget for carrying out development activities of union councils and introduction of another programme of development support thru’ Gram Sarkar with an allocation of Tk 60 crore are the steps that however can be interpreted as injection of funds to cater to the show-off development programmes by the ruling party lawmakers for election purpose.
   We hail the government’s higher allocations for education, public service, agriculture, fisheries and livestock sector, rural development, agro processing and agro based industries. Increased budgetary allocation for different sectors is not the last word for the budget. There is no specific measure to see that small, poor and landless farmers are benefited out of such allocations/subsidies. Going by past experience, how far can we expect that the measures and programmes covering different sectors as laid down in the proposed budget will be implemented up to a satisfactory level?
   Needless to mention here implementation of ADP remains largely incomplete and its size is routinely curtailed almost every year. Its implementation has been the worst in the current fiscal. So what miracle will take place next fiscal that a large sized ADP will be implemented in full, given the weak capacity in its utilization of funds and slow disbursement of aid? And how will the poverty reduction plan be implemented unless there are specific measures to benefit the people living below the poverty line?
   It is necessary to build the capacity for implementing projects in differebt ministries through the efforts of the civil servants and hired professionals/experts. The downsizing of the ADP reflects on the capabilities of the government in utilizing donor funds and domestic matching funds. The difficulties in implementing projects and utilizing donor funds indicate a decline in the quality of the civil service. Even the so called senior officers have no real comprehension of the problems faced and their solutions. Government policy should now be to recruit adroit and ingenious officers who can oversee the implementation of the nitty gritty of the ADP and the planning procedure of future ADPs. At the same time there should be an inter ministerial coordination.
   High level corruption and procrastination of bureaucracy under successive governments have been strangling the economy for a long time. Hence to reap the benefit of the ambitious budget proposals the government must be sincere first to curb corruption, making the administration accountable and pro people. Bureaucratic and regulatory obstacles and also slow speed of reform stand in the way of smooth implementation of budgetary measures. And a strict ‘confiscation law’ needs highly to be enacted and effectively enforced, so that ‘misappropriated’ public money and properties can be confiscated from the corrupt government officials and politicians. It is evident from the fact that huge amounts of public funds were ‘misappropriated’ in the past. And still it is continuing at random.
   The government should confiscate that money, lowering tax on essentials. And to make an effective dent on our extreme poverty the authorities have to anyw ay build highly efficient implementation machinery, so that the fiscal measures and ADP can meet successful completion. Otherwise, the populist budget of the hon’ble Finance Minister will remain high on semantics only but any vision that the critics, particularly the main opposition, are already voicing.
   Email: msaifulh2003@yahoo.com

A single story of horror from the second world war is now being heard after a gap of more than 50 years. A Woman in Berlin, the diary of a German woman from spring 1945, is an unforgettable testament that pulls you into the menace and fear of the times it describes. ‘All I can do is brace myself for what’s to come, and try to keep my inner flame alive,’ says the narrator.
   First published in 1954, the book then disappeared from view because of the poor reaction that it received. Because it deals frankly with the systematic rapes carried out against German women, it was called a ‘shameless immorality’ rather than a brave and moral document. Only now does the time seem right for this woman’s voice to be heard.
   Rape in war has, through out history, been downgraded as a regrettable side-effect of the important and interesting conflicts that take place between men on battlefields. In contrast, the conflicts that take place between men and women in houses, on streets, on farms, have been seen as merely personal, as the trauma traditionally borne by women privately.
   Tellingly, although the author of this particular account is now dead, she remains officially anonymous. Never able to seek justice for what happened to her, she wanted to keep her identity secret because of the sense of personal shame that she was forced to carry to the end of her life.
   In the aftermath of the second world war, when the victors tried to bring justice to the perpetrators of war crimes, rape hardly figured - unsurprisingly, given that the victors were culpable along with the losers. It was only well after 1945 that a transformation of the way we look at rape in war began, spearheaded by feminists who dared to insist that women’s rights were human rights. From the 1970s onwards, women brought to the fore the fact that war is not just fought between men and men, but also by men on the bodies of women.
   More than 10 years ago the feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon asked the world to take the ‘historic opportunity’ to look at what was happening in the former Yugoslavia and to make ‘this the time and the place, and these the women, when the world recognises that violence against women violates human rights’. And that has at last begun to happen. The first cases in which the perpetrators of systematic rape have successfully been prosecuted as perpetrators of crimes against humanity have since taken place, at the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. We can look at these trials, and we can say that we do live in a world that has moved on, in which the bodies of civilian women are not automatically seen as part of the booty of war.
   Even so, the progress has not been nearly as far-reaching as we might have hoped. Western powers have been reluctant to look at their own culpability. It is extraordinary to realise that although we have heard so much, down the years, about the atrocities carried out a generation ago by American troops in Vietnam, the soldiers who took their war of aggression on to the bodies of women have, by and large, walked away from justice.
   Even the well-known massacre and mass rape at My Lai - perhaps the only war crime that everyone in the United States agrees actually happened - ended with impunity for the perpetrators. As Sadakat Kadri retells impatiently in his recent book The Trial, even the unit commander, Lieutenant William Calley, who joked at his trial that a soldier under his command ‘would look kind of funny’ if he hadn’t pulled up his pants after forcing a woman to give him oral sex, only served three days of his sentence behind bars.
   And although the law has moved on, that does not mean that the experiences of women caught in the wars of the world are any different from what they would have been in 1945, or 1967, or 1994. Because, although we may have got better at talking about what is going on, we are no better at stopping it. When it comes to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mass rape has been used by every side in the long-running civil war, there is no sense of urgency in the international community to punish the perpetrators or treat the victims.
   Every now and again journalists or human rights workers travel to the forests and bring back heart-rending tales of the physical and mental trauma that the women suffer. But who is listening? Even UN peacekeepers have now been implicated in the sexual abuse of Congolese women.
   Systematic sexual violence is still being carried out on thousands of women and children, and each is still being forced to suffer by herself. They have to live with their violated bodies as a personal shame, rather than being able to speak publicly about the nature of these war crimes. As one Congolese interviewee said recently in Ms magazine: ‘If I give my name to try to get justice, then when they come back, I will be attacked, or my family.’ Or as the anonymous narrator of A Woman in Berlin said: ‘I feel so hopelessly alone.
   This article first appeared in The Guardian