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Two ministers arrested, six killed in Bihar

The Times of India News Service and Agencies

NEW DELHI: Six persons were killed in Bihar on Saturday but the polling was by and large peaceful in the eight other states which also saw voting in the fourth phase of Lok Sabha elections.

Chief Election Commissioner M.S. Gill termed it ``a very satisfactory day'' as there were apprehensions earlier that Bihar might witness violence comparable to the third phase of polling when 38 people had lost their lives.

As many as 750 people, including two Bihar ministers, were arrested for breach of poll laws. BJP candidate from Patna C.P. Thakur was also detained for allegedly trying to take ballot papers out of a polling station but was released later.

Saturday's average turnout was 51 per cent while the statewise split (percentages) was: Bihar 55; UP 50; MP 45; Orissa 55; Manipur 53; Meghalaya 52; Mizoram 45 and Nagaland 38. Repolling is likely to be held in 60 polling stations of Ballia, Begusarai, Munger and Arrah (all in Bihar) and in 10 stations of Muzzafarnagar in UP where polling was disrupted in Surjo village after supporters of a party clashed with the police.

Bihar minister of state for cooperatives Shyam Bihari Prasad was arrested in Motihari for disturbing polling while minister of state for agriculture Shiv Shankar Yadav was taken into custody in Siwan following recovery of four rifles from his vehicles.

Two persons each were killed in Nalanda and Barh constituencies from where defence minister George Fernandes and former railway minister Nitish Kumar, respectively, were contesting. One person died in Siwan while another was shot dead outside a polling booth near Anjai village of Chhapra district.

Other prominent candidates in the fray on Saturday included Union ministers Ramesh Bais, Maneka Gandhi and Som Pal and former ministers Ram Vilas Paswan, Mulayam Singh Yadav, P.A. Sangma, Kamal Nath and N.D. Tiwari.

Incidents of snatching of ballot boxes were also reported from Munger, Patna and Arah constituencies in Bihar. Naxalites tore ballot papers in some polling booths in Bastar but the polling was not affected.

In north-east, several bomb blasts were reported in Nagaland capital Kohima while gunshots were fired in Dimapu shortly before polling began.

A report from Shimla said 55 per cent voters exercised their franchise in the state. No untoward incident was reported from anywhere in the state.

Voters of Lindur polling station in tribal Lahaul-Spiti district and two polling stations in Kangra district boycotted the polls in protest against the lack of development in their villages.

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28 September 1999 : `Total Revolution' is dead, long live three Cs

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Tuesday 28 September 1999

`Total Revolution' is dead, long live three Cs

By Vinay Pandey

The Times of India News Service

PATNA: Bihar loves ideologies, especially those of the leftist variety. No wonder, anybody who is somebody in the politics of the state claims to be a socialist. And everybody is a ``disciple'' of Loknayanak Jayaprakash Narayan.

The JP movement of 1974, from which sprang most of the leaders dominating the stae's politics today, was built around the lofty ideals of ``Total Revolution'', which aimed at a corruption-free society, elections by consensus and right to recall. The Congress, accused of corruption and casteism, was seen by JP and his brigade as the main threat to democracy.

Twenty-five years later, the ideals of 1974 lie shattered. The names of JP and Ram Manohar Lohia are heard only when a politician is paying lip service to them. The ``socialist'' parties of Laloo Yadav and Nitish Kumar derive considerable strength from their Shahabuddins and Anand Mohans. The Congress and the BJP are no execeptions.

The boundaries between political parties were completely erased long ago. Many of those who, in 1974, symbolised the ``oppressive rule'' of the Congress are now part of the Janata parivar. One of them is Abdul Ghafoor, who was chief minister of the Congress government of Bihar during the JP movement. Later, he joined the Janata Dal. In the run-up to the present elections, he quit JD (U)-Samata to join the RJD but within a few days returned to the JD (U)-Samata fold.

The inheritors of JP's legacy have taken the art of corruption and casteism to new depths and added to it the new dimension of crime. If the late Jagjivan Ram used to distribute saris and dhotis to woo dalit voters, a candidate today has to distribute arms and money among those managing his campaign. Bihar's politics is now firmly in the grip of three C's - corruption, casteism and crime.

Interestingly, members of every political party claim they are forced to resort to muscle-power only to defend themselves against the terror perpetrated by their opponents. Thus, elections have been transformed into a strange ``Mahabharata'' in which each side claims to be Pandava.

Some politicians are frank enough to admit that the spirit of 1974 is dead. ``Everything is finished,'' says JD (U) leader and defence minister George Fernandes. However, he puts the blame on the ``all-round decline in every sphere of life''. ``Politics cannot be isolated from the social milieu,'' he says. Of course, one can always indulge in a debate on what came first - chicken or egg.

According to conservative estimates by political observers here, a candidate who wants to be in the reckoning in the Lok Sabha elections in Bihar has to spend a minimum of Rs 30 lakh. A good part of this money flows into the underworld - on acquisition of arms and for distribution among local musclemen.

Bihar has 54 Lok Sabha seats. Assuming that only two candidates in each constituency can spend this kind of money and Rs 5 lakh of the amount coming from either side is spent on arms and musclemen, Rs 5.4 crore is pumped into the underworld during each LS election in the state. With the all-round economic downslide of the state and frequent elections, this is the only industry that seems to be prospering here.

Like any other business, the stakeholders in this business - politicians and their criminal aides - too want to make the maximum out of their investments. The profits come mainly from the money meant for development. As a result, Bihar hardly has anything that can be called infrastructure. The condition of most roads is so bad that you should consider yourself lucky if with the best car you can travel more than 20 km an hour. There are stretches on which a 20-km journey takes two hours.

Asked why he has done nothing to improve the condition of roads in his constituency, one candidate said the people of the area were so poor they did not need roads. ``If you give a Mont Blanc pen to somebody who has seen nothing better than a Reynolds ballpoint pen, he won't know what to do with it,'' the candidate explained. Later, inquiries from the locals revealed that renovation of the roads in the area could not be taken up because those favoured by the MP could not get the contract.

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http://www.timesofindia.com/280999/28indi12.htm 28 September 1999 : Bloody battle of ballots feared in Naxal bastion

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Tuesday 28 September 1999

Bloody battle of ballots feared in Naxal bastion

By Raj Kumar

The Times of India News Service

ARRAH: Strife-torn Arrah parliamentary constituency, which sprang a surprise in 1989 elections when it sent an ultra-leftist as its representative in Parliament and which at present has a veteran Naxalite of yesteryears as MLA from one of its assembly segments, seems set to see another bloody battle of ballots with the dreaded Ranvir Sena throwing its hat in the ring -- through a proxy. The Sena, the outlawed private army of the land-owning class, has targeted Naxalites since it was formed to fight "anti-landlord" extremists in 1994.

"I am here to win a voice of our own in Parliament," asserts Rang Bahadur Singh, nominee of the Rashtravadi Kisan Mahasangh (RKM), a front organisation of the Sena, in an interview to this reporter. And by a "voice of our own" he says he means a voice "of and for" the farmers who have immensely suffered at the hands of Naxalites in central Bihar.

Sexagenarian Mr Singh belongs to Ichari village which comes under the Jagdishpur police station. This was the place where on March 29, 1993, ultra-leftists had gunned down five villagers and injured nine others of a marriage party when they were returning on Mr Singh's tractor. "The killings shook me no end and it was natural for me to join the RKM," the dhoti-kurta clad RKM state president said.

He is hoping to attract upper caste votes which could spell trouble for the sitting MP, Hardwar Singh of the Samata, who had bagged 2.86 lakh vote in the last poll and whose "indifference to the farmers' cause" was the reason behind the Sena decision to join electoral politics. "Last time, we worked overnight to ensure Hardwar's win and the man after getting the certificate did not bother to visit our office," an indignant Rang Bahadur says. One of his aides adds angrily, "office mein rakha phool aur mithai sukh gaya hamara". But, Mr Singh points out, "our aim is not to defeat anyone but to win".

The Sena presence in the fray has also added to the fears of poll violence in this constituency where at least 24 persons, including five upper caste men and 19 Dalits and backwards, were killed at a clash in one booth in Danwar Bihta in 1989 when the CPI-ML (then an underground outfit) had decided to contest the poll through its front organisation, Indian People's Front (IPF). The IPF nominee, Rameshwar Prasad, eventually won the seat.

For its part, the administration feigns ignorance about any Ranvir Sena presence obviously because the Sena is a banned body. "The RKM is also not a registered party so we would not like to comment," said the district magistrate and returning officer, H S Meena, when asked about fears of violence.

Outlawed Ranvir Sena leader, Barmeshwar Singh issued a press release on Thursday, describing the poll as "our pariksha ki ghari" and exhorted the Sena youths to give a befitting reply to those who grab booths or intimidate voters or mislead them, and ensure Rang Bahadur's win. "I'm sure Arrah will change its history and will emerge as another Chittorgarh after the polls," said the Sena supremo who is a fugitive from the police. Not surprisingly, polling in Arrah has now been postponed from its scheduled date on September 25.

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FROM SANKARSHAN THAKUR Barh, Sept. 23 Vijay Krishna is a would-be giant killer who must by now be terribly used to getting killed; every time he girds his loins and swings his mace he ends up flat on his back. Pity he has an opponent like Nitish Kumar. Pity Vijay Krishna continues to think he can beat him. Pre-poll forecasts of Nitish Kumars imminent defeat have become a bit of a joke in Barh now. It happens every time. Vijay Krishna puts out the invincible arithmetic of the Rajput-backward-Muslim combination, spices it up with anti-incumbency disgruntlement with Nitish Kumar and serves it as his recipe for victory. And every time he ends up eating humble pie, with Laloo Yadav for company. Barh is a prestige seat for Laloo and Vijay Krishna; talk of worsting Nitish Kumar is almost an obsessive pre-election preoccupation with the two. But Barh is one of those things for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)the more they want to win here, the more difficult it gets. It is not at all surprising that Vijay Krishna is out predicting doom for Nitish Kumar yet again. The Yadavs and Muslims are with him, the Rajputs have consolidated, specially after this weeks daylight murder of a Thakur trader, the mood is silently changing. Equations are changing quickly in our favour, says a Vijay Krishna man at the RJD office in Bakhtiyarpur, scene of the murder of the Rajput tradesman, You will see the result, the anger against Nitish will show up. Changes are taking place in Barhs vast backyard expanse but not to Vijay Krishnas script. For the first time you can witness a formidable anti-Laloo socio-political alliance coalesce in Bihars rural heartland: the BJPs upper castes, Samatas Kurmi-Koeri support base, Ram Vilas Paswans Dalits, and even a section of other backward communities brought in by the Janata Dal (United). This is almost the combination that the Congress used for decades to hold sway over the state. Only, instead of the OBCs, the Congress had the Muslims. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has almost succeeded in conjuring a social combination that threatens to uproot Laloo Yadav who has so far looked quite invincible in his Yadav-Muslim-Dalit fortress, says a senior official who has long worked closely with Laloo Yadav. Anti-Lalooism surges in every election but this time it has a strong platform. It is not a paper sentiment, it is actually working on the ground. This is not the first election in Bihar where defeat Laloo has been the dominant slogan of anti-Laloo forces but it does appear to be the first time that anti-Laloo sentiment has been channelised into a consolidated political groundswell: the upper castes, the lesser backwards like Kurmis and Koeris, the Dalits, all are in the drive-Laloo-out campaign together. Barh is an instructive case in how the political nature of the alliance against Laloo has changed. In the 1995 Assembly elections, the fledgling Samata Party had struck a deal with the CPI(ML), influential in some sections of central Bihar which is also Nitish Kumars homeground, in a bid to undo Laloo Yadav. Nitish then was, in fact, projecting himself as future chief minister; his anti-Lalooism was as strong as it is today. But the 1995 result? Laloo swept Bihar with an unexpected two-thirds victory and the Samata Party managed seven seats in the Assemblya tattered figleaf barely covering its dignity. The Samata-CPI(ML) alliance had remained a leader-level deal, neither worked to transfer votes to the other. Nitish and other parties that now form the National Democratic Alliance, seem to have learnt their lessons from 1995 well. The anti-Laloo alliance in Bihar this time is not merely about Nitish shaking hands with Paswan and Paswan shaking hands with the BJP; it is about their constituencies, their social bases shaking hands as well. So if Nitish has been feeling a little insecure about the Dalit and Rajput votes in Barh, Paswan and Anand Mohan Singh, the militant Rajput protagonist from north Bihar, have sent in their platoons to help. And if Anand Mohan Singhs wife, Lovely Anand, has needed to shore up backward votes in Vaishali, Nitish has been there to campaign. Paswan himself makes a strange sight speaking under the BJPs saffron banner but he has done so quite unashamedly; and in doing so, he has sent the message across: the priority at the moment is to oust Laloo Yadav, doesnt matter what compromises, personal or ideological, he has to make for that. It is not simply arithmetic that the anti-Laloo forces have worked on this time, it is also chemistry. There is a sense now that Laloo is going, says Paswan, because we have given one voice, one flag to the anti-Laloo sentiment. Many of the people I am campaigning for in this election have been my strong adversaries but we decided that in Bihar there is no bigger adversary than Laloo. Paswan and Nitish Kumar arent the best of friends, personally or politically, but in Barh, as in Bihar at large, they have a common adversary who makes their differences quite irrelevant. Pity Vijay Krishna.

New Delhi, Sept. 23 The BJP, with the support of George Fernandes, has begun grooming Ram Vilas Paswan as its chief ministerial candidate for the March 2000 Assembly elections in Laloo Yadavs gradually-weakening kingdom. The move is a blow to Samata Party leader Nitish Kumar, who has his eyes set on the Bihar throne if the National Democratic Alliance is voted to power. Though the BJP has several other stalwarts, like legislature party leader Sushil Kumar Modi and finance minister Yashwant Sinha, who are also keen on the top job, the party chose Paswan to kill two birds with one stone. First, the alliance will pocket the six per cent Paswan votes in Bihar. More important, it hopes to send a positive message to Dalits across the country, who are traditionally anti-BJP. While Kumar is waging a lonely war, Paswan has emerged as the darling of Samata president Fernandes and the BJP leadership. The BJP, and even Fernandes, are not quite at home with Kumar, who is fighting a no-holds-barred battle against the formidable Vijay Krishna of the Rashtriya Janata Dal to retain his Barh Lok Sabha seat. In the 1998 polls, Kumar scraped through by a slender margin of 15,000 votes. BJP strategists feel Kumar is still wedded to his socialist image. Party managers and also a section of the Samata leadership fear that Kumar, with his backward Kurmi votebankabout four per centcould regroup the Mandalites and emerge as another Laloo. Egged on by reports that the NDA is gaining ground in Bihar, BJP leaders are trying to work out a winning formula for the state. As the Muslims remain staunchly anti-BJP, the party sees the Congress votebank as its best bet. The Dalits and a section of the OBCs are still with the Congress. But the Paswan gambit means a chunk of the Dalit votes would fall into the BJP kitty. Realising this, senior BJP leader K.N. Govindacharya, has held at least 10 meetings with Paswan over the past six months. Sources said Govindacharya suggested that Paswan float a party of his own which would be backed by the BJP in a few constituencies. Paswan spoke to Bihar Jan Congress leader Jagannath Mishra, Koeri leader and Samata rebel Shakuni Chowdhry and Rajput leader Anand Mohan. Both Mohan and Chowdhry had quit the Samata Party following differences with Kumar. But Paswans venture did not take shape as Chowdhry joined Laloos Rashtriya Janata Dal.

Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India By C.A. Bayly, Oxford, Rs 575 C.A. Bayly is a historian who likes the idea of continuity. He prefers to see colonialism not as a disruptive intervention in the Indian economy and society but as a continuity of some of the traditions that had been created before the advent of the British. He also highlights continuities in his own work. The concerns of this book, he says, go back to questions which he had addressed in his first book, Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920, in which he wrote of networks of older institutions which propped up the Congress in Allahabad. Nationalism had a pre-history. In his next book, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society during the age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 , he made the suggestion that some features of modern Indian civil society harked back to the tradition of corporate rights and governance inherent in the organization and ideologies of the traditional Indian merchant communities. The third book, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780-1870 , analysed the density of social communication and suggested this to be an important factor in explaining how nationalism spread in a poor country with a low level of literacy. Nationalism and colonialism could not be understood as imports from the West. Both had indigenous roots. At the heart of this book lies the text of the Radhakrishnan Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in 1996. Bayly looks at the interaction between patriotism and nationalism. He uses the term patriotism to describe the sense of loyalty to place and institutions which bound some Indians, even in the immediate pre-colonial period, to their regional homelands. Baylys use of the word is deliberately provocative since he wants to push the study of Indian nationalism away from where modernists and their critics have taken it. Historians inspired by the national movement saw nationalism in India as the harbinger of the modern nation-state. From the Eighties this position has been attacked by scholars like Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha and Ashis Nandy who saw the Indian nation-state as the inheritor of the centralizing and normalizing tendencies inherent in its European exemplar since the time of the Enlightenment. Bayly does not disagree with the view that Indian nationalism, its organization and its ideology, was derived from Western models. But he insists the particularities of Indian nationalism have to be understood in the context of Indian forms of social organization and ideologies of good governance that pre-date the full western impact even if they, in turn, had been modified by colonial rule. In his analysis, nationalism has a longer history than colonialism. Bayly shows that identities of and doctrines wider than the village, the clan and the community were forming and reforming in immediate pre-colonial India. This patriotism was aware even of parties and crises in the British domestic political systemwitness its reactions during Warren Hastingss impeachmentand even when coloured by religion, region or caste was pitched more broadly. These sentiments with the new mediums of communication created the beginnings of oppositional politics in India which pre-dated by two generations self-consciously nationalist critiques of British rule. Bayly reinterprets the revolt of 1857 in this light. Bayly accepts now, under pressure from recent work done on the revolt, that it was something more than a concatenation of grievances. He sees it now as a set of patriotic revolts picking up on many themes of land and kingship. This is a welcome acknowledgment of the work done by Indian historians. Bayly very deftly weaves many of their findings and conclusions into his own analysis. But very few of these historians will accept Baylys minimalization of the impact of British rule on Indian society. If there is continuity anywhere it is in the debate.

OUR BUREAU Sept. 24: Battered and bruised, Bihar braces for another round of bloodbath in the second phase tomorrow. Though the Centre has beefed up security after last Saturdays violence spiral, the administration fears that groups owing allegiance to the Rashtriya Janata Dal, BJP and the Samata Party will unleash a no-holds-barred attack as much is at stake in the state. South Bihar was the worst hit by violence in the first phase as Naxalite groups, which have called a poll boycott, struck with clinical precision. At least 50 people, including 35 security personnel, were killed as the Naxalites triggered landmines throughout the region. Yet north and central Bihar, with over 29,000 polling booths, will not be crawling with security forces. The strength of central paramilitary forces has been augmented by only 15 companies, despite state police chief K.A. Jacobs fears of largescale violence in Gopalgunge, Nalanda, Ara, Barh, Siwan and Madhepura because of the profile of candidates. A red alert has been sounded in these areas. Besides, Naxalite groups have considerable sway over Bhojpur and Patna (rural). There is a culture of violence in these areas, Jacob said. Around 240 rounds of ammunition were seized from five persons in Asthana area of Nalanda last evening. The police also rounded up Raina Singh, a dreaded criminal of Hajipur, during a flush-out operation in the disturbed areas last night. The marginal increase in the strength of the paramilitary troops is giving the state administration sleepless nights. There is nothing like enough security forces, but we are going to bed with our fingers crossed, Jacob told The Telegraph over phone. Security forces would be deployed in remote Naxalite-infested areas after screening the roads with mine-sweepers, Jacob said. Though the officials are not complaining, the inability of the Union home ministry to deploy more troops places the Election Commission, and also the much-maligned Rabri Devi government, at an advantage. Pushed to the wall by the Samata Party, which has hurled a string of accusations, the poll panel has already requested the home ministry for more forces for Bihar. If there is violence tomorrow, both the Rabri Devi government and the commission will find it easier to pass the blame to the Centre. While 132 companies of paramilitary forces were deployed in south Bihar last Saturday, 147 companies will be stationed across the 19 constituencies that vote tomorrow. The state administration had demanded 100 additional companies.. Union home ministry officials, however, say that states always demand excess troops. But this is the best that can be deployed under the circumstances. Security forces will have to be sent to Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh as well, an official said. Initially, south Bihar was sanctioned 119 companies and north Bihar 110. But 13 more companies were deployed in the southern areas following a request from the state government. All parties have much to fight for tomorrow. In central Bihars Buxar, Vaishali, Bettiah and Chapra, Laloo Prasad Yadavs party is facing its toughest-ever challenge following the Janata Dal-Samata merger. Among the stalwarts in the fray are Nitish Kumar from Barh, Ram Vilas Paswan from Hajipur and George Fernandes, who is fighting to retain his Nalanda seat. Dal(U) complaint The Janata Dal (United) today complained to the Election Commission that the RJD was misusing official machinery in Madhepura, where Laloo is pitted against Dal(U) chief Sharad Yadav. Dal(U) spokesman Mohan Prakash alleged that criminals were canvassing and coercing voters to support Laloo.

CORNERED LALOO DRIVEN TO BRAHMIN FROM TAPAS CHAKRABORTY IN SIWAN AND GOPALGUNGE Laloo Yadav is on shaky ground, even on his home turf. The growing disenchantment with the Rashtriya Janata Dal coupled with the consolidation of Brahmin-Rajput-Koeri votes has forced the messiah of the downtrodden to opt for an upper caste candidate in Gopalgunge, his home district. Brushing aside claims of top leaders like Abdul Ghafoor, Laloo has picked Kali Pandey, a Brahmin, to retain his fief. Pandey, a former Congressman who till recently was part of the Jagannath Mishra camp, is known more for his trips to jail than for his political acumen. By taking the gamble, say RJD workers, Laloo hopes to split the Brahmin votes and stymie the BJP progress. But by doing this, he has given the impression that the mirror of his caste structure has cracked from side to side, says Mohan Dubey, a freelance journalist in Gopalgunge town. Observers see Laloos decision to field an upper caste candidate as a desperate gamble born out of the challenge posed by the Janata Dal(U) which is positioned enviously to gain both the Paswan and the traditionally upper-caste anti-Laloo votes. In the 1998 polls, the RJD boss had a tacit understanding with Bihar Peoples Party leader Anand Mohan in north Bihar to consolidate the backward votes and split the upper caste ones. But Mohan has since switched allegiance to the Dal(U). The caste arithmetic of north Bihar was reflected in Gopalgunges demographic structure. The Brahmin vote-share here touches 2.5 lakh. In Buxar, it is at least a lakh. In Motihari and Champaran, the Brahmin-Rajput division has always helped the RJD to scrape through. But this time, they have rallied behind the Dal(U). RJD leaders are putting up a brave front. Politics has never come under scrutiny on the moral sense of caste combination. Politics is a constant process of merging with the masses for magic power, says Jogesh Chaturvedi, Laloos ardent supporter and his office secretary in Gopalgunge. Laloo supporters like Harendra Yadav, a Yadav-Mukhia of Gopalgunge, point out that with one Assembly segment accounting for 70 per cent Brahmins and a sprinkling of at least five per cent in the remaining seven, the decision is a wise one. But the decision has raised a few eyebrows in the Yadav lobby. It is difficult to convince the ordinary voter about the poll exigencies, says Dinanath Yadav, a resident of Laloos village Phulwari. Laloos elder brother, Gulab Yadav, is also puzzled. What could I say? He is the best judge, he remarks indifferently. By harping on the caste arithmetic, Laloo has ignored other local factors. Four major sugar factories have closed down. One dalda manufacturing plant employing about 200 workers has also gone out of business. Besides, the strong-arm tactics of Laloos kin have become a potent issue for the Dal(U) candidate, Raghunath Jha. If Bihar has two chief ministers, Gopalgunge has at least four, including two brothers of the chief minister, he says.

BIHAR BEHAVES, MINISTERS DONT OUR BUREAU New Delhi, Sept. 25 Five persons were killed and two ministers arrested in the second phase of polling in Bihar today, which was relatively peaceful compared to the first round in which nearly 50 people were killed. Following the bloodbath on September 18, the authorities had braced for widespread violence today. Polling in other states, including Uttar Pradesh, was also largely peaceful. Chief Election Commissioner M.S. Gill said: The deaths took place in police firing away from polling stations. There were two deaths each in Nalanda and Barh and one in Siwan. Shyam Behari Prasad, a minister in the Bihar Cabinet, was arrested in Motihari for disturbing polling at a booth. In Patna, sitting BJP MP C.P. Thakur was detained by the magistrate for trying to take ballot papers out of the polling booth. He was later released. In the afternoon, another minister, Shiv Shankar Prasad, was arrested for having firearms in his possession. Unconfirmed reports said two more ministers were booked. In some 60-odd booths there could be no polling because of heavy rains, Gill said. In the first phase in Bihar, most of the victims had died in landmine explosions. Almost heaving a sigh of relief, Gill said: It has been a very satisfactory day today. The overall turnout continued to be low at 51 per cent. Polling was particularly dull in Nagaland and Mizoram. The turnout was 55 per cent in Bihar, 50 in Uttar Pradesh, 45 in Madhya Pradesh, 55 in Orissa and 52 in Himachal Pradesh. Sixteen people were injured in the violence in Bihar where 19 constituencies went to the polls, including Nalanda where defence minister George Fernandes is contesting and Barh, where former railway minister Nitish Kumar is a candidate. In both Nalanda and Barh, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal(United) activists clashed with each other. They were involved in shootouts and snatching of ballot papers and police rifles. A villager was killed in the crossfire between supporters of Nitish Kumar and his RJD rival. In Siwan, where Mohammad Shahabuddin is contesting, activists of the CPI(M-L)Liberation and the RJD exchanged fire. A Naxalite was killed in the shootout. Polling in Gopalgunge, Laloo Yadavs home town, was disrupted when the polling party walked out following snatching of ballot papers. The Dal(U) has demanded repolling in as many as 325 booths, including 148 in Barh and 64 in Hajipur. In Nagaland, eight crude bombs exploded shortly before polling for the lone seat in Kohima. The Samata Party has protested against the Election Commission directive asking Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala to stay away from Bhiwani, where his son is contesting, on polling day.

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	26Sp99 Telegraph Bihar behaves, ministers dont

26Sp99 Telebraph
BIHAR BEHAVES, MINISTERS DONT

OUR BUREAU

New Delhi, Sept. 25

Five persons were killed and two ministers arrested in the second phase of polling in Bihar today, which was relatively peaceful compared to the first round in which nearly 50 people were killed.

Following the bloodbath on September 18, the authorities had braced for widespread violence today. Polling in other states, including Uttar Pradesh, was also largely peaceful.

Chief Election CommissionerM.S. Gill said: The deaths took place in police firing away from polling stations. There were two deaths each in Nalanda and Barh and one in Siwan.

Shyam Behari Prasad, a minister in the Bihar Cabinet, was arrested in Motihari for disturbing polling at a booth. In Patna, sitting BJP MP C.P. Thakur was detained by the magistrate for trying to take ballot papers out of the polling booth. He was later released. In the afternoon, another minister, Shiv Shankar Prasad, was arrested for having firearms in his possession. Unconfirmed reports said two more ministers were booked.

In some 60-odd booths there could be no polling because of heavy rains, Gill said.

In the first phase in Bihar, most of the victims had died in landmine explosions. Almost heaving a sigh of relief, Gill said: It has been a very satisfactory day today.

The overall turnout continued to be low at 51 per cent. Polling was particularly dull in Nagaland and Mizoram. The turnout was 55 per cent in Bihar, 50 in Uttar Pradesh, 45 in Madhya Pradesh, 55 in Orissa and 52 in Himachal Pradesh.

Sixteen people were injured in the violence in Bihar where 19 constituencies went to the polls, including Nalanda where defence minister George Fernandes is contesting and Barh, where former railway minister Nitish Kumar is a candidate.

In both Nalanda and Barh, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal(United) activists clashed with each other. They were involved in shootouts and snatching of ballot papers and police rifles. A villager was killed in the crossfire between supporters of Nitish Kumar and his RJD rival. In Siwan, where Mohammad Shahabuddin is contesting, activists of the CPI(M-L)Liberation and the RJD exchanged fire. A Naxalite was killed in the shootout.

Polling in Gopalgunge, Laloo Yadavs home town, was disrupted when the polling party walked out following snatching of ballot papers.

The Dal(U) has demanded repolling in as many as 325 booths, including 148 in Barh and 64 in Hajipur.

In Nagaland, eight crude bombs exploded shortly before polling for the lone seat in Kohima.

The Samata Party has protested against the Election Commission directive asking Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala to stay away from Bhiwani, where his son is contesting, on polling day.

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Subject: 26Sp99 Tg, p.6: BATTLE OF DELHI FOR BIHAR THRONEBack to the top

http://www.telegraphindia.com/archive/990926/national.htm#head4


BATTLE OF DELHI FOR BIHAR THRONE

FROM SANKARSHAN THAKUR

Patna, Sept. 25 It is easy to get confused in Bihar about what exactly this
battle is for. Delhi? This is a Lok Sabha election but it is being fought
like a campaign for the Assembly. The big prize they are competing for is
not the resplendent South Block, but the office of the chief minister of
Bihar in a mofussil corner of west Patna.

The Bihar election is not about installing Atal Behari Vajpayee or Sonia
Gandhi. It is about dethroning Laloo Yadav and Rabri Devi. The fight for
the Lok Sabha is not the end of the battle, just the means. Dilli mein
Vajpayee sarkar, Bihar mein Laloo ki nishchit haar (Vajpayees government in
Delhi will mean the defeat of Laloo in Bihar) is the reigning slogan. Even
when the Prime Minister comes to Bihar, he seems to shift his focus from
Delhi to Patna. He asks not for a vote for himself, but for a vote against
Laloo Yadav.

Help us finish off this jungle raj in Bihar, he told a rally in Barh near
here the other day. We have tried and failed in the past, give us the
numbers this time and we will remove Laloo for you.

It is perhaps a tribute to Laloo Yadav that he remains the main, and
perhaps the only, issue of this campaign.

Bihar is a battle between those who are for him and those against; Laloo,
and Laloo alone, is the cutting edge, as he has been for the past decade or
so. Even for the protagonists of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA),
the issue is not Vajpayee, it is Laloo. In Bihar, we are not fighting for
seats in the Lok Sabha, concedes Ram Vilas Paswan, arguably the most able
general of the burgeoning alliance against Laloo.  We are fighting to
upstage Laloo and his jungle raj. This election is about killing two birds
with one stone, if Vajpayee returns to power in Delhi, Laloo will have to
go from Bihar.

The script, as Paswan and fellow leaders like George Fernandes and Nitish
Kumar see it, is simple: If Laloos Lok Sabha tally goes down even by a few
from its current tally of 17 and if the NDA comes to power in New Delhi,
they will be able to engineer desertions from the Rashtriya Janata Dal
(RJD). Rabri Devi could lose her majority in the Assembly and state
elections, scheduled for the first quarter of 2000, could be advanced.

Already two senior ministers of the Rabri Devi government have quit, more
could join them after the elections. Most people still with Laloo are
fence-sitters, says Paswan. They are waiting to see how he does in the Lok
Sabha polls and if he does badly, they will begin to leave the sinking
ship.

This is, of course, not a new situation for Laloo. This is not the first
time he finds himself fighting a combination of parties single-handed.
Neither is it new for him to be faced with rumours of imminent revolt. What
is new is that the alliance fighting him this time is stronger than ever
before and his supportersYadavs and Muslims, essentially and more passive
than ever. Paswan has strummed Harijan militancy to a new pitch, the upper
caste-Kurmi-Koeri coalition of the BJP and the Samata Party is sensing its
hour, what with the Harijans joining hands, and the old Janata Dal is, in
places, splitting the Yadav-Muslim votebank away from Laloo; Madhepura,
where Laloo is in fray against Sharad Yadav, could provide the breach that
will sink Laloo.

Hitherto, Laloo has always managed to keep the arithmetic of social
coalitions on his side. He has kept the upper castes from uniting with
Dalits or sections of the backwards. He has divided and ruled. But with
Paswan joining the BJP-Samata combine, equations may change drastically.

For the first time in decades, says an analyst in Patna, Dalit votes are
going to be cast wholesale with upper caste votes.  Not since the heyday of
the Congress has any party managed to do this.

Laloos response to the widening axis against him has been to accept the
real threat and betray it to his constituency: Lose the Lok Sabha, he has
been telling his Muslim-Yadav boroughs, and it will be the beginning of the
end of your supremacy in Bihar.

Tum logon kaa raj, jo dus saal se chal raha hai, chheen liya jayega, yeh
garibon ke khilaf saazish hai, Laloo has been going around saying. This
(the BJP-Paswan-Samata coalition) is a conspiracy against the poor of
Bihar. You will lose power in Bihar if you dont defeat them in the Lok
Sabha.

Everybody knows that even Laloo knows that if he falters in the race to
Delhi, he will end up losing Patna.  No wonder he looks worried.

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26Sp99 Telebraph
Battle of Delhi for Bihar throne

26Sp99 Telegraph
BATTLE OF DELHI FOR BIHAR THRONE

FROM SANKARSHAN THAKUR

Patna, Sept. 25

It is easy to get confused in Bihar about what exactly this battle is for. Delhi? This is a Lok Sabha election but it is being fought like a campaign for the Assembly. The big prize they are competing for is not the resplendent South Block, but the office of the chief minister of Bihar in a mofussil corner of west Patna.

The Bihar election is not about installing Atal Behari Vajpayee or Sonia Gandhi. It is about dethroning Laloo Yadav and Rabri Devi. The fight for the Lok Sabha is not the end of the battle, just the means. Dilli mein Vajpayee sarkar, Bihar mein Laloo ki nishchit haar (Vajpayees government in Delhi will mean the defeat of Laloo in Bihar) is the reigning slogan. Even when the Prime Minister comes to Bihar, he seems to shift his focus from Delhi to Patna. He asks not for a vote for himself, but for a vote against Laloo Yadav.

Help us finish off this jungle raj in Bihar, he told a rally in Barh near here the other day. We have tried and failed in the past, give us the numbers this time and we will remove Laloo for you.

It is perhaps a tribute to Laloo Yadav that he remains the main, and perhaps the only, issue of this campaign.

Bihar is a battle between those who are for him and those against; Laloo, and Laloo alone, is the cutting edge, as he has been for the past decade or so. Even for the protagonists of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the issue is not Vajpayee, it is Laloo. In Bihar, we are not fighting for seats in the Lok Sabha, concedes Ram Vilas Paswan, arguably the most able general of the burgeoning alliance against Laloo. We are fighting to upstage Laloo and his jungle raj. This election is about killing two birds with one stone, if Vajpayee returns to power in Delhi, Laloo will have to go from Bihar.

The script, as Paswan and fellow leaders like George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar see it, is simple: If Laloos Lok Sabha tally goes down even by a few from its current tally of 17 and if the NDA comes to power in New Delhi, they will be able to engineer desertions from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). Rabri Devi could lose her majority in the Assembly and state elections, scheduled for the first quarter of 2000, could be advanced.

Already two senior ministers of the Rabri Devi government have quit, more could join them after the elections. Most people still with Laloo are fence-sitters, says Paswan. They are waiting to see how he does in the Lok Sabha polls and if he does badly, they will begin to leave the sinking ship.

This is, of course, not a new situation for Laloo. This is not the first time he finds himself fighting a combination of parties single-handed. Neither is it new for him to be faced with rumours of imminent revolt. What is new is that the alliance fighting him this time is stronger than ever before and his supportersYadavs and Muslims, essentiallyand more passive than ever. Paswan has strummed Harijan militancy to a new pitch, the upper caste-Kurmi-Koeri coalition of the BJP and the Samata Party is sensing its hour, what with the Harijans joining hands, and the old Janata Dal is, in places, splitting the Yadav-Muslim votebank away from Laloo; Madhepura, where Laloo is in fray against Sharad Yadav, could provide the breach that will sink Laloo.

Hitherto, Laloo has always managed to keep the arithmetic of social coalitions on his side. He has kept the upper castes from uniting with Dalits or sections of the backwards. He has divided and ruled. But with Paswan joining the BJP-Samata combine, equations may change drastically.

For the first time in decades, says an analyst in Patna, Dalit votes are going to be cast wholesale with upper caste votes. Not since the heyday of the Congress has any party managed to do this.

Laloos response to the widening axis against him has been to accept the real threat and betray it to his constituency: Lose the Lok Sabha, he has been telling his Muslim-Yadav boroughs, and it will be the beginning of the end of your supremacy in Bihar.

Tum logon kaa raj, jo dus saal se chal raha hai, chheen liya jayega, yeh garibon ke khilaf saazish hai, Laloo has been going around saying. This (the BJP-Paswan-Samata coalition) is a conspiracy against the poor of Bihar. You will lose power in Bihar if you dont defeat them in the Lok Sabha.

Everybody knows that even Laloo knows that if he falters in the race to Delhi, he will end up losing Patna. No wonder he looks worried.

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Subject: Guardian in 26Sp99 Telegraph, Look p. 1: Out of the shadows

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3900657,00.html

The Guardian Profile: Edward Said [Mya Jaggi reports]

Out of the shadows

Renaissance man, charmer, passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause, and 'the most respected Arab intellectual in Israel' - yet this US academic has had to defend himself recently against claims that he lied about his roots. Maya Jaggi on a man who has been in the wars a long time

Saturday September 11, 1999

"The life of an Arab Palestinian in the west, particularly in America, is disheartening," wrote Edward Said in his pathbreaking book on western power's invention of the east, Orientalism: 21 years on, in the thick of one of the bitterest rows in years among America's intelligentsia, he is reminded of those words, though outrage and the solace of friends keep him buoyant and battling.

On the eve of publication of his keenly anticipated memoir of youth, Out Of Place, a small New York magazine, Commentary, has alleged that Said, the foremost Palestinian American, had through "30 years of carefully crafted deception" fabricated a childhood in Palestine so as to invent himself as a "living embodiment of the Palestinian cause".

Though conceding that Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, the author, Justus Reid Weiner, claimed he grew up in Cairo, neither residing in the Jerusalem house he says he lived in, nor attending school there. According to Weiner, Said and his family were not driven out of Palestine in 1947 as refugees on the eve of Israel's creation. Bizarrely, he suggested Said's imminent memoir furnishes a "corrected" version of his early life in Cairo in panic at his unmasking.

Weiner's argument crumbles with even mild scrutiny, much of it resting on his refusing Said the right to call his time in Palestine "formative", since his well-off business family moved frequently between Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon until 1948. Yet its spurious scholarship has not prevented newspapers from giving weight to its claims. Said found himself denounced as a liar and a fraud in the Daily Telegraph under the headline "Past catches up with refugee from truth". The Wall Street Journal labelled him "The false prophet of Palestine".

"You feel tremendous anger when you read those lies," says Said in his New York apartment overlooking the Hudson river, near Columbia university where he is professor of English and comparative literature. "But I've trained myself to use a steely cold resolve to fight back rationally and calmly - though it's made easier by friends." Hanan Ashrawi, a former student of his and PLO negotiator, was the first of many to offer comfort, despite Said's steadfast opposition to the 1993 Oslo accord between the PLO and Israel, which he described as the "Palestinian Versailles". "You begin to realise it's a badge of honour," he adds. "These people are attacking you because they're afraid of you and they take you seriously."

Now 63, Said revolutionised swaths of the academy, and launched the entire field of postcolonial studies, by insisting western culture cannot be understood outside its links with imperialism, and that knowledge, far from being politically neutral, is tainted by power and interests. He has coupled cultural criticism with acting as the most persuasive conscience in the west for Palestinian self-determination, charting the difficulty of being "a victim of a victim" and revealing how western guilt over the Holocaust masks injustice to another people.

A member of the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, from 1977 until his resignation due to ill health in 1991, he was once known crudely as "Arafat's man in New York", though since Oslo he has been among the fiercest critics of the man he sees as an increasingly despotic "Ptain figure", whose Palestinian Authority colludes with Israel. Three years ago Arafat tried to ban his books in the West Bank.

In his 1993 Reith lectures, Representations of the Intellectual, Said described the intellectual's public role as that of "unaccommodated" yet engaged outsider and amateur, divorced from the professional "expert" who serves power while pretending to detachment. He argued passionately for speaking the truth to power, "personal cost be damned", and has tilted at both US expansionism as the world's self-appointed policeman, and dictatorial Arab and Third World regimes.

Salman Rushdie once said of Said that he "reads the world as closely as he reads books", and the Irish critic Seamus Deane describes him as : "That rare figure: a truly public intellectual who has a powerful influence within the academy and also a potent public presence. He's a very brilliant reader, of both texts and political situations."

The combination has been a red rag to some. In 1985 he was called a Nazi by the Jewish Defence League and his university office was set on fire. He has endured periodic death threats and blacklists, to say nothing of verbal spats such as that with Bernard Lewis, the chief surviving Orientalist in the 80s, or the late Cambridge anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who derided Said - renowned among often drab academics for being attractive, well dressed and having cultivated tastes - as a "dandy and Manhattan bon viveur".

Noam Chomsky, the philosopher, fellow critic of US foreign policy and friend, says: "Edward's in an ambivalent position in relation to the media and mainstream culture: his contributions are recognised, yet he's the target of constant vilification. It comes with the turf if you separate yourself from the dominant culture." He adds: "His scholarly work has been devoted to unravelling mythologies about ourselves and our interpretation of others, reshaping our perceptions of what the rest of the world is and what we are. The second is the harder task; nothing's harder than looking into a mirror."

Although Said is both weary and indignant at the latest onslaught, he is reluctant to sue. Since being diagnosed as having leukemia eight years ago during a routine cholesterol test, he has other priorities. Last year his doctor Kanti Rai (to whom his memoir is dedicated jointly with Said's wife Mariam), revealed he had a rare form of the disease unresponsive to more than four years of chemotherapy and radiation. "It was depressing; my blood counts were astronomical," he says.

Last summer he put himself through a gruelling 12-week clinical trial for a breakthrough drug treatment. He relishes that he was treated "in a Long Island Jewish hospital, by an Indian doctor, where all the nurses were Irish". But holding up a three-page list of harrowing side-effects, he says: "I had 'em all. I was sick as a dog. I couldn't talk. I had temperatures of 104, 105, and shaky chills." The course - "a treatment not a cure" - worked miraculously. His counts returned to normal and the disease has since been in remission. But now, one year on, it shows signs of an insidious return. Said blanches at the prospect of further treatment.

Though he tires easily, he still gets up at dawn, teaches and travels, and remains combative. "I've been in the wars a long time. They recklessly defame you to provoke a lawsuit to tie you up for years. But they miscalculate; they don't realise how much resentment they stir up." As Chomsky, himself a veteran of smears, says: "It's a familiar genre. But if they'd tried to discredit themselves they couldn't have done a better job: going to someone's childhood home to see how many family members they think could fit in it is something even the most extreme Stalinist commissar would have shied away from."

Out Of Place, the most intimately personal book of his 17 to date, and a "conscious effort at a more literary form", covers his life till the early 60s, and forms a "record of a lost world". The initial spur for the memoir, commissioned in 1989, was personal grief. "My mother was dying [of cancer] at the time and I thought, there's an end to a special part of my life."

Two years later, when his leukemia was diagnosed, he found himself writing a letter to his deceased mother, from the urge to make sense of a frenetic but seemingly ebbing life. He began the book at the same time as he started chemotherapy, in spring 1994, and for most of 1997 was confined to bed or in hospital. "I worked on the memoir as a way of fighting the disease. It gave me the strength and determination because I felt my life was slipping away and it was a way to reconstruct its foundations."

Said was born an American in west Jerusalem because his Palestinian father, Wadie, took US citizenship after serving in the first world war. He was named Edward after the Prince of Wales, whom his mother Hilda admired. She was born in Nazareth of Palestinian and Lebanese parentage. When he was two his parents moved to Cairo, where his father ran a branch of the Palestine Educational Company, a thriving book and stationery business jointly owned with his uncle Boulos. They travelled constantly back to the extended family home in Jerusalem and to the Lebanese mountain resort of Dhour el-Shweir.

Crystallising his own "overriding sensation of being Out Of Place", Said says: "My story was complicated, because the names were all wrong. Not everyone's identity is a simple story from A to Z. There are other experiences and countries that feed into it." A polyglot, he dreams in both English and Arabic, is fluent in French and literate in Spanish, German, Italian and Latin.

He left Palestine for the last time in 1947, just before the nakba , or "catastrophe", of 1948 [when the state of Israel was created out of the territory of Palestine after a war with neighbouring Arab states], and shared the "massive sense of loss and dispossession that over the years clarified itself into a narrative into which mine fits". Although his family was, he says, driven out and lost all its property, it was cushioned by the business in Egypt, and Said has never claimed to have been a refugee. But his Aunt Nabiha worked for refugees in Cairo. "I had a protected upbringing, but through my aunt I learned the importance of service, which is what the Palestinian cause always meant to me," he says.

While Said sees the latest effort to discredit him as "part of the attempt not to let us have a narrative" - harking back to Golda Meir's assertion in 1969 that "There are no Palestinians" - his memoir implicitly forms part of the resistance: the insistent retelling from scratch of the other side of the story.

All the worlds of his childhood were lost to him through political upheaval - Palestine, pre-civil war Lebanon, cosmopolitan Cairo, where his classmates included Jews, Copts, Armenians and Muslims. But he feels he was saved from nostalgia by the deflating realities of family life; more, he says, Butler's Way of All Flesh than Proust.

The eldest child, with four sisters, he says his mother cultivated an exclusive intimacy with each child in "bilateral relationships as colony to metropole", a manipulative technique he blames for "creating rifts between me and my sisters that continue to this day". He also remembers with horror "tremendous sexual repression". His mother blocked his marriage to his Lebanese first love, Eva, by warning her against him. His father's "Victorian design" was to correct his incorrigible "naughtiness" with sports and extra lessons. To this day, says Said, he has no concept of leisure or sense of cumulative achievement and he's never learned to relax fully.

"I have no blue-collar tastes, like watching sports on TV or fishing, my son says. I fall asleep at movies and I don't enjoy nature at all. But I love the sea - which to me means the Mediterranean - and my idea of pleasure is to play the piano."

Surprisingly, Said grew up in an apolitical household, "cosseted and buffeted" in a "gigantic cocoon". Though he belonged to "a tiny Protestant group within a much larger Greek Orthodox Christian minority within the larger Sunni majority", he feels he grew up in a Muslim culture, "unable to feel any identification with Christianity as threatened by Islam", despite growing sectarianism among Levantine Christians. But the memoir reveals the tensions of being an Arab with a western education, shaped by the "three empires" of Britain, France and the US. At Victoria College in Cairo, the "Eton of the Middle East" (where Omar Sharif was head boy), Arabic was banned. Expelled "for being a troublemaker" and banished to a "puritanical" school in Massachusetts in 1951, he found himself alone among native-born Americans.

He describes an "unsettled sense of many identities, mostly in conflict with each other, all my life". As he says elsewhere: "To be at the same time Wog and Anglican was to be in a state of standing civil war", a predicament replicated as a Palestinian Arab in America. But he says: "I realised it wasn't necessary to try to reconcile these contradictions, but to have them within you as a potential, not a problem. Belonging to both sides of the imperial divide enables you to understand them more easily."

Initially "tormented", Said felt an affinity with Conrad, the subject of his first book - as with other "stubborn autodidacts and intellectual misfits" - for his "loss of home and language". He says: "I became more and more interested in the construction of identities, and how rich a field it was." He became politically aware of himself as an Arab at Princeton during the 1956 Suez crisis and the emergence of Arab nationalism under Nasser, and at Harvard during the six-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

The shattering Arab defeat was, he says, the "dislocation that subsumed all other losses" and gave birth to the Palestinian movement, though his parents disapproved of his growing political involvement ("You're a literary professor, stick to that"). Said recalls the "re-emergence of the Palestinian spirit and the stunned discovery to find in its ranks so many friends, memories deferred and suppressed" as a time of intellectual discovery. "Beirut, where the PLO was in the 70s, was a world centre for liberation move ments. I discovered Fanon and met Algerians and South Africans. I began to be open to people from Asia, Africa, Latin America."

In his 1968 essay The Arab Portrayed, Said linked representation with power, exposed the caricature of the Arab as terrorist or sheikh, and criticised Zionist myths of an unpeopled Palestine. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, who commissioned the piece, a Palestinian-American friend from Princeton now at Bir Zeit university in the West Bank, says: "It was the first opening to an alternative view in the US to the Zionist story. The presentation of Arabs as backward, militant and governed by dictators was used to justify and applaud their devastation by Israel, which imagined Palestine as an empty desert, the Arab as a shadow."

In a talk in New York last year, Between Worlds, Said described being by the mid-70s in "the rich and unenviable position of speaking for two diametrically opposed constituencies, one western, the other Arab". He began to write "contrapuntally, using the dis parate halves of my experience, as an Arab and American, to work with and against each other". His 1978-81 trilogy on the relationship between the Arab and Islamic world and the west - Orientalism, The Question Of Palestine and Covering Islam - borrowed from Foucault and Raymond Williams but made imperialism central. Ruling others was made possible by the cultural representation of the ruled, from the 18th-century novel to CNN. Said also saw the Palestinian plight in terms of the universal "problem of the Other", believing that "if you wish to uphold basic human justice, you must do so for everyone".

In his later Culture And Imperialism, he extended his ambit from the Arab world to other colonised areas, breathtakingly rereading the western canon from Conrad, Kipling, Camus and Flaubert to Robinson Crusoe, the Tempest and Verdi's Aida. Most controversially, he dared to suggest that the apparent moral rectitude of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park rested on the slave plantation. Through anti-colonial writers such as CLR James, Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire, he also told the other side of the story, their "writing back" to the metropolitan centre being what Said calls "the voyage in".

Though he loves the literature he reinterprets, and argues against a rhetoric of blame, Said is sometimes rebuffed for presumption. He once translated an essay by his admired Erich Auerbach, but when he sought the estate's permission to collect Auerbach's essays, his son refused. Said recalls with a trace of sadness: "He said my views were political anathema to him and would have been to his father."

The Gulf war began as he was finishing Culture And Imperialism, which he ends with a critique of Desert Storm, "the most covered and least reported war in history". Furthering his argument in Covering Islam that insulting Islam is "the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the west", he saw the Gulf war as a paradigm of America's cultural war on the Arabs: "Bomb them, humiliate them, lie about them." In a post-cold war atmosphere where the "red peril" has given way to hysteria about the "Islamic threat", the professor had 25 calls from the media asking him to "explain" the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, before a home-grown terrorist was fingered as the culprit.

Yet Said, who feels he "belongs to both worlds, without being completely of either one or the other", is against reductive stereotypes on both sides, or Manichean stands between "us" and "them". He writes: "Partly because of empire, all countries are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous". While he recognises "defensive nationalism", he is suspicious of the rigid-identity politics of "drum-beating roots affirmation", believing in the "inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect and country." Identity, he says, should not be "over and above knowing about others".

While his memoir hints at the seeds of his thought, it skates lightly over sexual relationships. Married for almost 30 years to his Lebanese-born wife Mariam, Said says half in jest that he ended the book in 1962 so as not to discuss his first wife. Of that marriage to Maire Jaanus, an Estonian-German who also became a Columbia professor, he says: "There's a symbolic dimension to it. I married a European. We had nothing in common. She was very beautiful and incredibly brilliant, studied at Vassar, Harvard, Cambridge. It was a great ordeal."

He does speak of an unnamed American woman, a "Diana figure" who represented an "ideal America I couldn't gain admission to". He explains: "It was tied up with being out of place in America; a liaison with an insider in American society. Though I had a western education, it was a society I never felt I could join. In my wanderings I've been fascinated with that sort of person everywhere, looking at them to see how they belong, which is something I've never had except as a child in Palestine, when I wasn't aware of belonging. They're in the 'right place' unselfconsciously, in a way I've secretly envied."

Yet Said praises exile, and "the process of intellectual discovery which relative rootlessness gives you", without ever glibly glossing over its pain or the cushioning effect of privilege. He no longer has the need to feel "at home". Although he enjoys New York "where I shall be until I die", as a "gateway city that's so much part of the world", he says: "I still feel New York isn't home. I don't know where home is, but it certainly isn't here."

Preparing for a Labour Day vacation with his wife, he describes his "sleepless near-panic", and his tendency, "like all Palestinians", to overpack. "It's a panic about not coming back, because of my first big departure to America, or maybe earlier," he says. "Last night I dreamt of losing my carry-on bag, which contains all my essentials - my Filofax and spectacles. But I constantly organise trips." It is also, he says, a fear of being "defenceless, stateless".

Although Said's father and sisters travelled on US passports, his mother's Palestinian laisser-passer always held her up at borders, till she gained Lebanese citizenship in 1958. When his mother was ill in Washington, there was an attempt to deport her because her visa had expired. "The judge listened aghast, and threw the case out. He said to the officials, 'you guys must be monsters'. A week later my mother died. She'd say, 'I want to go home.' I'd ask, 'Where's home?'. But she couldn't answer."

In 1992 Said returned to Jerusalem for the first time in over 40 years, with his son Wadie, a lawyer, and daughter Najla, an actress. He now makes frequent trips. After his BBC film marking Israel's 50th anniversary last year, In Search of Palestine, which passionately excoriated the "peace process" for creating apartheid "bantustans" and allowing more Jewish settlements, Said feels the timing of the latest attack on him was "to discredit my memoir and me as a witness and a spokesman". In the run-up to a final settlement, and amid Palestinian calls for compensation and their right to return, he says: "They think, if they can call me a liar and a fraud, who's to say those poor peasants are telling the truth."

Yet Justus Reid Weiner, an American resident in Jerusalem, was for 12 years an official in the Israeli justice ministry, one of whose tasks was to defend the security forces in the occupied territories from Amnesty International. The obscure Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, which paid Weiner for his three-year research, is principally funded by Michael Milken, the former junk bond dealer jailed in 1991 for insider trading. Commentary, a "neo-conservative" magazine, had a previous effort at slandering Said 10 years ago, when it labelled him "professor of terror", despite his consistent rejection of terrorism or a military solution. And the Daily Telegraph's publisher, Conrad Black, also owns the Jerusalem Post, which supports the rightwing Likud party of former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Rebuttals have flowed in, from Said's teachers, relatives and schoolmates. According to Said, those testimonies that ran counter to Weiner's purpose he ignored, not least denying there was evidence that he attended St George's Anglican Cathedral school in Jerusalem. Haig Boyadjian, an Armenian from Jerusalem now resident in New Jersey, says that when contacted by Weiner in February he clearly affirmed Said as a classmate. He dismisses Weiner's claims as "absolute rubbish".

Said, though, is scornful of the suggestion that he wields great power in the media. "The mainstream press makes use of you when it wants to, as a token or a symbol, but you have no access," he says. No major US paper, he adds, would publish his response to Weiner, though it appears in the Arab press, for which he has written regularly since 1993. It has been published in Hebrew this week in the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'aretz.

For him, the attack was recognition of his growing currency within Israel, where even far-right Zionists, he believes, are "less rabid and more in touch with reality" than in the US. He has long pleaded for both sides to recognise the other's history, and having now abandoned hope of a separate state, advocates equal citizenship in a "one-state solution". He says: "The politics of separation can't work in the Middle East. The land's too small. Our history's so mixed." He says the irony is that Weiner has surfaced just as Israeli textbooks have been revised to admit dispossession and massacres.

Israel Shahak, an Israeli human rights activist and Holocaust survivor, says of Said: "Not only can he crystallise the tragic situation of the Palestinian people but he does it in a manner that the Israeli Jewish elite can understand and respect. He's by far the most respected Arab intellectual in Israel." Orientalism, in which Said likens the false representations of the Arab and the Muslim to anti-semitism, is being translated into Hebrew.

Daniel Barenboim, conductor of the Berlin Staatsoper and a friend since 1992, describes Said as a "Renaissance apparition in these times of specialisation" with an "indefinable moral authority". He adds: "We agree the time has come, whatever the past, to make contacts between peoples and not wait for political solutions." Said attended Barenboim's masterclasses in Weimar last month with 90 young Arab and Israeli musicians. Said says: "There were Arabs who'd never met Israelis before, and Israelis who'd never met Palestinians. It began with tension, but it quickly disappeared" - aided by his 10-year-old great-nephew, a piano prodigy from Amman.

Seamus Deane thinks Said's anger helps keeps him going; what Christopher Hitchens called, after Conrad, his "magnanimous indignations". Perhaps too his relish at his "lonely vocation" as a "secular critic". Asked if it's hard to be reviled not only by staunch Zionists but by Palestinians who back the Oslo and 1998 Wye River accords, Said smiles impishly and confesses: "But I enjoy it. It does concentrate the mind."

In his memoir he likens living with the "sword of Damocles" of his illness to surviving exile. He says: "When you find circumstances are too much, that they're weighted against you and you're in an unfriendly camp, there are always reserves, some stubborn faculty of resistance wells up and you hold on. You realise you have more allies than you think, that the other side might seem monolithic but it's not. It's not self-confidence but an instinctive holding on, a love of life."

Edward Wadie Said

Born: November 1 1935, Jerusalem, Palestine.

Education: St George's Cathedral School, Jerusalem; Victoria College, Cairo; Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts; Princeton and Harvard universities.

Married: 1962-67 Maire Jaanus;1970 Mariam Cortas (one son, one daughter).

Books: Joseph Conrad And The Fiction Of Autobiography, 1966; Beginnings, 1975; Orientalism, 1978; The Question Of Palestine, 1979; Literature And Society, 1980; Covering Islam, 1981; The World, The Text And The Critic, 1983; After The Last Sky, 1986; (co-ed) Blaming The Victims,1988; Musical Elaborations, 1991; Culture And Imperialism, 1993; The Politics Of Dispossession, 1994; Representations Of The Intellectual, 1994; Peace And Its Discontents, 1995; Out Of Place: A Memoir, 1999.

Out Of Place is published by Granta Books on September 30 at 25. To order a copy for the special price of 20 plus 99p UK p&p freephone 0500 600 102 or send your order with a UK cheque payable to The Guardian CultureShop, to 250 Western Avenue, London, W3 6EE. Edward Said will be speaking at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on Tuesday September 28 at 7pm (sold out).

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The Guardian Profile: Edward Said

Out of the shadow's

Renaissance man, charmer, passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause, and 'the most respected Arab intellectual in Israel' - yet this US academic has had to defend himself recently against claims that he lied about his roots.Maya Jaggion a man who has been in the wars a long time

Saturday September 11, 1999

A member of the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, from 1977 until his resignation due to ill health in 1991, he was once known crudely as "Arafat's man in New York", though since Oslo he has been among the fiercest critics of the man he sees as an increasingly despotic "Pétain figure", whose Palestinian Authority colludes with Israel. Three years ago Arafat tried to ban his books in the West Bank.

Two years later, when his leukemia was diagnosed, he found himself writing a letter to his deceased mother, from the urgeto make sense of a frenetic but seemingly ebbing life. He began the bookat the same time as he started chemotherapy, in spring 1994, and for most of 1997 was confined to bed or in hospital. "I worked on the memoir as a way of fighting the disease. It gave me the strength and determination because I felt my life was slipping away and it was a way to reconstruct its foundations."

Said was born an American in west Jerusalem becausehis Palestinian father, Wadie, took US citizenship after serving in the first world war. He was named Edward after the Prince of Wales, whom his mother Hilda admired. She was born in Nazareth of Palestinian and Lebanese parentage. When he was two his parents moved to Cairo, where his father ran a branch of the Palestine Educational Company, a thriving book and stationery business jointly owned with his uncle Boulos. They travelled constantly back to the extended family home in Jerusalem and to the Lebanese mountain resort of Dhour el-Shweir.

He left Palestine for the last time in 1947, just before thenakba , or "catastrophe", of 1948 [when the state of Israel was created out of the territory of Palestine after a war with neighbouring Arab states], and shared the "massive sense of loss and dispossession that over the years clarified itself into a narrative into which mine fits". Although his family was, he says, driven out and lost all its property, it was cushioned by the business in Egypt, and Said has never claimed to have been a refugee. But his Aunt Nabiha worked for refugees in Cairo. "I had a protected upbringing, but through my aunt I learned the importance of service, which is what the Palestinian cause always meant to me," he says.

"I have no blue-collar tastes, like watching sports on TV or fishing, my son says=2E I fall asleep at movies and I don't enjoy nature at all. But I love the sea - which to me means the Mediterranean - and my idea of pleasure is to play the piano."

The shattering Arab defeat was, he says, the "dislocation that subsumed all other losses" and gave birth to the Palestinian movement, though his parents disapproved of his growing political involvement ("You're a literary professor, stick to that"). Said recalls the "re-emergence of the Palestian spirit and the stunned discovery to find in its ranks so many friends, memories deferred and suppressed" as a time of intellectual discovery. "Beirut, where the PLO was in the 70s, was a world centre for liberation move ments. I discovered Fanon and met Algerians and South Africans. I began to be open to people from Asia, Africa, Latin America."

In a talk in New York last year, Between Worlds, Said described being by the mid-70s in "the rich and unenviable position of speaking for two diametrically opposed constituencies, one western, the other Arab"=2E He began to write "contrapuntally, using the dis parate halves of my experience, as an Arab and American, to work with and against each other"=2E His 1978-81 trilogy on the relationship between the Arab and Islamic world and the west - Orientalism, The Question Of Palestine and Covering Islam - borrowed from Foucault and Raymond Williams but made imperialism central. Ruling others was made possible by the cultural representation of the ruled, from the 18th-century novel to CNN. Said also saw the Palestinian plight in terms of the universal "problem of the Other", believing that "if you wish to uphold basic human justice, you must do so for everyone".

In his later Culture And Imperialism, he extended his ambit from the Arab world to other colonised areas, breathtakingly rereading the western canon from Conrad, Kipling, Camus and Flaubert to Robinson Crusoe, the Tempest and Verdi's Aida. Most controversially, he dared to suggest that the apparent moral rectitude of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park rested on the slave plantation. Through anti-colonial writers such as CLR James, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, he also told the other side of the story, their "writing back" to the metropolitan centre being what Said calls "the voyage in".

Though he loves the literature he reinterprets, and argues against a rhetoric of blame, Said is sometimes rebuffed for presumption. He once translated an essay by his admired Erich Auerbach, but when he sought the estate's permission to collect Auerbach's essays, his son refused. Said recalls with a trace of sadness: "He said myviews were political anathema to him and would have been to his father."

Yet Said, who feels he "belongsto both worlds, without being completely of either one or the other", is against reductive stereotypes on both sides, or Manichean stands between"us" and "them". He writes: "Partly because of empire, all countries are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous". While he recognises "defensive nationalism", he is suspicious of the rigid-identity politics of "drum-beating roots affirmation", believing in the "inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect and country." Identity, he says, should not be "over and above knowing about others".

Edward Wadie Said

Born: November 1 1935, Jerusalem, Palestine.

Education: St George's Cathedral School, Jerusalem; Victoria College, Cairo; Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts; Princeton and Harvard universities.

Married: 1962-67 Maire Jaanus;1970 Mariam Cortas (one son, one daughter).

Books: Joseph Conrad And The Fiction Of Autobiography, 1966; Beginnings, 1975; Orientalism, 1978; The Question Of Palestine, 1979; Literature And Society, 1980; Covering Islam, 1981; The World, The Text And The Critic, 1983; After The Last Sky, 1986; (co-ed) Blaming The Victims,1988; Musical Elaborations, 1991; Culture And Imperialism, 1993; The Politics Of Dispossession, 1994; Representations Of The Intellectual, 1994; Peace And Its Discontents, 1995; Out Of Place: A Memoir, 1999.

• Out Of Place is published by Granta Books on September 30 at =A325. To order a copy for the special price of =A320 plus 99p UK p&p freephone 0500 600 102 or send your order with a UK cheque payable to The Guardian CultureShop, to 250 Western Avenue, London, W3 6EE. Edward Said will be speaking at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on Tuesday September 28 at 7pm (sold out).



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