Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:30:08 -0500
From: Partha Banerjee <partha-AT-capital.net>
Subject: Re: **Bride burning and dowry death conference at Harvard**


Now I am "invited"!
___________________

I just received a note from Dr. Michael Witzel, Sanskrit Professor at
Harvard (and actually a non-right-wing person), asking me to attend the
conference. Of course, this is AFTER I wrote him about the rather
objectionable list of speakers and conference announcement already
published. According to him, the conference is not going "right".

He says to me, "It is strange that the (Indian) Govt. seems a little
interested now ... and that Maneka Gandhi will come..."

My own reading is, like I said before, the Indian right-wing government and
BJP, the party in power (a party that synonymizes oppression on women)
wants to seize this opportunity: co-opt this cause, and project itself as
the savior of the suffering Indian women. Thakur, i.e., Mr. H. Thakur, the
conference organizer, either yields to that pressure or hopes that their
presence will put his so-far non-event conference on spotlight.  In any
case, he or the other organizers do not understand the political game
played by the Hindu supremacist Indian government and its far-reaching
harmful effect on this issue as a whole.

I am not sure if I will make it to the conference though; if I do, I will
carry a few copies of my book on RSS and BJP that just came out from Delhi.
Or, more likely, I will send a few copies through some good friends of mine
who might be participating. I think it would be important to display the
book there because it has a chapter on the issues of South Asian women and
a section on the subject of bride burning and dowry deaths. This might
sound a little self-propagating, but believe me, I am not doing this to
make a profit.

I want to send a special appeal to all on this list (specially those who
live in Northeastern USA) to attend this conference. With OUR help,
something good might actually happen and some poor women might be saved.