Lechobhai is 55 years old. She is blind and suffers from untreated ailments, including a shockingly exposed fly-infested cervical prolapse. She is bedraggled beyond belief. Some days her husband calls by with food for her.

Twenty-five years ago she was woken from sleep by choking poisonous gas that filled the air. Her eyes burned. The more she rubbed them, the more they hurt. The gas blinded her permanently. She was one of many victims of India’s infamous Bhopal gas disaster, still the world’s worst industrial accident. An estimated 30,000 people died either immediately or soon after it. Hospital wards were jammed with thousands of people suffering from blindness, skin complaints and breathing difficulties. Some half a million people were exposed to the toxic fumes.

The factory produced Sevin, a pesticide containing methyl isocynate (MIC) – a potent toxin. Other chemicals, far less toxic, could have been used, but MIC is much cheaper. And the Union Carbide firm had been allowed to build its pesticide plant in a densely populated, poor area of Bhopal in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in 1969.

Safety appears never to have been a priority for the company. The hazardous MIC was stored in massive tanks instead of safer, smaller steel drums. Maintenance levels of equipment were reduced to save running costs – pipelines were allowed to corrode without replacement and leaking valves weren’t replaced. On the night of the disaster, water got into a storage tank of 42 tonnes of MIC, the reaction of which caused the tank’s temperature to rise to 200oC, a pressure point the system was not designed for, resulting in the release of tremendous volumes of the poisonous gas.

Corporate cost-cutting

Many independent examiners of the disaster, including the International Medical Commission on Bhopal, have found that neglect of regulations and established safety norms were common Union Carbide practice. It was known, for example, that pressure on storage tanks would be increased by corrosion of iron in pipelines used instead of non-stainless steel pipes.

Workers’ warnings that bad maintenance and leaking valves were allowing water to enter MIC tanks were ignored and pleas for emergency contingencies to be drawn up in the event of catastrophe were shunned. Union Carbide was later to claim that their factory equipment had in fact been sabotaged – but they failed to substantiate their plea with any evidence whatsoever.

Within days of the event, the US president of Union Carbide’s Indian operations, Warren Anderson, fled the country, never to return. Ever since, Union Carbide (bought up by Dow Chemicals in 2002) has vigorously fought off compensation claims and charges of industrial neglect and environmental damage in both US and Indian courts.

The company made a one-off ex-gratia payment of $470 million in the hope that it would be in full and final settlement. This is still being challenged in Indian courts. The payment did not go directly to the victims but to the Indian government. What finally reached the suffering victims and families from the $470 million was a pittance among so many people. Much is said to remain unallocated.

Efforts continue to bring Warren Anderson to justice in Indian courts to face prosecution on charges of culpable homicide but, like Union Carbide, Washington won’t hear of it. The US won’t allow its citizen to be extradited and dismisses all allegations against him.

When Union Carbide finally left Bhopal in 1999, it left behind thousands of tons of leaking chemicals, which sank into the surrounding environment. One New Delhi human rights lawyer, Karuna Nundy, is currently pursuing two petitions – one concerning the poisoned environment and the other the inadequate financial award.

In the first petition she claims that waste toxins had been dumped at the pesticide factory site since 1977, seven years before the tragedy. This was Union Carbide’s normal practice, she says. Her claim is backed up by memos proving that the company knew that toxins from the plant were present in the local water supply but did nothing about it. She states that today the chemicals still cause birth defects, vomiting, nausea and coma.

Nundy’s second petition is for better compensation to be paid to the victims. So far, the supreme court in New Delhi has rejected this claim. However, the court is monitoring how to get better health care to sufferers.

Government failure

With convincing justification, NGOs claim central government and the Madhya Pradesh state administration have paid insufficient attention to the suffering of the victims and to the environment, which they say is heavily polluted and poses a continuing health hazard.

One organisation established in 1995, the Sambhavna Trust Clinic, has taken numerous cases to court. Its director, Satinath Sarangi, complains about government incompetence: ‘Medical care is lacking, with no treatment protocols and no co-ordination between research and treatment levels.’ Sarangi claims there is corruption at all levels and that the government has failed in the rehabilitation programme for which money has been allocated but not spent accordingly. ‘There is no shortage of money for these things,’ according to Sarangi.

The Sambhavna clinic provides up to 30,000 patients with regular medical care, community health care, research, education and preventative medicines, and runs a department dedicated to liaising between patients and authorities and fighting for the rights of the people. It has many times taken the government to task in the New Delhi courts and there are still several petitions awaiting deliberation.

Satinath Sarangi feels that closure on this disaster will not happen until the courts decide on appropriate awards in damages and make orders requiring action on the human and environmental damage. Until then, he says ruefully, ‘the fact of life is the poor will always suffer and the poorest of the poor do not count for anything.’

The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila is another effective pressure group, which has taken the authorities to court more than 200 times. Abdul Jabbar, who heads the Peedit Mahila, says there have been two disasters – one at the time of the gas leak in 1984 and the second being the continued failure of the authorities subsequently.

Lost in the system

Lechobhai is one victim who appears to have been lost in the system. She remains neglected. Blinded since the accident, she is given the minimum of human care by her ailing husband. In the colony just across the road from the factory, she lives in a decrepit old shack that barely offers shelter.

Forced to lie down all day on the filthy stone floor with no rug or blanket, not being able to see and having no aid, she remains curled up and never leaves her home. She says she always feels at risk because her rickety home offers no protection. She did receive compensation of 10,000 rupees (£780) in 1998, but there was no further help and she receives no medical attention despite her continuing ailments. Even her neighbours won’t approach her, in the false belief that they too will become ill.

While she suffers, the company and its shareholders continue to profit. Indeed, when the Indian government agreed to accept $470 million in compensation and not to press for more, shares in Union Carbide rose by $2 on Wall Street. Since the compensation only cost shareholders $0.43 per share, they actually made money out of the payment.

Meanwhile, the defunct Union Carbide factory still dominates the area worst hit in 1984. The ugly decrepit ruins and blackened, leaking storage tanks remain – a macabre monument to the horrific tragedy, dominating the sealed-off and guarded plant compound. Its perimeter wall is plastered with strongly-worded anti-Union Carbide, anti-Dow and anti-government slogans. A statue erected outside the infamous factory is a permanent memorial to the many lives sacrificed – and a lasting epitaph to Bhopal’s only claim to fame.

For some gay and lesbian Indians the high court declaration will mean having the courage to come out. For Shaleen Rakesh, a 38-year-old veteran gay rights activist, it is the end of a legal campaign he mounted six years ago against an insidious law that left him powerless against homophobic violence and unable even to talk about rights.

‘Domestic partnership, adoption, all the things that straight people take for granted, activists couldn’t even talk about because Section 377 made it illegal to be gay in the first place,’ he says. Under the colonial law, men could be jailed for 10 years for having gay sex, an act which was classed as an ‘unnatural offence’ along with paedophilia and bestiality. ‘How could you talk about rights when the legal framework made you a criminal?’

Six years ago, on behalf of the Naz Foundation HIV/Aids charity, and with the help of a legal charity called the Lawyer\’s Collective, Rakesh began to put together a public-interest litigation against Section 377. ‘Besides just coming out and shouting from the rooftops, trying to change the law was the only thing we could do,’ says Rakesh, who now lives with his partner of seven years in Delhi.

The everyday harassment of gay men by police and thugs also strengthened Rakesh’s resolve to fight the law. Gay men were rarely prosecuted under Section 377, but they were often intimidated or exploited because of it.

Once, while he was coordinating the Naz Foundation’s ‘men who have sex with men’ programme, a whole group of men with whom Rakesh had been working were badly beaten up. ‘A bunch of gay boys who were walking home from the support meeting were attacked by some street boys,’ says Rakesh. ‘They had iron bars and hockey sticks. Many of the boys I knew got their heads smashed that night and were taken to hospital.’

‘We knew who did it. I wanted to make a police complaint but we couldn’t because of the law,’ says Rakesh. ‘The police had a history of raiding groups working with gay men and of rounding up and arresting outreach workers,’ he says. ‘So we were afraid.’ The men who were beaten up were also afraid to speak out. ‘They were not ready to own up to being gay publicly; they thought they would be criminalised,’ he says. ‘In the end we made no complaint.’

Activist journey

Rakesh’s journey to becoming a gay rights activist and legal victor began when, as an 11-year-old schoolboy in Delhi, he realised he was attracted to men. He describes growing up surrounded by a ‘conspiracy of silence’, in which nobody even spoke of the possibility of homosexuality. ‘I would have been happy to hear something I could latch onto or fight with, but there was just silence, nothing,’ he says.

‘There was this hypocrisy. It’s okay to do what you want to do in the bedroom but you don’t talk about it in the living room. I used to find that appalling.’

He got into gay activism in his twenties, finding that voicing what he felt about the state of affairs ‘began to heal the years of silence and oppression that I felt as a gay boy growing up’.

But before he could go public, he had to tell his mother. After keeping his sexuality secret from family and friends for a decade Rakesh came out to his mum, who delighted him by replying simply, ‘So what?’ Most gay Indians do not have the privilege of being born to such liberal parents.

After coming out to his family, he began working with gay organisations, starting with the Humsafar Trust in Mumbai and then the Naz Foundation in Delhi. ‘I became a very openly out gay rights activist,’ he says. ‘I used to write a magazine column, I did training workshops and seminars, I was very vocal in the media, I organised protests and I did a lot of work with the National Human Rights Council on the psychiatric mistreatment of homosexual clients by the medical fraternity.’

Rakesh did not expect legal victory to come so soon – the petition had been winding its way round the country’s judicial pipelines for years – but credits the judicial change of heart to two things: ‘the HIV/Aids argument’ and a groundswell of public activism.

Gay men are up to eight times more likely to contract HIV than the average Indian, and many groups lobbied for Section 377 to be overturned on the grounds that it pushes gay men underground, making them more vulnerable to HIV. NACO, the government’s HIV/Aids control body, came out against Section 377 in 2006, arguing that the law made HIV prevention more difficult. The health minister Anbumani Ramadoss and many AIDS organisations, including the Indian HIV/Aids Alliance, where Rakesh now works, have also called for the law to be abolished in order to protect public health.

Opening the floodgates

Social pressure from around the country, but particularly the big cities, has also grown hugely in the past few years. ‘The floodgates have opened,’ says Rakesh. Cities such as Delhi and Mumbai have held gay pride marches; young gay people and their families have been interviewed by journalists on primetime TV; Bollywood films now have gay characters. Bombay Dost, a gay magazine, has been relaunched and is no longer sold wrapped in brown paper. This cultural shift ‘probably gave the court some degree of comfort to believe that the population was ready for change,’ says Rakesh.

Now that homosexuality has been decriminalised by the high court the government will discuss formally repealing Section 377. But there is also plenty of opposition to a change in the law. Religious groups, leaders of the BJP (the Hindu nationalist party), and millions of ordinary Indians, especially those in rural areas, still find homosexuality unacceptable.

This social discrimination will be much slower to budge. ‘In small towns in India it’s still virtually impossible to come out to your family,’ he says. ‘Even in Delhi most young gay men find it hard to come out.’ Many men succumb to the social pressure around them and keep their sexuality secret. When Rakesh was in his late teens he asked a man he’d met at a cruising spot whether he would ever get married (to a woman). ‘I already am,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t everyone?’

Rakesh no longer sees himself as a political activist. But the legal change he helped to bring about has set a host of new challenges for the next generation of activists – to make social change follow legal change, and to campaign for all the rights that straight people take for granted.

‘I don’t think people are just going to change their opinions overnight because of the law,’ says Rakesh. ‘Stigma and years and years of socialisation don’t get changed overnight, but it’s a start.’

Global developments in gay rights

Venezuela

A law was proposed earlier this year that would legalise same-sex civil unions in Venezuela. It has passed through one round of discussion in the national assembly but it has faced strong opposition from Venezuela’s episcopal church, which has publicly condemned the proposal. The proposed law would also accord equal rights to transexual people.

Zimbabwe

Gay rights campaigners in Zimbabwe believe they have a 50-50 chance of getting gay, lesbian and bisexual people protected under the country’s new constitution, which is currently being drafted. At the moment sex between men is illegal. Keith Goddard, director of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, says that the best chance of success is to argue for the law to be repealed in the name of HIV prevention.

Pakistan

The supreme court in Islamabad has ordered that transgender people should receive equal protection and support from the government. The interior ministry has also been directed to ensure police provide protection to trans people from criminal elements. Gay sex is still illegal.

Burundi

Gay rights took a step back in Burundi in April this year after the government criminalised homosexuality for the first time in the country’s history. Gay men who are prosecuted can be punished with up to two years in prison.

Much of the English panic is merely a belated recognition of the reality of demography: south Asia is where the vast majority of cricket fans reside, and over the long run that’s bound to affect the game’s governance.

More important than the geographical shift are the changes in the structure of the game accompanying it. For the first time since the early 19th century, cricket teams will be privately owned. The eight city-based teams have been auctioned off to consortia that include major Indian industrial houses, as well as a smattering of Bollywood royalty. The new franchises can be bought and sold, along with their assets (the players). The profits they generate belong exclusively to the owners.

So the big story here is not the shift of power to India but the incipient privatisation of cricket. Like other privatisations, this one grants monopoly privileges to the privateers – allowing them exclusive licence to exploit a public asset in a given market – while also guaranteeing them an income stream from broadcasting rights. Meanwhile, responsibility for grass roots development is dumped back on the quasi-public local and state cricket associations.

At the moment what’s worrying cricket-lovers is the effect IPL and other planned Twenty-20 leagues will have on the cricket calendar as a whole. Since Twenty-20 offers far greater financial rewards than other current versions of the game, isn’t it inevitable that it will supplant those other versions? And will what’s left behind warrant the kind of devotion that cricket has elicited in the past?

Cricket’s strange fate is to find itself at the epicentre of burgeoning Indian economic power. IPL-style entertainment seems an apt reflection of the ‘aspirational’ culture of a self-aggrandising wealthy minority in a society still saddled with mass poverty. It is the celebration of a global elite whose services are contracted to the highest corporate bidder, slickly packaged and easily digestible. As a sporting spectacle, Twenty-20 consists of a rapid-fire sequence of contrived climaxes. It distends cricket’s classical equation of runs, wickets and time: runs and wickets are both been devalued, and time is the primary engine driving the drama. With its emphasis on celebrity and instantaneous impact, it’s closer in spirit to Big Brother and Pop Idol than it is to Test cricket.

For more see www.mikemarqusee.com

For some, this historical trinity will serve to highlight the rise, fall and more recent resurgence of India as a global power. When the East India Company was first established on new year’s eve 1600, Mughal India commanded 22 per cent of global GDP, with Britain producing less than a tenth as much. By the time Britain finally departed India’s shores three and a half centuries later, its national income was more than 50 per cent greater than its former colony. Now, of course, India is once more seen as a global economic star, confidently shaking off its imperial past.

Down with the East India Company!

Yet it would be wrong simply to consign the East India Company to a box marked ‘fallen empires’. Since India is often the place where corporate practice is seen at its most extreme, whether at Union Carbide’s Bhopal factory or Enron’s Dabhol power project, or now with Wal- Mart entering India’s retail markets, it is useful to see how the East India Company twisted the region’s economy in the first era of corporate globalisation.

The rise and fall of this mother of the modern corporation exposed on a global stage a level of malpractice that terrified its contemporaries and prefigured today’s crisis of market power, financial speculation and evasion of accountability. From the beginning, the company was controversial in Britain for the monopoly control it had over all trade with Asia. Its closeness with the court often spilled over into naked corruption.

But it was with the acquisition of Bengal, which followed in the wake of Plassey, that the company became the focus of powerful criticism from those who feared that its new-found wealth would be used to subvert Britain’s hardwon liberties. For one writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1767, the issue at stake was ‘whether the freedom or the slavery of this island shall result’, defiantly concluding his piece by declaring,’Down with that rump of unconstitutional power, the East India Company!’

Driven on by a relentless desire for executive and shareholder gain, the company crashed following the implosion of the ‘Bengal bubble’ on the London stock market in 1769.That same year, perhaps as many as 10 million Bengalis starved in a cruel famine made worse by the company’s hoarding of limited grain stocks and its decision to raise the rate of taxation to maintain its revenues.

In the decades that followed, some of the leading minds of the age sought to expose the company’s oppressive practices in India.The company became the subject of ferocious critique in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, in which Smith argued that over-mighty corporations were just as much the enemy of the open market as the over-mighty state. The philosopher-politician, Edmund Burke, took up the baton, introducing legislation in 1783 to make the company accountable to parliament. Burke argued that its corporate charter carried with it intrinsic duties: ‘This nation never did give a power without imposing a proportionable degree of responsibility.’

When this measure failed as a result of an unholy alliance of business and court, Burke took up an almost hopeless struggle to impeach the company’s most senior executive in India, the former governor-general Warren Hastings. In spite of Smith’s profound analysis and Burke’s passionate rhetoric, imperial interests won out against principle, consigning India to an empire of extraction and scorn.

To have the founder of liberal economics and the father of modern conservatism both struggling to tame the company says something for the bipartisan threat that this corporation posed to Enlightenment Britain. And they were joined by many others, among them poets, playwrights and pamphleteers, who expected future generations to take a similarly hard look at the company’s performance as a corporation.

‘Historians of other nations (if not our own),’ wrote the poet Richard Clarke in 1773,’will do justice to the oppressed of India and will hand down the Memory of the Oppressors to the latest Posterity.’ In the introduction to his long satire entitled The Nabob, or Asiatic Plunders, Clarke urged on his fellow countrymen ‘to perpetuate an honest indignation against these enemies of mankind’.

And, of course, it was East India Company tea that was dumped by American patriots in Boston harbour in December 1773, with one activist arguing that they were faced with ‘the most powerful Trading Company in the Universe’, an institution ‘well-versed in tyranny, plunder, oppression and bloodshed’.The uprising that eventually led to America’s independence was sparked as much by hostility to corporate monopoly as it was to taxation without representation.

Now it’s our turn

From the ruins of the East India Company’s fort at the pepper port of Tellicherry on the west coast to the grandeur of Chennai’s Fort St George on the east, the company’s physical presence in India continues to impress today.The mark is greatest in Kolkata, a ‘company town’ of immense proportions.

This physical presence is matched by a powerful legacy presence in India’s public memory, stretching back to the nationalist struggle for independence. For India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the company lay at the root of the oppression that he had fought against.’The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of British rule in India,’ Nehru thundered in The Discovery of India, ‘is something which passes comprehension.’ ‘It is significant,’ Nehru noted, ‘that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is loot.’

This critical analysis continues to lie close to the surface today. In September 2006, for example, opponents to a planned coalmine at Phulbari in Bangladesh accused the British firm,Asia Energy, of behaving like the East India Company. For many Indians the company’s story has two profound morals: first, that multinational companies want not just trade, but power; and second that division and betrayal among south Asians facilitates foreign rule.

A new mood of national assertiveness is impacting upon India’s handling of the company’s legacy.Writing recently in the Financial Times, the chief executive of Ranbaxy, Malvinder Hohan Singh, caught the mood.’Five hundred years ago, a company was formed in London that directly led to British rule in India,’ he wrote.’There appears to be some concern that there is evidence of a reverse trend.’

This theme of reversal has also influenced India’s popular media, most strikingly in the TV advertisement for Rajnigandha pan masala. Set in London, the advert shows an Indian tycoon stopping his car in front of the East India Company’s headquarters and telling his secretary that he wants to buy the firm: ‘They ruled us for 200 years, and now it’s our turn.’

Reckoning with John Company

The East India Company deserves to be looked at as what it was – a profit-making corporation that generated great wealth, but contributed to immense suffering. Just as corporations today should be judged by the impacts of their core business rather than their often peripheral donations to charitable causes, so the East India Company has to be assessed on the basis of its underlying activities rather than the occasional philanthropy of its executives.

The continuing reluctance in Britain to examine the full scope of the East India Company’s impact is part of a more general amnesia about the historical role of business. It remains an oddity that although companies are among the most powerful institutions of the modern age, our histories still focus on the actions of states and individuals, politics and culture, rather than on corporations, their executives and the consequences of their activities. If we are to fully understand our corporate present, then we must understand our corporate past – and this means grappling with the legacy of John Company.

Far from being a dusty relic, the East India Company demonstrates that the quest for corporate accountability is a perpetual exercise in controlling the energies of merchants and entrepreneurs so that their private passions do not undermine the public interest. For Britain, much can be gained by confronting this legacy.

From Adam Smith, we can draw the imperative of keeping corporate size in check – of special importance in today’s economy, where globalisation is fostering ever-increasing commercial concentration. And from Burke we can take the essential importance of placing corporate conduct within a framework of justice, establishing legal mechanisms to hold corporations to account, and fill the void that allows scandals such as Bhopal to continue largely unaddressed.

At its heart, the East India Company’s business model combined speculation at home with aggression abroad. It was Karl Marx, writing in the 1850s as the company limped towards its end in the bloody ‘mutiny’, who pithily captured the drive that lay behind its remorseless rise to power. It was not any imperial project that had led it on, he wrote, but rather the company had ‘conquered India to make money out of it’.This applies to this day.

To borrow a couplet from Ghalib, the Urdu poet who saw his beloved Shahjahanabad (Delhi) destroyed by the British at the Mutiny’s end:

zakhm gardab gaya, lahu na thama,

‘though the wound is hidden, the blood does not cease to flow’.

Nick Robins is author of The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company shaped the modern multinational (Pluto Press, 2006).

For details of activites around the 150th anniversary of the 1857 war of Indian independence, contact committee1857@yahoo.co.uk

The delegates were launching the ‘referendum campaign’. Over the next 12 months the APNA hopes to ask Pakistan Kashmir’s 3. 2 million residents one simple question: do they want freedom from or accession to Pakistan? ‘I believe there will be a thumping majority in favour of freedom,’ says Arif Shahid, APNA chairperson and brain behind the campaign. ‘The time for a real referendum on Kashmir has come.’

There is nothing unusual about the aspiration. Kashmiri nationalists have been fighting for the reunification of their state ever since it was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1948. What is unusual is the brazenness. Nationalist parties are banned in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Neelum View is the glitziest hotel in Muzaffarabad, hosting Pakistani politicians and army generals alike. From where did the APNA get its temerity? The answer is as simple as it is tragic, says Shahid: the earthquake that last year destroyed large swathes of his country.

‘We lost thousands of our people and scores of our villages. But there’s no doubt the earthquake helped our cause. There is now an international presence and media in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. They see the political realities. And they are favourable to us.’

The call for an independent Kashmir has long been muffled by India and Pakistan’s rival claims on the territory, which have caused two of their three wars. Pakistan’s argument is that as a Muslim majority state Kashmir should be ‘free’ to accede to the Islamic Republic. India says Kashmir is an ‘integral’ part of its secular nation and will remain so in war or peace. Both sides are ready to fight ‘to the very last Kashmiri’, says Shahid.

The latest fight – an insurgency against army rule in India-controlled Kashmir – has been the bloodiest. Although it began as a nationalist uprising in 1989, it rapidly degenerated into a proxy war between Pakistan and India, scarred by sectarian killings, brutal army oppression and, so far, the death of at least 45,000 people, many of them civilians. Pakistani (or ‘Azad’) Kashmir has supplied the hinterland to the conflict, hosting 30,000 refugees and bases to a dozen or so pro-accession jihadist groups fighting the war on Islamabad’s behalf.

It was the presence of these ‘banned’ groups that explained Pakistan’s reluctance to open its side of Kashmir following the earthquake, says Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). ‘For 48 hours the Pakistan army dithered,’ he says. ‘In the end the scale of the disaster overwhelmed them and the army was forced to open up Azad Kashmir to international relief organisations. But there were real misgivings. First, the army knew it would expose to public view militant jihadist camps whose existence had officially been denied. And second, it understood that with such a massive international operation in place the military would lose its grip on one of the most closed areas in Pakistan.’

That is what happened. Prior to the earthquake, all land and mobile telephone links were controlled by the army, proving a major obstruction to postearthquake rescue efforts. The government was thus compelled to open lines to private mobile companies and, through them, greater telecommunications and internet access. Similarly there are now for the first time nonstate radio stations, as well as several international media networks, operating out of Muzaffarabad.

This freeing up of Kashmiri society has redounded to nationalists’ benefit more than to the jihadists or the army, says Mohammed Khaleeque, APNA spokesperson. The reason, he says, is the Islamists’ sectarian role in the anti-Indian insurgency and the army’s failure to meet people’s expectations in the aftermath of the earthquake.

‘There is a lot of anger and it has translated into political protest,’ says Khaleeque. ‘In the last 12 months we’ve seen meetings, demonstrations and showdowns with the Pakistan authorities. Sometimes the protests are over government inefficiency and corruption. But increasingly there are demands that the army withdraw from Kashmir and that our sham “autonomous” local government stand down. People want real control of their lives. All of this has strengthened the nationalists.’ Brad Adams agrees.

‘Everyone we spoke to in Indian Kashmir – activist, official and neutral – said that the growing sentiment was for independence rather than accession to India or Pakistan. I’d be amazed if that wasn’t also the case in Azad Kashmir. Kashmiris on both sides of the divide know Pakistan is not the Muslim paradise it was made out to be. My hunch is that were Kashmiris free to choose they would prefer to go their own way.’

But the fear is there will be reversion to the old ways once the emergency caused by the earthquake is over and the international agencies start to pack up and leave. Diplomats and donors say that Pakistan is already quietly urging that the aid agencies quit Kashmir sooner rather than later. It is a request the world must resist, says Adams.

‘With the earthquake, the international community has a golden opportunity to open up Azad Kashmir permanently,’ he says. ‘And $6. 5 billion in aid is a lot of leverage. I am not saying emergency humanitarian relief should be made conditional.

But development aid can be. There are a lot of demands on the world’s resources. If they are to be spent on Kashmir’s reconstruction, then it should be on condition that Pakistan respects the basic civil and political rights of the Kashmiri people.’

But the way justice is administered in the Muslim familial legal system is treating women unfairly, according to Muslim women activists. And some of them are trying to change it.

The existence of religious autonomy in family law recently came into the public spotlight in a somewhat bizarre fashion in India. In March, a Muslim Indian man, Aftab Ansari, was ruled by a village council in West Bengal to have divorced his wife because he had accidentally uttered the Urdu word for divorce, ‘talaq’, three times during his sleep.

His wife of 11 years heard him, and when the village council found out it decreed that this constituted a divorce, even though Ansari said he had no intention of leaving her.

Sameera Khan, a Mumbaibased activist and journalist, complains that according to Islamic law a husband can divorce his wife just by saying ‘I divorce you’ three times. The wife, however, does not have similar rights. Khan’s current work involves the study of the Indian public space and how it affects women. She looks to the future optimistically as there are a growing number of Muslim women’s groups in Mumbai seeking to challenge this inequality.

Hasina Khan is the coordinator of Aawaaz-e-Niswaan (Voice of the Women); her group strives to make polygamy illegal in India.

Noorjehan Safia Niaz, of the Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG), also works to secure more rights for women in India’s Muslim family law. In 2005, Niaz protested loudly against the All India Muslim Personal Law Board when it stated that Muslim law made the wife subservient to her husband.

‘Islam gives more rights to women than any other religion,’ says Sona Khan, a Muslim women’s rights attorney in Delhi.

‘But politically, Islam has dropped gender protection rights.’ Khan was an attorney for Shah Bano, whose mid-1980s Indian supreme court case ended in a ruling that a Muslim woman in a divorce could be granted maintenance, or alimony, which was different from the Muslim law.

Despite that ruling, Muslim communities in India today can still control how divorces are administered. Khan considers herself a practising Muslim, but she believes that India’s democracy is weakened by what she calls ‘regionalism’. ‘[Muslims] can’t run a parallel system of the administration of justice,’ she says.

Sameera Khan laments the fact that Muslim women in India have long been stuck in a political bind. During the British occupation, she says, Muslims were taken up with fighting colonialism. So women who may have felt slighted by inequality were discouraged from calling for change in their community, for fear that the independence movement would be splintered. She says Muslim women are in a similar situation in India today.

India is home to the second largest Muslim community in the world (after Indonesia). But Muslims comprise only 16. 2 per cent of the overall population, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), although currently in opposition, continues to promote a political platform that stands against the ‘appeasement’ of the Muslim minority. On the world stage, meanwhile, Khan believes that Muslims feel confronted by Europe and by the US. Thus, Muslim women feel that their religion is fighting for equality with other religions, so now is not the time to rock the proverbial boat.

‘When do we fight for our rights?’ Khan asks rhetorically. ‘The woman’s question is always to be answered later. It’s tough being Muslim,’ she says. ‘It’s even tougher to be a Muslim woman.’