Articles by Asghar Ali Engineer

enhances emotional stress and tensions.
To compound matters, in Jamabaihar village, all land is owned by a single bhumihar landlord. Though originally their own, inability to pay revenue, made the bhumihar intervene and do so. Gradually, along with the revenue receipts, he also got the land recorded in his own name, rendering the local people landless. The women lease in the same land from the bhumihar, but in the absence of irrigation are able to cultivate only one maize crop on the land, 50 per cent of the yield of which goes to the landlord as rent. Cash advances taken for agriculture have to be returned with 100 per cent interest after the harvest. With men away, women have the sole responsibility of caring for their homes and cattle, and hence are forced to look for jobs as wage labour in the surrounding villages. This brings us back full circle to the woman labourer, faced with prospects of sexual harassment, unable to satisfy the needs of her children or nurture personal relationships. Not only in the case of migrant women, but here too, children are gradually drawn into the workforce, in a supportive role, if not directly.

Asghar Ali Engineer State, Nation and Ethnicity in South Asia by Ishtiaq Ahmed; Pinter, London and New York, 1996; pp 326, price not stated.
THE whole of south Asia is facing the acute challenge of ethnic trouble, be it Sri Lanka, India. Pakistan, Bangladesh or Bhutan. The process of nation-building is proving to be a most challenging one. Specially so as the former colonial masters had drawn arbitrary boundaries and building cohesive nations within them is no easy task. From hindsight it can be said that it was perhaps easier to get freedom from western imperialism and much more difficult to build nations out of what it left behind. When we were fighting against the British we were united but differences cropped up once they left and the process of nation-building started. Of course communal differences had cropped up before independence itself resulting in the vivisection of the country, but ethnic differences emerged only later.

Religious Fanaticism and Communalism Asghar Ali Engineer RELIGIOUS fanaticism and communalism are two different things yet they have many similarities. Sometimes it becomes difficult to draw a line between the two. These two words are often used interchangeably though not justifiably. We have to understand their proper connotations. It is always not possible to define every concept correctly and precisely. Each living concept is rooted in human life and, like it, tends to be very complex, hiding within it various dimensions. Yet we cannot do without definitions. We shall try to define both fanaticism and communalism to convey some of their relevant aspects, it not all.

the Lal Nishan Party, with LNP activists not only operating in his unions but even contesting and winning elections on Kamgar Aghadi tickets. Reluctant to associate himself with the IPF in the early 1980s, during the last 10 years Samant had also overcome much of this earlier inhibition. In 1987, he shared a platform with Nagbhushan Patnaik in the workers' convention held by IPF at Ambernath. In September 1995, he addressed the inaugural rally of the AICCTU's Third National Conference in Patna. And since December 1995, his Maharashtra Girni Kamgar Union has been waging joint actions with AICCTU-affiliated textile workers' unions in UP, Gujarat and Bihar under the banner of the Save NTC Action Committee. In the otherwise increasingly bipolar politics of Maharashtra dominated by the Congress and the BJP-Shiv Sena combine, Samant was a consistent advocate of a third front building bridges between the dalit. Left and other secular political streams.

Asghar Ali Engineer Colonisation of Islam by Jamal Malik; Manohar, Delhi, 1996; pp 359.
is the degree to which one attains those goals which governs the value, respect and authority with which one is publicly endowed. This also governs the feeling of power that one experiences. But when a public political order of ranking is lacking, the activity of self-overcoming lacks either a direction, or the conditions of its public significance, that is the public ranking of virtues.