Sushmita Banerjee's killing: India in touch with Afghanistan

[pakistani342]

Have to say the woman had balls and pretty big ones.

I think she also ran a dispensary for women that was shuttered by the Taliban

....

original article here


Friday, Sep 6, 2013, 19:31 IST | Place: New Delhi/Kolkata | Agency: IANS
Banerjee, 49, was dragged out of her home and shot dead by suspected Taliban gunmen in Sharan city of Afghanistan's Paktika province on Wednesday night.

India is in touch with the Afghan government over the gunning down of Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, whose killing has shocked West Bengal. Her family on Friday demanded her mortal remains be brought back to Kolkata.

While New Delhi pursued the matter with Kabul, the fatal shooting of Banerjee, whose best selling book detailed the horrors she endured during Taliban rule in Afghanistan, has left the literati in West Bengal shocked and disturbed.

Banerjee, 49, was dragged out of her home and shot dead by suspected Taliban gunmen in Sharan city of Afghanistan's Paktika province on Wednesday night.

"We are already in touch and contact," External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid told the media persons outside parliament Friday. He called the murder "very, very distressing".

Khurshid said India and Afghanistan have "one single point of view" on women's issues and were committed "to fight this kind of inhuman treatment, particularly of women".

Banerjee defied her family to marry Afghan businessman Jaanbaz Khan, and stayed for years with him in Afghanistan. She later came back to India, and in 1998 wrote the bestselling memoir "Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou" (A Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife), offering a vivid description of the suffering of women under the Taliban.

She also described her daring escape from the clutches of militants. The book made her a household name in Bengal.

Gopal Banerjee, the author's younger brother, said in Kolkata they will move a request to the external affairs ministry to recover her body and "have it sent back to us".

Banerjee's kin say she was "desperate" to return to Afghanistan, and did not heed their advice to stay on in India. They said she wanted to write another book on the lives of Afghan women.

"We had warned her not to go (to Afghanistan). But she was sort of desperate in nature from the outset. We had told her that the Taliban would not let her live in peace as she had written so much about them... but she did not listen to us. She wanted to go back immediately," Gopal Banerjee said.

The writer's family suspect a conspiracy in her killing.

"Why she (Sushmita) alone was killed while the rest of the family was left untouched? Did the killers tie the rest of the family members to actually protect them? Why did her husband not try to contact us after the tragedy?" Banerjee's sister-in-law Debolina Banerjee told IANS in Kolkata.

News of her death cast a gloom in West Bengal, with Magsaysay Award winner Mahasweta Devi saying: "It is tragic...."

Noted author Shirshendu Mukherjee expressed shock, and marvelled at the courage of Banerjee. "I had read her book, but I didn't know her personally. She was a courageous woman and she faced many hardships," he said.

Sahitya Akademi awardee Shankha Ghosh told IANS: "This is shocking. If the Taliban is doing all this, then it goes against civilisation."

Banerjee was also the subject of the 2003 Bollywood film, "Escape From Taliban", featuring Manisha Koirala. The film described itself as the "story of a woman who dares the Taliban".

Celebrated Indian columnist and novelist Shobhaa De equated Banerjee's death to the attack on Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai in October 2012 by the Taliban.

"Another Malala. R.I.P. Sushmita Banerjee. Intellectual martyr," tweeted De.

Malala was shot by the Taliban for promoting education for girls in Pakistan's Khyber PukhtoonKhwa province where extremists had issued a diktat banning education for females.

 

[pakistani342]

Another article on this topic (original here)

.....


The brutal killing of the Bengali writer and women's rights activist, Sushmita Banerjee, in Paktika province of eastern Afghanistan is a tragic end to a brave life and a reminder of the extraordinary risks Indians take to foster a better world. Banerjee's cold-blooded murder by Islamist terrorists is an attempted assassination of the universal ideas she stood for in a bleak environment of generalised war and religious fundamentalism.

What did Banerjee represent? Her values posed a serious threat to the extreme forms of patriarchy emanating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. She became a martyr in the meat grinder of war zones where voices of dignity and decency are silenced by the gun to sustain the ideological basis for cultural repression of society.

That Banerjee had opened a medical dispensary for women in the early 1990s from her home in Afghanistan drew the ire of the then newly ascendant Taliban. Despite the fact that she had converted to Islam for safety and acceptance into her Afghan husband's family, her origin as an Indian and her attempt to mobilise local Afghan women around the issue of healthcare were interpreted by hardcore Islamists as an unacceptable combination that had to be terminated.

Hardline Islamists are riled by individuals or groups that could show by example, even if they are apolitical in their advocacy, visions of alternative futures for women. Banerjee's stated aim of working to raise awareness about "the conditions women in Afghanistan live under" and her missionary zeal to keep going back to that country to "free" its women through quiet, grassroots-based interventions disturbed the Islamist world view of the female as subordinate and incapable of determining the socio-economic structures.

Banerjee's quest for finding meaning in her own life by supporting her Afghan sisters bears strong parallels to that of the Pakistani teenager and international celebrity, Malala Yousafzai, who miraculously escaped death after being shot in the head by the Taliban in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Control over the mind and the body are essential for Islamists to maintain their authority on civilian populations living under their thumb. The Taliban know that education and health are the key variables that have long-term impact in undermining radicalism and obscurantist restrictions on women. Both Banerjee and Malala were deemed 'enemies of the faith' on the grounds that they were subtly posing a challenge to the conservative moral universe constructed by Islamists and their followers in the Pashtun communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Insurgent groups fighting against their governments and foreign enemies do not tolerate insubordination or sedition among their own constituents on whose behalf they wage their self-determination wars. Banerjee, who had integrated well into Afghan society and taken the name Sayeda Kamala, was a "traitor" in the eyes of her assassins for disseminating the wrong messages that were corrupting women to take charge of the well-being of their families.

Although Afghanistan has witnessed repeated targeted killings of Indian civilians as a means of scaring away the Indian government's reconstruction programmes, an estimated 3,000 of them continue to serve there in the United Nations system, in aid agencies, in consulates and embassies and in private corporations involved in reconstruction work.

What makes them tick in an environment where being Indian is a life-endangering tag? My interactions with some of them elicited responses that they love performing their 'duty' towards their employers. The fairly large cohort of Indian professionals continues to stay its ground in Afghanistan despite hostile circumstances and renders services with trademark Indian efficiency and conscientiousness.

The Taliban, the Haqqani network, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and other anti-India forces closely associated with Pakistan's intelligence services have taken many cheap shots at these committed Indian citizens out of spite for India's popularity and influence in Afghanistan. Strategic fears of a lasting liberal Indian impact on Afghanistan's culture and economy are also background factors for the terrorist strikes on Indian nationals.

Banerjee was a rare species lacking publicly known connections to governments, international organisations or private enterprises. The usual suspicion in a war zone that an Indian national like her could also be a spy for India's external intelligence agencies in Afghanistan would have added to the venomous rationale which took her life. But her solidarity with Afghan women derived neither from official strategic intent of New Delhi nor the liberal discourse of international institutions that *** the war-ravaged landscape of Afghanistan.

Her story was deeply personal — one of marrying an Afghan for love by defying social taboos in Hindu society and then adopting the struggle of Afghan women as her own. She was a symbol of the free Indian spirit that operates non-violently and altruistically at the global level by integrating into local milieus in different corners of the world and trying to transform its surroundings in a progressive direction. At the time of her untimely death, she was authoring a new book whose protagonist was an Afghan girl child trying to navigate the Taliban's sexual terrorism.

Sushmita Banerjee was an international Indian who gave her life to inspire like-minded souls to keep doing the right thing. Her ghastly end is a reminder that Afghanistan needs more purposeful and sustained external support for individuals sticking their necks out to improve the social indicators of that country.

The writer is dean, Jindal School of International Affairs.

 

[livingdead]

Taliban has denied killing her, may be they dont want to be seen killing women.