Image courtesy: AIKS
Today, Kisan leaders Hetram Beniwal and Sheopat Meghwal were released unconditionally and it was also reported that the Rajasthan Home Minister has assured in the Assembly that all Kisan leaders including AIKS Vice President Amraram and Rajasthan Sabha President Pemaram will also be released. Earlier, trying to pre-empt a large scale farmers’ protest scheduled for February 22, around Jaipur-Sikar National highway, the Rajasthan government had launched an intensive crackdown on farmer leaders. The call for the protest was given under the leadership of All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS).
AIKS Joint Secretary Vijoo Krishnan, Rajasthan Kisan Sabha Vice President Dulichand and Treasurer Gurcharan Singh Mour, Sumitra Chopra Jaipur District Secretary of CPI-M, Manoj Kumar from AIKS Centre and Pawan Beniwal Joint Secretary of SFI met AIKS Vice President Amraram and others in Jaipur Central Jail, where more than 185 Kisan leaders and activists are still jailed.
The farmers have decided to intensify the struggle from today. Despite the intensive repression yesterday, AIKS president Dr. Ashok Dhawale, AIKS Joint Secretary Dr. Vijoo Krishnan and AIKS Rajasthan treasurer Gurcharan Singh Mour were able to address two large gatherings of thousands of farmers who had blocked the highway. The AIKS leaders then reached Sikar, where as many as 25,000 farmers including women were militantly protesting and due to the continued arrests, have decided to intensify the struggle. Until all the leaders were free and demands met, the protests would continue including a call for a Chakka Jam tomorrow, on February 24. The peasant struggle, in the backdrop of the recent Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha by-elections results has put the BJP government on a defensive.
Farmers in Rajasthan had launched a protest in September 2017, which lasted for 13 days starting September 1. They demanded peasant loan waiver, remunerative prices, pension to poor peasants and agricultural workers and implementation of Swaminathan Committee recommendations etc. The scale of the protest had compelled the BJP state government to concede to some of these demands. However, even after six months since those promises were made, the state government led by Vasundhara Raje Scindia remains utterly unresponsive to any of the assurances it had given. Protesting against this, the Kisan Sabha had given a call for a massive state wide Kisan Mahapadav in Jaipur on February 22.
Unleashing a shameless wave of repression, the Rajasthan state government had arrested former AIKS President Amra Ram, Pema Ram, Hetram Beniwal, Sheopat Ram and over 1000 other Kisan Sabha leaders have been arrested in various parts of Rajasthan. Not only this, peasants were forcibly stopped from leaving their districts, especially on the national highway outside Jaipur. The frightful repression could not deter thousands of farmers who have gathered in Jaipur outside the Kisan Sabha office, where police was been posted in huge numbers.
The AIKS leaders along with several state leaders of the AIKS, CITU, AIDWA, SFI, DYFI Ravindra Shukla, Duli Chand, Gurcharan Singh Mour, Sanjay Madhav, Kusum Sainwal, Mahipal Charan, and leaders of other organisations addressed the farmers yesterday, on February 22. In a press conference, Dr Ashok Dhawale and Vijoo Krishnan, denouncing the state repression demanded for the release of Kisan Sabha leaders along with stringent implementation of the demands that were agreed upon September 13. They also called for BJP’s defeat in the coming elections as well as the emergence of a left democratic alliance.
https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/all-india-farmers-conference-kicks-impressive-start
https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/farm-loan-waivers-are-necessity-if-farmer-suicides-needs-be-curbed-aiks
https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/rajasthan-farmers-massive-protest-curb-democratic-freedoms-govt
Soon it will be a month since a young photographer Ankit Saxena was murdered for being in love with a Muslim girl in west Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar. Much has already been said in the media about the brutal murder while the detained perpetrators have admitted to their crime. But before his death is forgotten under the burden of other trendy news, some of us from the forum ‘Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy’ decided to visit Ankit’s family and express our concern, even though a bit late. With me were Zulaikha Jabeen and Dr. Rahul.
As we were moving towards Ankit’s house in Raghubir Nagar in an e-rickshaw we noticed an ongoing fight on the busy road – a few truck drivers were apparently beating up another man near some parked trucks. Shocked to see this, we asked the e-rickshaw driver to stop in case we could stop the beating. But instead of stopping, he increased his speed, saying, “if you intervene, you will get beaten up”.
He continued driving despite our requests to stop. This is the typical crowd mentality in India, which even Ankit’s parents saw with onlookers on February 1, as they tried to save their son from being attacked by the girl’s family. This is one of the regrets that Ankit’s father Yashpal has: “No one from the crowd came forward to helpmy son”.
Ankit’s murder was chilling – his mother saw the son’s throat being slit by a sharp knife – a fact that would shock anyone. While they were rushing him to the hospital, the mother tried to stop the bleeding by putting her hand on the throat, but noticed her fingers going right into the slit throat. “It was all over in three seconds”, said the father, “My life was turned over in three seconds”.
Ankit was their only child and a bread-earner since the father is in his sixties and a heart patient. Ankit had just begun rising in his career as a wedding photographer, and no less than a handsome model himself as his portraits at home reveal. Some of his photos show him in backdrops of different religious spaces such as a gurudwara or a mosque.
In these times when countless couples deciding to marry outside their religion or caste in India are being attacked either by mobs or their own relatives, this murder was bound to bring a communal backlash since a Muslim family was involved in killing a Hindu boy. Raghubir Nagar and surrounding areas were surely tense for a few days after the murder. But Ankit’s father, despite his personal tragedy, saved a larger tragedy from happening by appealing to the people through media not to see the perpetrators as Muslim.
Not only that. He now wants to keep his son’s memory and legacy alive by creating an institution or group that will carry on the message of love and harmony. However, the parents do not have the means to even carry out their daily lives, which involve treatment of their illnesses – Ankit’s mother has high blood pressure and diabetes.
It is unfortunate that despite Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal meeting them thrice, the government has not provided any sort of monetary help or compensation for the loss of their child. It had promised them free medical help in a government hospital, but after consulting a doctor there, the couple had to pay for medicines worth Rs. 2,000 from their own pocket. They are mostly being taken care of by their nephew Ashish Duggal and few other relatives – Ashish doing much of the legal formalities at the moment.
After meeting the family and discussing their various requirements, we felt that some funds need to be raised to not only take care of their immediate medical needs, but also to fulfill Yashpal Saxena’s wish to create a group or institution for peace and social harmony. There can be no better cause than this for all of us to pool in our resources to deal with the trauma of the Saxena family at this moment.
Kindly contact us if you wish to contribute for this cause. Details about how to make your contributions will soon be available on www.imsd.in, www.ektara.org and other websites.
February 23, 2018 marks the 27th anniversary of Kunan Poshpora mass gang rape case. Two contiguous villages from North Kashmir, Kunan and Poshpora, on that cold and dark night of February 23, 1991 experienced a massive sexual assault by a group of soldiers and officers of the 4th Rajputana Rifles regiment of Indian army. As many as 32 women had openly alleged rape in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Though, the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission had validated the claims of sexual assault against these women, the perpetrators remain yet to be prosecuted.
After many instances of distortions, cover-ups and humiliation of survivors, in 2016, five women namely Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Samreena Mushtaq, Munaza Rashid and Natasha Rather came up with the book, “Do you remember Kunan Poshpora”. The book is a tale of the many legal battles the women waged in order to get justice, as also an evidence of the resilience of Kashmiri women. It documents the experience of filing the PIL that as many as 50 women filed in 2013 in before the Jammu and Kashmir High Court seeking to reopen the case. Though the High Court rejected the petition after three hearings, the legal battle was restarted with a fresh series of petitions.
In this conversation with CJP, Ifrah Butt, a young activist, a petitioner of the PIL in Kunan Poshpora case and also the co-author of the book, takes us through the deep dungeons of memory and urges us to remember and support the survivors in their struggle for justice and dignity.
As many as 11 states and four union territories (UTs) have not announced any change in the additional salary paid to anganwadi (courtyard shelter or creches) workers (AWWs) and anganwadi helpers (AWHs) since 2015, according to government data.
India utilises the services of 1.18 million AWWs and 1.16 million AWHs under anganwadi services in the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), an early childhood care and development programme to improve health and nutritional status of children between 0-6 years. The number of AWWs dropped 7% to 1.18 million in 2016 compared to 2013.
AWWs and AWHs are part time “honorary workers” from the local community who provide government services to children, pregnant and nursing women.
AWWs and AWHs are already overburdened and underpaid for the various services that they are expected to render under ICDS. AWWs have been forced to shell out money from their own pockets due to delays.
Nearly 40% of anganwadi workers surveyed in 2014 in six states had to use their personal money to run the anganwadi centre and 35% of them had not been paid on time, according to Progress of Children Under Six, 2016, report. In some states like Tamil Nadu, where the ICDS is robust, honorarium paid to the AWHs is higher than AWWs in Uttar Pradesh, added the report.
The central government enhanced the honorarium of AWWs and AWHs by Rs 1,500 and Rs 750 per month–to Rs 3,000 and Rs 1,500 per month, respectively–with effect from April 1, 2011.
States and UTs provide additional salary to AWWs and AWHs out of their resources.
Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal have not increased salary paid to AWHs or AWWs, according to data made available as of March 2015 and December 2017 to the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament). Uttar Pradesh, with nearly 170,000 AWWs and 150,000 AWHs, increased payments to Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 per month, respectively, as of December 2017, from Rs 200 and Rs 100 per month
Delhi increased the total salary (including centre’s allocation) to Rs 9,678 for AWWs and Rs 4,839 to AWHs, the Times of India reported on July 22, 2017.
The state government has also provided an additional Rs 500 and Rs 250, respectively, for internet/mobile charges, the Hindu reported on July 22, 2017.
| States & UTs That Have Not Recorded Any Change In Anganwadi Wages |
|---|
| State/UT |
| Andhra Pradesh |
| Assam |
| Chattisgarh |
| Dadra and Nagar Haveli (UT) |
| Daman and Diu (UT) |
| J&K |
| Kerala |
| Lakshadweep (UT) |
| Madhya Pradesh |
| Manipur |
| Odisha |
| Puducherry (UT) |
| Sikkim |
| West Bengal |
| Tripura |
Source: Rajya Sabha (2017 and 2015); Data as of December 21, 2017
While Odisha hiked the remuneration of anganwadi workers from October 2017, Karnataka increased the salaries after protests by anganwadi workers.
The wage increase in news report for states like Odisha and Kerala does not reflect in the government response in Parliament.
Despite two email requests and as many calls over three weeks to the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the state government of Kerala on clarification of wages, we have not received any response. We will update the copy if and when we receive it.
This article was first published on IndiaSpend.
Justin Forsyth, ex-CEO of Save the Children UK. Credit: By DFID – UK Department for International Development, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
It is now an acknowledged fact that women staff at Save the Children UK’s Headquarters in London suffered harassment and that their leadership failed them. In its public statements SCF-UK is now all about the implementation of policy reviews and a new dawn and a readiness for root and branch reform. Justin Forsyth, the former CEO, and Brendan Cox, his former number two, have both admitted that they mistreated women. But this stems from a crisis that culminated in 2015. Why is it only being acknowledged now? Why didn’t anyone speak up?
Well, that’s the thing. Many did speak up but they were silenced. What happened at Save the Children UK wasn’t a ‘mistake’, it was a strategic choice: achieving change for children, went the argument, needed Save the Children to be firmly led by powerful charismatic leaders who ruffled feathers and who should be followed obediently by staff.
When staff started complaining about the bullying culture that was brought in by former Number 10 special advisors Forsyth and Cox, they were derided as moaners. Everyone learned that it was ‘their way or the highway.’ So when several women suffered repeated mistreatment, this was dealt with by leadership as part of the price of being an ‘effective organization’—and staff found out that it was dangerous to complain as a number of them later told the BBC.
Many kept their mouths shut, or at least complained to their peers through informal channels because they had no faith in the formal ones. The bullying and mistreatment was the worst kept secret in the development community. A great many NGO people knew about the ways in which the behavior of Cox was indulged and enabled by Save the Children’s leadership, who, as is now becoming known, did not do enough to stop it or to hold those responsible to account. But still people were reluctant to come forward. Nevertheless, some did. Complaints were made about both Cox and Forsyth, but neither was fully or properly investigated because the trustees protected their ‘star players.’
Some of the women affected said that the Chair of SCF International’s Trustees, Alan Parker, discouraged them from speaking out and left them re-traumatised. He even brought in Brunswick, the PR agency he founded, to help fend off the communications challenges of the crisis. Both Cox and Forsyth were allowed to go quietly—Forsyth to become number two at UNICEF in New York until his resignation on February 22.
The victims of Cox and Forsyth and their allies didn’t stop at telling peers, senior management and trustees about what was happening. They also went to the media. You might be wondering why all these stories of harassment and abuse are being broken by the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph—it was the Mail that originally covered Cox’s departure from the charity back in 2015. Why didn’t the complainants go to somewhere like the Guardian? They did.
These victims are not typical Mail and Telegraph readers and they understood that a story about a lack of accountability in an aid organization will likely be followed in those newspapers by calls for less foreign aid. None of the victims support that goal. What they want is aid plus accountability.
Almost all of the complainants went to the Guardian first. Different Guardian journalists were contacted, but all went quiet. One told me: “I just wanted to say I haven’t forgotten about this. Unfortunately the decision to work on the story or not is above my station, so I’m just waiting for a decision either way…” Later, when I asked if they had heard back the same journalist said: “I haven’t unfortunately. It was passed onto powers that be. At the moment it’s looking like it’s not going to run… I presume after some weighing of pros and cons.”
Not only did the Guardian not run a piece about Cox and Forsyth, they actually ran a piece by Cox. This was three months ago. Still I and others kept pressing them. To those affected it looks like some senior media people protect those who are also their personal friends—both the BBC’s Andrew Marr and Sky’s Adam Boulton have publically spoken up for the two men. Perhaps they also think that they are protecting Save the Children, but you don’t protect charities by covering up the behavior of predatory men, only by helping them free themselves from them, and if you leave it to outlets like the Daily Mail then the story gets turned into another reason to cut support for charities.
So this has been a massive disservice, and also a shocking approach to the news, as though women being harassed by powerful men should not be reported on if those men are ‘one of us.’ When the Guardian sat on the story a subsection of the whistleblowers went to the Mail and the Telegraph, who ran it with many fewer sources. The Mail ran a new story about Cox’s behavior on February 17 2018 and the Telegraph followed suit the next day. Neither mentioned Forsyth. But on February 20 the fuller story of the SCF scandal was broken by Radio 4’s PM programme by a dedicated journalist who cited three complaints by female SCF-UK staff members about threatening text messages and other behaviour. SCF-UK has admitted that these complaints were not dealt with in a satisfactory way.
Just a few hours before the PM programme, Kevin Watkins, the current CEO of Save the Children-UK and a former trustee who was one of the people supposed to be ‘governing’ Forsyth, appeared before MPs on the International Development Committee as a leader on transparency and accountability. He wasn’t asked a single question about Cox or Forsyth, or the role of Parker, or his own previous role on SCF-UK’s Board.
Several journalists told me how Forsyth and Parker can kill media stories. What made Cox so dangerous was his power, and that power came from Forsyth and Parker, but their power in turn came from how willing so many people were to participate in silence and in silencing: trustees, politicians, journalists, staff who kept quiet either out of fear of their careers or fear of hurting Save the Children, and ‘feminist leaders’ including Labour MPs like Lucy Powell and Jess Phillipswho publically praised Cox after his confession.
But now it looks like all these silencers will be defeated by the persistence and courage of a few difficult women. One of them is Brie O’Keefe, who served under Cox and whose experience at Save the Children left her feeling broken. She spoke yesterday on the record and said this: “If you look at where I am right now I am in a town called Yellowknife in Northern Canada and I am so far away from it, and I am still afraid to speak out. But I am going to do it anyways.”
When Save the Children does reform and return to its values and become a safe place for women, let’s not rewrite it as a story of how Cox and Forsyth ‘took responsibility’ and how Save the Children’s new leadership brought in a new approach. They were covering up key aspects of that story even yesterday—and still haven’t released the key documents prepared for the hearing that never happened because Cox resigned, nor those that look back and examine the whole crisis (SCF-UK has promised to release these documents later in 2018).
Remember instead the real heroes, the whistleblowers. Justin Forsyth remained the deputy director of UNICEF until February 22 2018. Alan Parker remains the chair of Save the Children International. Kevin Watkins, a trustee at the time of the scandal, succeeded Forsyth as CEO of SCF-UK and now insists that he has zero-tolerance of sexual harassment. Brie, meanwhile, lives in fear in a small town in Northern Canada. She and others like her are the real leaders of Save the Children.
This story has been updated to reflect the resignation of Justin Forsyth from his position at UNICEF on February 22 2018.
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Save the Children-UK responds 2pm February 22: “Brunswick was not instructed with regard to these matters. Save the Children has always sought to protect all employees from inappropriate comments and behaviour. If concerns about behaviour occur, there are very clear policies and processes in place to deal with them.
In 2011 and 2015, concerns were raised about inappropriate behaviour and comments by the then CEO, Justin Forsyth. In each case, the chairman instructed HR to manage the process in conjunction with an independent trustee. Two trustees carried out two separate investigations into a total of three complaints made by three female employees.
Both reviews resulted in unreserved apologies from the CEO. All the parties agreed to this and the former CEO apologised to the women in question. At that time the matters were closed.
Concerns were raised with trustees that matters should not have been left as they were and that a further review was required. The review found that HR processes had not been followed in every aspect.
In a statement on Sunday, 18 February 2018, Kevin Watkins—who was appointed CEO of Save the Children in late 2016—confirmed that he was commissioning a root and branch review of the organisational culture, examining the systems and processes that protect and preserve the safety and wellbeing of all staff, and addressing any behavioural challenges among senior leadership.
A spokesperson for Save the Children said: ‘The review will commence by the end of this week and report in June 2018. The final report will be published, shared with the Charity Commission and made available to Government and every single member of staff.”
This article was first published on opendemocracy.
In this 2005 photo, Rattan Singh Kalsi shows a photograph of his daughter, Indira, at a meeting with families of the victims of the 1985 Air India bombing.
Rattan Singh Kalsi kept photos of all his grown children in his room at the seniors’ home, but one of them towered over the rest.
The photo anchored a kind of shrine to his daughter, Indira, who had died more than 30 years earlier, just as she was entering adulthood.
Indira had grown up in Canada and Rattan had bought her a plane ticket so she could see India, the country their family had come from, and spend time with the relatives she might not get to see once the responsibilities of work and adult life set in.
Naturally, Rattan, who had been middle-aged at the time of Indira’s death, was heartbroken when she was killed in the bombing of the plane. He never recovered. He was not responsible for what had happened, but he blamed himself and lived in quiet anguish for the rest of his life.
Not long before he died, he shared his story. I was there to record it, and it was unbearably sad for both of us.
Rattan had left behind a request to scatter his and his wife’s ashes (she had died some years earlier) over the same patch of ocean where the remains of the plane carrying their daughter had splashed down.
All 329 people on board Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985, were killed, including 280 citizens or permanent residents of Canada.
They were lost to a bomb that exploded while their plane was in Irish airspace, en route from Canada to India. The bomb had been planted in Canada in an act of terror planned by extremists allegedly advocating for a separate Sikh state in the Punjab.
It was Canada’s worst mass murder, yet it is barely remembered in this country.
Today, Canadians commonly regard the bombing as an Indian tragedy, or at most an Indo-Canadian tragedy. They typically dwell on the terrorism, but rarely on the grief and hardship of fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, children, friends and neighbours left behind.
Why hasn’t this tragedy claimed a prominent place in Canadian history and public memory? Some now call it Canada’s 9/11, but until the attack in New York City some 16 years later, they didn’t call it much at all.
The Canadian families of the dead wonder year after year why no one but them seems to care, or why their grief is seen as less worthy than that of others who are more openly taken into the nation’s heart.
Yes, there was a long criminal trial, a public inquiry and an apology from the federal government for failing to prevent the bombing and for the mistreatment of the families thereafter.
The bombing was belatedly declared “a Canadian tragedy,” so Air India is part of the official record, but it does not appear to be part of the Canadian family album.
I have no personal connection to the tragedy, but our country’s broad indifference to it came to me as a surprise. A course I was teaching at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., 25 years or more after the bombing, called for a section on Air India Flight 182, but when I went to look up the scholarly research, I was astonished by how little there was.
The absence of research was consistent with the broader and more troubling fact that the bombing has never resonated as deeply with Canadians as the scale of the tragedy would suggest.
An Indo-Canadian woman shows her two-year-old grandson where the name of her husband and his grandfather, Daljit Singh Grewal, is located on a monument during a memorial marking the 25th anniversary of the Air India bombing in Vancouver, B.C., in June 2010. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
The mismatch between the tragedy itself and its significance in the public memory may have many explanations, including racism.
It could be that the bombing is regarded as an Indian issue, since it was apparently motivated by political conflicts rooted there, or as an Irish event, since the plane that had taken off in Canada exploded in Irish airspace. It may be that since most of the Canadian victims were of Indian ancestry, that their fellow Canadians discounted them as outsiders or minorities.
Whatever the reason, a great wound had been left to the families to tend to on their own, and history had closed it over, leaving barely a scar for the public to see. The wound represented not only the grief of losing one’s loved one, but the heartache of not being recognized as Canadians, and the loss not being viewed by the Canadian government and fellow citizens as a loss worthy of public mourning.
Since then, I have made it a personal and academic mission to haul this tragic event into the Canadian living room for a broader discussion, partly for the sake of the memory of those who died, and partly for the sake of those who have had to carry on without them.
In 2016, toward the end of the 30th anniversary of the tragedy, my colleagues and I organized a two-day conference at McMaster featuring family members, scholars and artists in the hope of bringing the bombing closer to its rightful place in the Canadian consciousness.
(Khursheed Ahmed)
Last year, we published an anthology, Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning that creates a different sort of public record of the bombing than official responses.
In the course of my research, I have had the difficult honour of interviewing dozens of relatives of those who perished on Air India Flight 182. They have taken me inside their pain, and I find their grief substantial, complex and palpable even after three decades.
My work has led me to understand what our country lost in the bombing, and also what we have lost by failing to include the tragedy and its living victims in our collective memory.
At the annual commemoration of the bombing in Toronto every year, Air India families come up to me and ask who I lost. To me, it’s distressing that they have come to expect that only other family members would care enough to come to a memorial service.
Slowly, I am assembling an Air India Flight 182 archive, the first of its kind, featuring families’ scrapbooks, poems, dance, kids’ paintings and recordings and transcripts of interviews with family members, to be housed at the McMaster University library and made available online for users around the world.
My hope is that it will preserve the memory of those who passed away, document the pain of their families and create resources for research that may finally connect this “Canadian tragedy” to Canada itself.
It’s high time.
This article was first published on THECONVERSATION.
Several stories are coming out Jind related to how the state has been failing Dalits in the region. On Jan 18, 2017, Ishwar Singh, an employee with Haryana Confed (Haryana State Federation of Consumers’ Cooperative Wholesale Stores Ltd) committed suicide after months of harassment at the hands of corrupt officials and state administration.
Singh, a Dalit from Jind, Haryana, took the extreme step after he spent three months in jail when charges of corruption were filed on him. Singh had alleged that it was higher authorities who had been involved in corruption, but to acquit them, he, a lower level worker,was picked as a target.
The protests in Jind have been going on for over 10 days now but the government is yet to act on the issue.
Although he came out of jail, he could never recover from the humiliation he faced. Having stopped talking to his family and even eating, he finally committed suicide on the night of January 17. After his death, the usual government promises followed, but not before the family had protested for five days outside the Jind Civil Hospital. The family was promised a thorough CBI inquiry into the corruption scandal, a compensation of Rs 10 lakh, and a job for one of the family members by state minister, Krishna Pawar. However, a year later, none of these promises have been fulfilled.
Another family, that of one Satish Kumar feels similarly cheated. Satish was a soldier in the Indian Army who died fighting Kashmiri insurgents. In a number of villages across the nation, martyred soldiers have a bust of theirs installed in their villages but since Satish was a Dalit, his bust was never installed in his village. Not only this, his family received neither compensation nor a government job as is the norm. Despite a number of pleas and visits to the Ministry of Defence and state government, there has been no response.
On January 9, 2018, a Dalit girl left her home in Jhansa village of Kurukshetra district for tuitions, but never returned. On January 12, her body was found about 2 km from her residence in the village of Rajvaha in Jind district. Post-mortem reports revealed that the girl had been gangaped and suffered vicious assaults. Her private parts had been penetrated with sharp tools which caused excessive bleeding leading to her death. Her body had bruise marks all over. A week later, one of the guys who was said to be a friend of the girl was also found dead. The family of the girl along with local Dalit activists sat on a dharna (protest) outside Jind civil hospital for over a week following which they were assured that the CBI would inquire into the matter. Again, the promises were never honoured.
Protesters waving black flags in Jind, Haryana during the arrival of Amit Shah
This is not the first such incident in the region. Last year, a girl from Aasan village of Jind district was raped, following which she had to suffer humiliation at the hands of the public. In an extreme step, the girl committed suicide after consuming poison. Here too, the family was promised swift inquiry and punishment for the accused that was never delivered.
In many ways, these stories coming out from Jind are only a reflection of the deeply casteist nature of the society, says Rajat Kalsan, a Dalit activist and a lawyer from Jind. He points out, “In the past few years, there have been many reports emerging from Karnal, Kurukshetra, Jind, Panipat and Hisar about busts of Dr. Bhimrao Babasaheb Ambedkar being desecrated. However, not one person has ever been arrested in these cases. This shows how seriously the district administration takes cases where Dalit icons are humiliated.”
Kalsan, who has been protesting along with the families outside the small secretariat in Jind for over 10 days, says, “Despite a series of attacks on Dalits, it seems the Haryana government is not at all interested. There are no constitutional bodies in the state to address Dalit issues despite the Constitution mandating it to have a National Scheduled Caste Commission.”
Kalsan however, adds that he and the other protesters have been left equally disappointed with the support of people from all walks of life. “People who have benefited from the vision of Babasaheb Ambedkar are also silent on these atrocities…people and NGOs who claim a lot and talk ‘big’ are missing from these protests…one of the protesters Dinesh Khapad nearly died from the fast unto death yet not one person from the administration has blinked,” he adds.
The protesters were detained for three hours on February 15
On February 15, six days after the protests started outside the secretariat in Jind, BJP National President Amit Shah was scheduled to visit the region. Rajat Kalsan, Dinesh Khapad and other protesters decided to waive black flags at Shah, hoping that the same would at least get the government to acknowledge their grievances. However, on the contrary, the police acted against the protesters and detained and were released only after three hours.
A detailed look into these cases, and a closer inspection of the caste realities of Haryana shows that despite strong laws such as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (PoA), there is a serious lack of will on the part of administration to implement the same. In most of these cases, the police do not even register FIRs until the community protests. Then, there is the inclusion of the PoA Act. “I will give you an example of how even this law is used to target us. Last year in Hisar, there was a row between Brahmin and the Dalit community over a public handpump, following which Dalits were beaten up. When we forced the police to include the SC/ST PoA Act, the Khap Panchayat called for social boycott of the Dalits who had filed the complaint. So, we filed a complaint against the people who had called for the boycott and made sure that these people are also booked under the Act as well. However, despite the Act being clear that offences under the Act are non-bailable, the sessions court freely released the accused on bail. When even courts do not want to help us, what options do we have?”
Kalsan knows a thing or two about how the police and the state machinery are complicit in these cases. “The attacks on Dalits are a systematic way to turn Haryana into a fight between Jats and other dominant communities versus non-Jats. The BJP government had no issue when Jats went on a rampage during their fight for reservations but refuses to even pay compensation when Dalits are raped and murdered,” he says. Kalsan adds that time and again, he is accused by people of dividing people on the basis of caste. “I am a counsel for Dalit families of Mirchpur atrocity cases and for seven years, because of the nature of the case, I was given police protection. However, protection was then suddenly withdrawn. No reason was given on my asking why. .” He adds that for his efforts, there are more than 12 cases registered against him. “The law is strong, the people are not. And here lies the issue. We cannot achieve much unless the government wants things to change. And it seems this government is satisfied with Dalits being attacked and murdered,” he says.
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