The government is all set to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India and allow them to repatriate profits from operations here. As per the proposed plans, the Centre is working to make it easy for foreign universities to set up campuses in India in collaboration with local partners.
The NITI Aayog has submitted a report to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) in favour of inviting foreign universities to set up campuses in India. Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked NITI Aayog to study all reports regarding setting up of foreign universities and the reasons on why it could not move forward. Governments in the past have made several attempts to enact legislation for entry, operation and regulation of foreign universities in the country. The first was in 1995 when a Bill was introduced but could not go forward. In 2005-06 too, the draft law could not go beyond the Cabinet stage.
The last attempt was by UPA-II in 2010 in the shape of the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill, which failed to pass muster in Parliament and lapsed in 2014 since it was opposed by the BJP, Left and Samajwadi Party. One of the reservations on foreign universities operating in India was that they would raise the cost of education, rendering it out of reach for a large part of the population.
To discuss this, NewsClick interviewed Abha Dev Habib, executive council member, Delhi University. According to her the argument that foreign universities coming to India will stop brain drain is not valid and will not stop the phenomenon. Excerpts from the interview.
Rohini Pande, Jennifer Johnson & Eric Dodge, IndiaSpend.com
Image: Simon Williams
India boasts superior rates of women serving in political office compared to other emerging economies: the nation just swore in its 16th female Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti. Yet it lags well behind its competitors in its rate of women’s labour force participation. There is surprisingly little data to answer why. But one reason stands out: women can’t get to work.
India is well beyond the point when economists would expect that high numbers of women would begin participating in the labour force. Instead, 25 million women have left the Indian labour force over the past 10 years. Today, only 27% of Indian women are in the labour force, the second-lowest rate of female labour-force participation in South Asia after Pakistan. And while that country’s female labour-force participation is rising, India’s is falling.
Limited mobility is one of the key challenges many women confront when they set out to find a job. India’s road network now spans more than 4.69 million km, a 39% increase over 10 years earlier. Between 2007 to 2011 alone, an additional 600,074 km were laid. The rate of car ownership is also rising, with more than 2 million cars sold last year in India, up 9.8% over 2014.
Public transportation systems are expanding, too. But these infrastructure improvements are not translating into substantive gains in women’s mobility and ability to get work. And when women do work outside the home, on average, they do not travel as far to work as men. In short: the further from home the opportunity, the less likely women are to access it.
Indian women want to work but held back by lack of skills, social norms
Our research at Evidence for Policy Design indicates that India’s women want to participate in the labour force at higher rates. But they are constrained by lack of skills, and by social norms restricting their mobility.
Women who work outside of agriculture are typically engaged in informal, home-based work activities. This is not necessarily reflective of their preferences—it also points at structural factors that keep women from pursuing employment outside the home. National Sample Survey data highlight that disparity, and a pilot survey we conducted of rural youth in Bhopal and Sehore backs it up: 91% of below poverty line, female respondents (aged 18-25) think women should go out of the house to work–yet nearly 70% of these women were unemployed in the previous year.
Within India, cultural attitudes about whether it is proper for women to leave the home by their own decision, and whether they need to be accompanied on these trips, vary by region.
How Indian men constrain women
Using two rounds of the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS), we found that 79.9% of women reported not being allowed to visit the health centre without permission from their husbands or other family members. In 2012, 33% were not allowed to go alone to seek medical care, a marginal improvement over 2005 (35%).
Nationally, the IHDS survey also shows that 51.7% of women think it is usual in the community for a husband to beat his wife if she leaves the home without telling him. Even when a woman does have the freedom to leave the home, distance is still a pertinent constraint. In a sample of Skill India participants, 62% of unemployed women reported that they were willing to migrate for work, but 70% said they would feel unsafe working away from home.
The implications of a rapidly industrialising and urbanising India for rural women with restricted mobility are concerning. Projections indicate that most of India’s economic growth in the next 15 years will be generated in urban areas: In 2010, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that India’s cities could produce 70% of Indian GDP and 70% of net new jobs created up to 2030, and stimulate a near four-fold increase in per capita incomes. As it stands, mobility statistics suggest that women outside of India’s major population centres face exclusion from the coming urban boom.
Women’s desire for productive work is not simply rhetorical. There are places in the Indian economy where women are well-represented in the labour force, but these tend to be fields where women can work close to home. Public works projects created under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have been quite successful in drawing women into the workforce. While only 27% of rural women work outside the home, MGNREGA’s participants were 51% female in 2014.
Several factors make MGNREGA attractive to women, including its 30% quota for women participants. By accident rather than by design, MGNREGA largely eliminates mobility constraints by being structured around thousands of community-based project sites. In addition to localising project sites close to where rural women live, MGNREGA also provides equal pay for equal work to both male and female labourers. Finally: MGNREGA projects are low-skilled work, and thus accessible to women without experience.
As we discussed in our December IndiaSpendfeature, many women—especially rural women—express concern that they lack the skills necessary for the jobs they would like to have. The government of India has recently prioritised drawing huge numbers of India’s youth into the labour force and cities through Skill India and Make in India.
Both programs include quotas to ensure a certain proportion of trainees are women. These schemes present an unprecedented opportunity to bring many young women into the labour force, but they often require that women leave their home communities to pursue work placements after training, and there are currently no mechanisms in place to support women migrants once they have been placed.
MGNREGA may be the first step to letting women out of the house. Skill India’s challenge will be to help women be successful further afield, where greater economic and other opportunities may lie. Women’s education levels are rising, as is women’s financial inclusion. But women’s labour force participation is in decline–and our data shows that women’s mobility may be declining as well. This must be addressed, if India’s women are to have access to the same economic opportunities as their brothers.
(Pande is the Mohammed Kamal professor of public policy and co-director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at Harvard Kennedy School. Johnson is a Program Associate managing EPoD’s India programs. Dodge is EPoD’s Data Analytics Lead.)
In the last week of April 2016, Team Arnab [Times Now news channel] staged another show, attacking academicians and historians at large at JNU. This time it was Bipan Chandra, and his book India’s Struggle for Independence (1987). The crime: calling Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries “revolutionary terrorists” and “intentionally maligning the patriots” of the Indian freedom struggle. Bipan and his co-authors were accused of being court-historians of the Congress and being pro-Nehru and Gandhi to intentionally call Bhagat Singh a “terrorist”. Next day, Anurag Thakur, the BJP MP raised the issue in the Parliament and another “row” was manufactured, with JNU once again at the centre of it.
This is not the first time Bipan has been under attack by the right-wing regime. This has been happening to him and various other left-leaning historians from the late 1970s; 1977 to be specific, when the right-wing shared power for the first time in the centre. This article brings back those moments, taking help from the articles published in the Times of India (henceforth TOI) archives[1], from late 1970s to 2006. It presents a chronology of all such attacks and debates on Bipan, along with Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, RS Sharma, and various such historians who have used Marxist interpretation as their tool of analysing past and the Indian history. It briefly expresses concern over the rising trend of attacking “non-Bhakts” by calling them anti-nationals, and dangers of (mis)appropriating the national icons as the icons of the Hindu right.
Cartoon credit: The Times of India
Freedom Struggle, the book written by Bipan, Amales Tripathi and Barun de, published by National Book Trust (NBT) faced ban and withdrawal during the Janata government regime in 1977. Several such books were under threat of banning and withdrawal. An article dated 21 September 1977 talks about a memorandum submitted by teachers and journalists, which says,
The books should be judged on merit and on purely academic considerations, and not on spurious grounds fabricated by politicians who have no academic credentials. The reported move by the Prime Minister’s secretariat to ban the books is in favour of those who want to throttle academic freedom and impose communalist regimentation.[2]
Books written by Bipan, Romila, Harbans Mukhia, etc. were banned by the Morarji Desai government as the regime blamed that they were written in a Marxist style. The report of 28 September 1977 quotes Bipan asking, “Why do Indians get so upset if someone makes critical references to their past? Why do we like to worship our past?”[3] “The purpose of studying the past is to study it critically and precisely so that we can find out what is wrong with our present and how we can improve it, he said.”[4]
In the same year, amidst the text book controversy, Bipan answered few important questions in an interview given to Narendra Panjwani. Bipan told Panjwani, “One of our main objectives [of writing these text books] was to write the books in such a way as to get students to take history seriously…. We wanted to write history so as to show that it can be logical and scientific and capable of throwing useful light on the present.”[5]Comparing the content of Modern India with other books written so far, he said,
We have attempted for the first time to conceive and restructure the whole account in a nationalist spirit – where the people of India, their lives, their struggles and achievement occupy the centre of the historical stage. I would even claim that my textbook is the only one which tries to bring out the nature, the origins and mechanisms of colonialism at the school level.[6]
Answering why the communalists have got so angered by his books, Bipan gives an analytical answer, in simple language and giving examples:
…in this ideological struggle, the crucial role has been that of history. Why? Because the whole rationale of communalism (as an ideology) derives from a certain interpretation of history. The heart of this interpretation is that Hindus were the greatest of nations and cultures in ancient times. The Muslim rule, meant decline and decadence. And the task now – according to this school – is to go back to the greatness of that Golden Past….no historical period can be scientifically explained merely as the march of a single religion which is allegedly inherently aggressive. Now this does not suit the communalists because they would like people to believe that Ghazni’s sole motive was religion – which would imply that there is something in Islam which leads its followers to plunder and destroy. Permit me, finally, to pose a question to you in this context. What if the writers of these five textbooks by chance happened to be Muslims? It is just an accident that all of us are Hindus by birth – can you imagine what an ugly furore there would have been had a Muslim written what we have, about Ghazni, Aurangzeb, Shivaji etc.?… This should give you an idea of the extent of communalism underlying the whole controversy.[7]
I want to make a special reference to a passage Bipan wrote in a letter to editor responding to journalist N. Ram’s attacks on Bipan. In this passage, Bipan gives some advises to Ram and says,
It does not help anyone, least of all a young man, to brand and smear people through literary flourishes. It may produce the psychologically exhilarating feeling that one is joining the ranks of revolutionaries at one jump and thus making up for concrete and sustained political or intellectual work. In the long run, however, it neither develops the person concerned nor advances whatever intellectual or political cause one wants to see grow.[8]
Are the current batch of TV anchors listening?
Bipan strongly believed that the government’s concessions do create communal fever. Giving the example of the Punjab crisis in 1986, he cited how the concessions given to the Akalis first and then to the Hindus “resulted in creating a feeling of hatred and distrust between the two communities.”[9] During the lecture he delivered in Lucknow on ‘Communalism – the Way Out’, he also said that “the teaching of history had been one of the major instruments for spreading communal ideology. Certain largely circulated language magazines were also responsible for infusing communalism.”[10] Recently, we had come across a statement by the Rajashtan state minister for education on how major changes are being made in the school curriculum so that “no one like Kanhaiya Kumar is born.”[11]
The year 1988-89 is regarded as the times of Mandal and Kamandal, referring to the caste and religious resurgence in India. Govind Nihalani adapted Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi novel, Tamas as a lengthy feature film to be serialized on Doordarshan. The Hindu right wing strongly objected to it and multiple court cases were filed and a debate ensued on artistes’ freedom and hurt-sentiments. Bipan Chandra was consulted by Doordarshan before the serial was approved for telecast. In an article published in January 1988, on the eve of the Republic Day, Bipan is quoted to observe, “If Tamas had been stopped, it would have become impossible to criticise even sati on television”.[12]
Bipan told the TOI news service that the serial does not open old wounds, rather it might help prevent future wounds as it shows how communal riots break out. He is reported to have said that the serial supports the fact that the ideology of communal organisations was not based on the “profoundly humanist” Indian culture but was rather borrowed from Nazism.[13] Deriving two lessons from Tamas, Bipan said that it is very important to act fast and diffuse the tension once communal tension is in the air, and Tamas also shows that the basic Indian culture has been anti-communalism, as is shown by people who tried to save the victims, irrespective of their religion.[14]
Image: India Today
In March 1989, while visiting Bombay, he spoke with TOI on issues like casteism, democracy, and regional chauvinism.[15]Talking on the connections between textbooks, education and the rise of communalism and racism, he said,
Education in several parts of the country is intellectually backward for there are few books in regional languages which do not portray regional chauvinism. Our peasants were far more secular for they were illiterate. Our students are fed on wrong history and are less secular. West Germany, a country with the highest number of PhDs and a high overall level of education, was also the country which put forward the racial theory of Nazism.[16]
Emphasising the need for responsible mass writing by academicians, he said it is important because through a study of history “not just the statesman but also the citizen learns what we have become and how. It enables individuals to make a choice, whether the individual is the Prime Minister or average citizen.”[17]Bipan strongly encouraged, almost forced, historians like Romila Thapar, to write textbooks as he believed that “writing textbooks is a national duty of academics”.[18]
In March 1992, Bipan wrote a comment in support of the Indian history Congress (hereafter IHC), after the controversies over the Ujjain session in December 1991 when the Hindu right-wing tried to capture the history congress by using money power to enrol wholesale or in bulk life members. Answering the critics for whom Indian IHC is a pleasure trip to its participants, he wrote, “Most of the delegates travel at their own expense by second class. They stay in student hostels, bring their own beddings, stand in long queues before the latrines, often bathe without hot water, and eat meals which are Gandhian in their simplicity.”[19]He also highlighted the point that IHC had to take steps “to ensure that history teaching, writing and historical research remain the business of historians while political groups and parties confine themselves to making history, good or bad.”[20]
During NDA-I regime, Murli Manohar Joshi, the then Union minister of human resource and development had called such historians and academicians “intellectual terrorists”. Most of the NCERT textbooks written by left-leaning historians, like Romila and Bipan, were taken back from the shelf and major changes, suiting the needs of the fascist regime were made in the school textbooks, particularly history.
In 2002, the saffron brigade crossed all the limits when they handed over a 7-year-old boy to the police for being an “intellectual terrorist”. The event occurred at the Bhopal session of the IHC in January 2002.[21]The crime of this 7-year old “terrorist” was that he was trying to sell an “objectionable” booklet titled Communalisation of Education: The History Textbook Controversy. The book contains articles by Romila, Bipan, Irfan Habib, RS Sharma, Satish Chandra, and Arjun Dev. Reprints of newspaper articles by Vir Sanghvi, Dileep Padgaonkar, and others, and the text of deletions made from NCERT’s history textbooks were included in this booklet.
Srikanth, the 7-year old “terrorist”, son of Prof. Sucheta Mahajan, and nephew of Profs. Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee, all at JNU, students and colleagues of Bipan, and co-authors of India’s Struggle for Independence, had accompanied his parents to the congress. While selling copies of the booklet to IHC delegates, a man accosted him and threatened to hand him over to the police.[22] Srikanth was actually taken to the police posted at the venue.
The saffron brigade has always used intimidating tactics to “expose” the Marxists and people/organisations who they consider as threats to their existence in India. The tactic continues, this time the difference is that Bipan is not alive to put forth his defence and launch scathing attack on the saffron brigade playing with historical facts and history writing in particular.
We have a Destroy-History Inc. ruling the country. We must assert ourselves and tell them that you do not teach us who Bhagat Singh is; as historians, we must tell them that history writing is a serious business and you keep your “melodramatic” TV anchors and MPs away from this very serious discipline. You do not possess that critical qualification needed to produce an unbiased, objective history, because your only qualification is enacting a “high-voltage drama” in TV rooms and the Parliament, you don’t even know the difference between a TV studio and Parliament. We will resist the attempts of communal forces to replace historians like Bipan, Romila, and Irfan with a PN Oak, we will not let you scrap Mughal history, and we will not let you teach us that Taj Mahal is a Shiva Temple.
Let’s wage a fight against this fascist regime, which is not only trying to appropriate our great icons like Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, and Bose, but, as Kanhaiya Kumar said, they are actually “encroaching” upon these icons.
Let’s stand in defence of history and historians.
(Sudha Tiwari is a PhD research scholar at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi.)
[1] These articles have been accessed through the Proquest Times of India archive available on the JNU library website.
[2] A Staff Reporter, “Teachers, journalists assail move on history books”, The Times of India, 21 September 1977, p. 4.
[3]A Staff Reporter, “Author denies Marxist style of interpreting history”, The Times of India, 28 September 1977, p. 3.
[7] Ibid. I was reminded of a similar question asked by Umar Khalid in his comeback speech in JNU, what if he was a Namazi, a believer, a practicing Muslim, what if he was from Azamgarh and not a student at JNU? How would the judiciary and police and intelligence agencies have dealt with him then?
[8]Chandra, Bipan, “Crucial Test”,The Times of India, 29 January 1978, p. 4.
[9]“Govt. sops feed communal fever”, The Times of India, 28 April 1986, p. 16.
The university authorities who are solely accountable for the escalation in the present situation and the threat not just to the academic health of the JNU, but to the very lives of its students.
The JNU[1] Vice Chancellor, professor Jagadesh Kumar’s written “appeal” to the students who are on hunger strike since April 27, 2016 has surpassed even his own amazingly low standards of university governance that must respect the time-honored principle of autonomy.
On a minor issue of `indiscipline’ he brought police onto the campus, allowed the Students Union President[2] and other student leaders to be arrested on charges of `sedition’ for slogans allegedly raised at a meeting and finally set up a `kangaroo court’ of a High Level Enquiry Committee (HLEC) which dubbed the students “anti-national” on unspecified charges and then `punished’ them without a hearing with rustication, a ban on entry into the campus for five years, and fines of up to Rs. 20,000!!
Understandably not only the JNUSU but even the JNUTA[3] rejected outright both the HLEC[4] and its report. 20 students, including the JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar and Secretary Rama Naga, went on an indefinite hunger fast demanding the immediate withdrawal of the `punishment’and scrapping of the illegal committee and its enquiry. Days into the hunger strike, with the health of most of the students rapidly deteriorating in Delhi’s heat-wave conditions with temperatures rising to 45 degrees, the VC came with his infamous “appeal”.
"Hunger strike” Jagadesh Kumar admonished, “is an unlawful activity and a harmful method of protest that adversely affects the health and career of the students… The administration urges the students to use constitutional means to put forth their demands, if any.”
Kanhaiya Kumar being taken to hospital
Does the VC not know that in India for over a hundred years the hunger fast has been a moral statement against injustice; that it has been a major weapon of the Gandhian political strategy of satyagraha that not only played a dominant role in India’s freedom struggle but also influenced the thinking of leaders struggling against apartheid in South Africa and the civil rights movement against racism in the USA? Has he never heard of the courageous fasts unto death in 1981 of imprisoned Irish rebels opposing the injustice of British rule; of Myanmar’s Buddhist monks against British colonial rule in 1929 and against the military junta in 2007 when they marched with overturned begging bowls effectively ex-communicating the military rulers by refusing to accept alms from them or their families?
Perhaps Jagadesh Kumar does not know all this, for he belongs to an entirely different `tradition’, one which has never been inspired by the demand for freedom. Instead it has been stimulated by grandiose notions of State supremacy and the submission of the people to brute power. The supporters of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, the glowing models of Nationalism for the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), never boasted of a single moral statement against injustice because obedience to the State exhausted in entirety the concepts of both law and morality.
As always with organisations like the RSS one is forced to move from the sublime to the ludicrous! So a hunger fast is a “harmful method of protest” because it “adversely affects the health and career of the students”! Of course the veiled threat underlying this apparent absurdity is that under the present regime no opposition will be tolerated so, if you know what’s profitable for you, be submissive.
The right to protest by imposing suffering on oneself in order to expose the regime’s insensitivity to any injustice inflicted upon the people is both lawful and constitutional. The question is when is such a protest action appropriate? Have the students shown unseemly haste in resorting to this form of protest? Have all avenues of reason and dialogue been exhausted? What can we make of the VC’s “appeal” for talks? Is it reasonabIe? Is it sincere, and if it is, then what is the point of urging the use of “constitutional means to put forth their demands, if any"?
The answer to these questions is evident in a letter of February 16, 2016 addressed by hundreds of scientists and academics from leading institutions across the country to the JNU VC expressing their deep dismay at the manner in which the JNU authorities handled the situation arising out of the events of February 9, 2016. Apart from the actions mentioned above, they specifically refer to “the statement made by the registrar of JNU, Bupinder Zutshi, who reportedly said, 'The government of India hanged him [Afzal Guru] after declaring him a terrorist. How could we allow them to organise an anti-Indian programme?' This indicates a complete lack of appreciation of the concept of academic freedom. India is a vast country, and no one group can define what it means to be 'nationalist' or 'anti-national', in specific terms of positions to hold and causes to support".
The scientists and academics further asserted that in the interest of the nation and democracy the importance of protecting academic freedom is crucial for, “University is a site where contesting ideas are explored and where students should be able to freely debate and discuss various views, including controversial ones, without the threat of state action.” Therefore, the statement explicitly objects to the fact that “Senior members of the government have aggressively targeted your students. The JNU administration should have protected its students against these attacks… We are deeply disappointed that you have failed to carry out this responsibility.”
In other words, the university authorities should not have functioned as a willing tool of the government but should have stood as a shield against such government attacks. The failure of the university authorities to stand up to institutions of power signals a severe threat to opening up possibilities for settlement through reason and dialogue.
It is therefore the university authorities who are solely accountable for the escalation in the present situation and the threat not just to the academic health of the JNU, but to the very lives of its students. The VC and his administration must immediately retreat from their stubborn and inflexible position, withdraw their preposterous punishment and fight along with the students and teachers to ensure that the fabricated charges against the students are dropped.
The writer is a retired Professor from Zakir Husain Delhi College, Delhi University and member of the All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE).
[1] Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi [2] JNU Students Union (JNUSU) [3][3] JNU Teacher’s Association (JNUTA) [4] High Level Enquiry Committee Report (HLEC)
A law proposed by the Union government makes incorrectly drawn borders a severe offense.
Image credit: IANS
Comically muscular jingoism has been the one of things the Bharatiya Janata Party has delivered on strongly. Since it came to power, the party has targetted students from Hyderabad and Delhi, suggested that citizenship should be made contingent on sloganeering abilities and misinterpreted the history of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. Friday morning bought the latest installment of the saga: a proposed law to punish incorrect depictions of India’s borders on a map with seven years in jail and a fine that must be equal to the annual income of a small Indian city: Rs 100 crore.
The nub of the issue is that the government of India claims a lot more land than it actually holds. The Jammu and Kashmir that you see on India maps is a fine thing – but it doesn’t really exist on the ground. Pakistan controls large parts of the western half of Jammu and Kashmir and China, the Aksai Chin region in the north-east. If you actually show this ground situation on a map, though, you can be prosecuted by the government under a 1961 act that now carries a jail term of six months. If Narendra Modi has his way, that will become seven years.
What about Akhand Bharat? The interesting thing here is that there is one rather powerful group for which incorrectly depicting India’s borders is almost at article of faith. The Sangh Parivar believes in what is know as Akhand Bharat or undivided India. At its smallest, Akhand Bharat includes present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh: basically, the dominions of the British Raj. Other versions also have Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and sometimes even Tibet sidling into the map.
Image from the RSS website.
Hindutva’s irredentist fantasies might not square up to history or logic but they are core to its philosophy. Leaders of the Rashtrya Swamaysevak Sangh are frequently seen declaiming against the backdrop of an Akhand Bharat map and just in December, 2015 Ram Madhav, the general secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, made it clear that an Akhand Bharat was a goal of his.
What will happen after this law? Akhand Bharat is also an incorrect depiction of India’s borders, after all. Will RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat be punished? Will the BJP have to give up its Akhand Bharat dreams?
The Bombay High Court today struck down two of the most controversial amendments to the Maharashtra Animal Protection Act of 1976.
While the ban on slaughter of cows, bulls, and bullocks in Maharashtra stays, the high court verdict decriminalises the possession and consumption of beef imported from outside the state.
As reported by the ‘Bar and Bench’ website,
Justices AS Oka and SC Gupte read out the operative parts of their judgment in Vishal Seth & 2 Ors v. State of Maharashtra today before a packed courtroom number 13 of the Bombay High Court. The provisions (Sections 5D and 9B), have been struck down as Constitutionally invalid.
Section 5D of the Act reads, “No person shall have in his possession flesh of any cow, bull, or bullock slaughtered outside the State of Maharashtra”
Section 9B of the Act reads, “In any trial for an offence punishable under 9 or 9A for contravention of the provisions of this Act, the burden of proving that the slaughter, transport, export outside the State, sale, purchase or possession of flesh of cow, bull or bullock was not in contravention of of the provisions of this Act, shall now be on the accused.”
Justice Oka said that the impugned provisions were in violation of the right to privacy, a right which is part of personal liberty. The other provision, namely S.9B, was held to be violative of Article 21.
Senior councils Aspi Chinoy and Mihir Desai had argued a batch of petitions filed on behalf of consumers of beef.
In February 2015, the President granted assent to the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act. While the original 1976 Act banned slaughter of cows, the amendment prohibited, in addition, slaughter of bulls and bullocks and possession and consumption of their meat.
Image: K Fayaz passed his PHD Synopsis Exam while on Hunger Strike
All Party Delegation of MPs to meet JNU VC Today as an Intransigent GOI and JNU Admin Remain Adamant,
Senior members of parliament (MPs) have been in touch with the JNU administration and will be meeting the VC Jagadesh Kumar to ensure that some negotiations between the fasting students –on an indefinite hunger strike since the night of April 27 — and the administration begin. The Left Parties, JD(U), Indian National Congress (INC), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) are all together coordinating the initiative. Senior parliamentarians are expected to join the delegation, names of which would be released and finalised shortly. D Raja, veteran parliamentarian, KC Tyagi, senior leader JD(U), Tapan Sen (CPI-M) and Pavan Kumar Varma are likely to be part of the delegation.
Meanwhile, since the afternoon on Thursday, the health of Kanhaiya Kumar, President of the Jawaharal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) president, Kanhaiya Kumar was very serious. This morning Kanhaiya Kumar has issued the following press release:
कन्हैया को आज भी डॉक्टर एम्स में ही रखेंगे। सीटी स्कैन व कुछ टेस्ट्स होने बाकी है । वे पहले से थोड़ा बेहतर महसूस कर रहे हैं, पर ज्यादा सुधार नहीं है। कन्हैया ने सभी शुभचिंतकों का शुक्रिया अदा किया है, और भूख हड़ताल पर बैठे हुए अपने सभी साथियों को अपना सलाम भेजा है। बीमार हालत में भी वे आज 2 बजे एड ब्लॉक पर होने वाले प्रोटेस्ट के बारे में पूछ रहे थे व भारी संख्या में छात्रों से जुटने की अपील की है। साथ ही केरल में 30 वर्षीया दलित छात्रा जिशा का बलात्कार कर जघन्य हत्या कर दिये जाने के विरोध में बापसा द्वारा दिये गये प्रोटेस्ट कॉल पर केरल भवन के सामने 11बजे से होने वाले प्रोटेस्ट में शामिल होने की अपील की है। जयन्त जिग्यासु,
मीडिया प्रतिनिधि, कन्हैया कुमार Meanwhile the spirits at "Freedom Square" Admin Block JNU continued to be upbeat even as Delhi's scorching heat took its toll. Supporters from all walks of life have been coming in to express support even as the cultural programmes every evening have kept spirits up. The JNUTA, the Teachers Association is on a Relay Hunger Fast today with other civil society activists.
Hunger Strike by Mumbai Students In Solidarity With JNU, Other Universities
Before and after: How access to the mazaar has been blocked for women. Sketches by BMMA.
“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.”
~ Rumi the Mystic
A new phase has arisen in the struggle for women’s emancipation, whereby women of faith are asserting their right to equal access to sacred space, be it a temple, masjid, church or a dargah (tomb). Even as they assert their constitutional rights as equal citizens of India, women are simultaneously challenging the patriarchal hegemony, male-centric interpretation of scripture and tradition.
In 2012 women were overnight barred from going close to or touching the mazaar (elevated grave) of Haji Ali, which is an iconic part of Bombay’s syncretic, secular landscape. Women questioned this “innovation” for which no reason or logic was offered by the dargah’s trustees.
Refusing to be pushed back, Noorjehan Safia Niaz and Zakia Soman, co-founders of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) challenged the arbitrary manner in which the trustees had relegated women to second class believers. For two years they knocked on the doors of the Maharashtra government, but to no avail. The all-male trustees of the dargah refused to even meet them. They finally filed a petition in the Bombay High Court in 2014. The case lingered on in the court, till on January 26 this year, when the Shani Shingnapur movement emerged, with a valiant group of women of the Bhumata Brigade led by Trupti Desai attempted to enter the sanctum sanctorum of the Shani temple in Ahmednagar.
This acted as a catalyst for women across all religions who no longer accept their relegation to an inferior status. For believing women it’s a question of spiritual equality.
They scoff at the laughable and irrational illogical arguments hurled at them including the notion of purity-impurity, challenge male-supremacist interpretation of religious scriptures, argue that tradition and culture be tested against constitutional principles of justice and parity. In debate after debate in the print and electronic media, women and progressive men have demolished the rationale offered by the religious orthodoxy.
Dharna organised by 'Haji Ali sab ke liye forum near Haji Ali dargah on April 28. Photo credit: PTI
Within days of the Shani Shingnapur agitation, at BMMA’s initiative, we held a cross-community protest demonstration at Azad Maidan, Mumbai to express our solidarity with the demand of women for equal access at Shani Shingnapur temple (Ahmednagar, Maharashtra), Sabarimala temple (Kerala) and elsewhere. The participants included BMMA activists led by Noorjehan, Khatoon Apa and, Zeenat Shaukat Ali (Islamic scholar), Jyoti Badekar (Vaghini), Javed Anand (Muslims for Secular Democracy), Salim Saboowala, Jatin Desai, this writer.
Some of our friends from within the secular fraternity were ambivalent or indifferent. A few even questioned the wisdom of secularists getting associated with women of faith demanding for gender parity in religious rituals and practices.
However a large majority among the progressives felt differently. Firstly, they argued that all of religion cannot be reduced to superstitious beliefs and blind faith. Secondly, being secular is not synonymous with being an atheist. Thirdly, the issue is not whether I believe or not, but the right of believing women to equality in the domain of religion. In other words, it was essentially a matter of right to equal access to sacred space. It was about democratising religious, social, cultural spaces and structures of beliefs and power.
The assertions and demands continued to grow encompassing the Sabarimala temple, the Trimbakeshwar temple (Nasik, Maharashtra), Haji Ali dargah, Mumbai. Soon the issue was being debated and discussed among sections of the Muslim community. Many Muslim women and men spoke out about the right of women to pray inside masjids (mosques).
On March 8, International Women’s Day, we organised a major programme at the Azad Maidan around the central theme: “Women from all religions have an equal right to worship and sacred space”. A separate march organised by various leftist, feminist organisations had also included this demand within their larger programme. Thus the assertion by women of faith was crossing new boundaries.
Azad Maidan solidarity demo in support of women's right to equal access to temples/dargahs at ; Photo credit: DNA
After the historic verdict of the Bombay High Court (March 31, 2016) in favour of women’s access to the sanctum sanctorum of temples across Maharashtra, some of us decided to take the struggle for women’s equal access to the Haji Ali dargah to the next level.
On April 20, a cross-community forum, ‘Haji Ali sab ke liye’ was launched jointly at a press conference by prominent Muslim intellectuals, activists and artists (men and women), supported by over a dozen secular-democratic mass organisations. The name of the forum had a simple but powerful inclusive message. It was a message that the Haji Ali trustees and their supporters found very difficult to counter.
At the press conference it was announced that a peaceful dharna will be held near Haji Ali Dargah on April 28. Trupti Desai who had shown interest in the forum’s initiative was invited to the press conference where she declared that she too would participate in the dharna along with other organisations and individuals.
The struggle for equality at Haji Ali dargah has raised some key questions that are now being widely debated within the Muslim community. It is also leading to a new assertion of Muslim women, who cannot see any logic in being treated as second class believers in masjids and some dargahs, even as they stride forward in the fields of education and employment.
Sanatani Hindutva organisations who had vehemently opposed Trupti’s temple entry agitation had earlier challenged her to enter Haji Ali dargah. It is to be noted that at the joint press conference she made no mention of her plans to enter the dargah on the day of the dharna.
In the backdrop of the Bombay High Court’s order on women’s right to enter the sanctum sanctorum of all temples throughout the state, some of the remarks from Supreme Court judges during the ongoing hearing in the Sabarimala temple case, and with the Bombay High Court’s ruling in the Haji Ali dargah case pending, all that the forum planned was a peaceful gathering of progressive Muslim women and men, along with leading secular organisations and activists. The objective was to create public awareness about the right of women to equal access, on par with men, to sacred spaces.
Before the proposed dharna, several TV news channels carried heated debates where several forum members were pitched against the Muslim clergy and other conservatives. The latter’s premise was that the Quran, Hadiths and Sharia prohibited women from getting close to the mazaar. Forum members and other progressive individuals participating in the debates asserted that this was not an issue concerning religion but custom and tradition which could not override constitutional principles.
Satyen Bordoloi
The conservatives claimed that the Indian constitution gives them the right to freedom of religion under Article 25 & 26, which is more important that the right of equality guaranteed under article 14. There were some who made the outrageous proposition that to the Sufi saints (men) buried in the dargah, women appear naked and that is why they must not be allowed up to the mazaar. Asked to explain the logic, if any, all they would say was: “It’s in the Sharia”.
It’s the very same non-logic that is applied by some for barring Muslim women from entering a cemetery, where the souls of the dead and buried, it is claimed, were hovering around and they too could see women naked. On being told that the same logic should apply to the souls of dead and buried women who could also see man as naked, they were speechless.
The fact is that Sharia appears to mean different things at different dargahs. Women are barred from getting close to Haji Ali’s mazaar since 2012, whilst at the Mahim dargah of Makhdoom Baba just a few kilometers away and at Ajmer Sharif (the dargah of the most revered Sufi saint in South Asia) there is no such restriction or gender segregation.
Yes, the constitution does grant minorities the right to religious freedom but not the right to discriminate and oppress women in the name of religion. Women are now asserting their right to interpret scriptures and personal laws, which is no longer the exclusive domain and monopoly of the male clergy.
As the day of our protest approached, the cacophony of our opponents also grew. Haji Arafat (Shiv Sena), Abu Asim Azmi (Samajwadi Party), Shamsher Khan Pathan (Awami Vikas Party), the Indian Muslim League, Owaisi’s MIM, all turned out in large number to prevent Trupti from entering the dargah premise.
Here both Trupti and the coalition against her erred. In yet again projecting an anti-women perspective, those arraigned against her provided ballast for the media. In unilaterally over-stepping the commonly agreed programme of the forum, Trupti herself created confusion and chaos.
In any case, the struggle for equality at Haji Ali dargah has raised some key questions that are now being widely debated within the Muslim community. It is also leading to a new assertion of Muslim women, who cannot see any logic in being treated as second class believers in masjids and some dargahs, even as they stride forward in the fields of education and employment.
It is also compelling the Muslim conservatives to take a fresh look at the many uncomfortable questions being raised at every TV debate. The Urdu press in Mumbai has also been supportive of the push for gender equality and this too is a welcome development.
The reality of the situation is that Muslim conservatives, fanatics and extremists stand exposed the world over, even as the edifice of extremist political Islam continues to implode.
The onus now lies on progressive, liberal Muslims. There is a need for Muslim intellectuals, scholars, lawyers, artists and activists within and outside secular democratic mass movements and political parties with broader agenda to join the struggle for long overdue reform.
The progressive Muslim women’s movement is already leading the struggle for equality and emancipation, reinterpreting the scriptures, asserting their constitutional rights, challenging the citadels of patriarchy. It’s time for progressive Muslim men to come out in large numbers, organise themselves and stand in solidarity with the struggle of Muslim women.
Today women have been relegated to an inferior status at the Haji Ali dargah. Tomorrow it could be other dargahs. Who knows, next they may demand that only those Muslim women wearing a burqa would be allowed. Then they might pronounce that music is haram so Qawalis are a no-no.
Where does this plague of patriarchy and fanaticism stop?
Which is the next dargah they will target?
Could it be the Ajmer dargah itself?
This is a battle we must not lose.
(The writer is among the initiators of the ‘Haji Ali Sab Ke Liye’ forum).
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In the same year, amidst the text book controversy, Bipan answered few important questions in an interview given to Narendra Panjwani. Bipan told Panjwani, “One of our main objectives [of writing these text books] was to write the books in such a way as to get students to take history seriously…. We wanted to write history so as to show that it can be logical and scientific and capable of throwing useful light on the present.”
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