Bastar: the story not told

February 15, 2016

Rape, beatings and looting in Bastar by the security forces remain hidden because of media indifference.

Aritra Bhattacharya analyses why this happens

Courtesy: The Hoot

Over the course of four days (11-14 January 2016) that the patrol party spent at Nendra village in left wing extremism-affected Basaguda block of Chhattisgarh, they gang-raped 13 women, stripped several others naked, fondled their breasts and genitals, berated and abused them physically and verbally and threatened to thrust chillies up their rectum ('gannd mein mirchi daalnege' were their exact words, say villagers).

In normal circumstances, the media may have been expected to report on, at the very least, the rather serious allegations of the rape of vulnerable tribal women by the security forces. Thirteen women raped over four days by those supposed to protect 'the country' isn't a mere statistic. Studies in India and abroad have shown repeatedly how violence in any conflict is gendered, and 13 isn't a number any women's rights organisation would want to paper over. Not in normal circumstances.

Except that the circumstances in Bastar aren't normal. This 'allegation' of rape and gangrape, if you will, came barely two months after the registration of an FIR in the same district alleging rape by the security forces. Over 40 women had complained, on that occasion in full media glare, about men from the 'force' molesting them routinely. The November FIR – the first ever instance of one detailing rape by the security forces in conflict-torn Bastar – was the first acknowledgement by the state machinery in these parts that such crimes may have been committed by its own functionaries.
When the allegations of rape and loot in Nendra first surfaced this time on 17 January, the media had adequate reason to accord them some importance, given that they were coming from the same block as the ones in November 2015. Yet, not a word of the allegations made it to the national media at a time when 16 tribals, including eight rape survivors, kept trying to reason unsuccessfully with the bureaucracy and police machinery to at least register an FIR.

The villagers were helped in this task by a fact-finding team from Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) which was in the area.

What is reported and what isn’t
If pursuing a story is still a basic tenet of journalism in the digital age, national newspapers and web outlets should have turned their focus to the allegations in Bastar, more so because most of them had reported the lodging of the FIR on similar grounds just two months earlier. Yet, only The Hindu among the English dailies ran a story on 22 January, a day after the FIR was registered.

No media house, including those powerful enough to buy off governments, has since sent in its correspondents into these villages to investigate the grave allegations. This failure exposes, once again, how coverage of the Maoist conflict is incident-based and fact-based. The lodging of an FIR is an incident, a fact; allegations of rape aren't. So the former is often news and the latter mere hearsay not worthy of investment or coverage.

Incidentally, this is exactly how the security establishment, the accused in this case, views the matter. In a conversation with members of WSS regarding the need to register an FIR, Anti-Naxal Operations (ANO) ASP Elsela reportedly said, “Allegations (of rape) will keep coming. Does it mean we will lodge an FIR every time?”

In subscribing to the establishment's viewpoint on a matter as grave as sexual violence and rape by the security forces, the media inadvertently becomes party to the crime, perhaps also a co-conspirator. And despite our thriving democracy, those journalists who refuse to toe this line, such as Scroll.in contributor Malini Subramaniam, expose themselves to immense risk, threats and violence.

Government sources dictate the coverage
That the media sides with the establishment when it comes to covering the Maoist conflict isn't a revelation for those who have followed it. As a recent piece on this site examining coverage of the Naxal issue pointed out, media coverage of the Maoist conflict is represented “in terms of what the government [is] actively doing to address the crisis through its police interventions and pro-social work.”

One look at newspapers across the board in Bastar will tell you that the police and government functionaries are the only regular sources of information for 'local news'. Most journalists working for the local media or providing content to the national media don't dare to venture into villages inside the jungle to bring out aspects of the conflict and provide analysis and understanding that go beyond staged incidents like encounters, arrests, and official statements.

For those who do, like Santosh Yadav (a freelance journalist who has been in police detention since September 2015), the price is high as yet another recent piece here showed: illegal detention, beatings, imprisonment, and false cases.

Reporters working for local channels and newspapers in Bastar are at the mercy of the police and Maoists, in that order. In the aftermath of Yadav's arrest, journalists there have formed a union to draw the government's attention to their plight and give voice to the routine harassment by police officials when reporters go about their normal work.

Reporters of the national media outlets are insulated from several of these threats; if nothing else, the heft of their employers protects them from harassment from within the system. Yet, no media outlet has a correspondent on the payrolls in Bastar. The Indian Express and The Hindu have one correspondent each in Raipur.

What happens when reporters do report
Scroll.in is the only English language media outlet that has a contributor based in Jagdalpur. Over the last three months, Malini Subramaniam has been reporting for Scroll.in on rape allegations against security personnel, fake surrenders, human trafficking and – a contentious matter in these parts – roads.

Hers were the only stories that were consistently taking news of routine human rights violations to an educated urban English-speaking audience. The fact that she is based in Jagdalpur ensures better access and understanding of various aspects of the conflict; yet, this same aspect also exposes her to danger.

Since January this year, the Samajik Ekta Manch, a newly formed group that claims it is working to counter the spread of Maoism in Bastar, has been pressuring Subramaniam, staging demonstrations outside her house. After goons on bikes pelted stones at her residence under cover of darkness last week, Scroll.in released a statement backing its correspondent.

Among other things that she was accused of by the pro-police Samajik Ekta Manch was that she writes against development. “You write against roads. You don't want progress in Bastar,” they told her.

They were referring to a November 2015 story where Subramaniam reported increased violence by security forces against villagers in areas where roads are being constructed. Like those quoted in her story, the villagers in Nendra from where the rape allegations surfaced are also wary of roads.

In Bastar, a road is more than just a road
For local as well as national journalists, Nendra is far away. The district headquarters of Bijapur lies bang in the middle of 'affected territory' and that is also the point up to which a private vehicle will take you. From there on, unless you have your own vehicle, you must depend on a single bus that will take you 50 km inside, through the jungle. Once off the bus, it's another 5 km walk into the jungle, without a road beneath your feet.

Nendra had not seen a journalist till I and another fellow journalist happened to visit in September 2015. So great was the surprise of media-wallahs in the village that men who were working in the fields were called home. To us then, as now to the WSS fact-finding team members and officials in the collectorate and the police, the villagers narrated tales of beatings, torture and loot by the security forces during patrols. They narrated tales of women being chased through fields, their clothes torn, molested.

In a quiet clearing by the fields flush with paddy, they recalled rather casually how men in the patrol parties had been threatening them: 'Dekho hum tum logon ka kya kartein hain' (See what we do to you). Then, in September 2015, there were no allegations of rape.

A CRPF jawan at the last camp en route to Nendra had told us, a few hours before this conversation, that a road would be constructed through the forest, passing by Nendra, very soon. A new camp was to be constructed inside the jungle.

Road construction in fact seems to be the reason why the hostilities in Nendra increased between September 2015 and January 2016. The November 2015 FIR on rape by the security forces had also thrown up the road question. Then, defending his men against rape allegations, SP Bijapur K. L. Dhruw had told The Hindu: “An operation did take place in the area and a force of around 500 men was there. These boys ventured into that Maoist sensitive area as a road is to be built there.”

In any case, when the patrol party comprising men from CRPF and the district police arrived in Nendra on 11 January, the road was firmly on the agenda of the powers-that-be in the area. Sources said that most men fled the village into the jungle when the 'force' arrived that day. One of them, who had spent several years in jail on false charges only to be acquitted, managed to reach tribal activist and AAP leader Soni Sori a couple of days later: he pleaded with her for help, detailing the pillage by men from the forces in the village.

Sori informed the WSS team that was in the area in connection with another fact-finding exercise. By the time this team reached the village and heard the horror stories of the security forces running amok, plundering, looting, and raping, it was 17 January. By the next day, the team had managed to find eight rape survivors willing to come forward and register an official complaint.

Nendra in Basaguda block is the third instance in the last two months that survivors of rape by the security forces have come forward to lodge an official complaint. The WSS team had played an important part in the first instance too, in November 2015.

Everywhere, sexual violence
After visiting villages close to Peddagelur, Budgicheru and Gundam villages in the same Basaguda block, they brought out a report detailing rape, sexual violence and loot by the security forces. During that instance, over 40 women had come forward to register complaints of sexual violence. This was what resulted in the first FIR under the amended Section 376 in Bastar which provides for severe punishment for police and security forces convicted of rape.

The involvement of WSS and Soni Sori and their assistance to villagers has been crucial in the local media and some web outlets carrying news on the Bastar rapes. Yet, those WSS team members who are based in Bastar, such as academic Bela Bhatia and Soni Sori, have been facing increased pressure and threats from groups like Samajik Ekta Manch.

The attacks on Subramaniam and others who help ensure that human rights violations in Bastar are reported, confirms that, at its heart, the game centres on information and its availability. The routine recurrence of rape, sexual violence, abuse, beatings, torture and illegal detention by the 'forces' is as common in Bastar as concrete buildings in a city. Yet information about it cannot and must not go out of the conflict area.

In Bastar, you could walk into any village and people would tell you, in guarded conversations, about how things have been this way since the 'force' started visiting the area. People in Nendra would tell you how, over four days, the 'force' looted and consumed 175-200 chickens, local liquor, several goats, pigs, pigeons, vegetables, and rations stocked up in homes in preparation for the migration season.

Out here on our TV screens and newspapers, we only hear of the Editors' Guild issuing a statement condemning attacks on the press. Wouldn't it be worthwhile if one of the big guys at the Guild also pushed in a correspondent into this zone with all the required backing?

(The author is Principal Correspondent with The Statesman and a PhD scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He can be reached at aritra.bhattacharya@gmail.com via e-mail and @b_aritra on Twitter)

Equality in education: what does that mean?

February 15, 2016

Equality in education is not achieved by giving everybody the same thing but by giving everybody what they need in order to achieve the same outcome

The Conversation

(Though this article is written in the Australian context, it is equally relevant to our own situation).

Australia’s appalling record of equity in education has once again been confirmed in the latest Closing the Gap report. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the report’s dismal findings present an opportunity to “recommit to achieving equality of opportunity for all Australians”.

But first we must agree on what we mean by ‘equality’. Is equality in education achieved by giving everybody the same thing? Or is it achieved by giving everybody what they need in order to achieve the same outcome?

The latter is the premise of the now-defunct Gonski model of education funding – where each student is given what they need in order to achieve, and that means some students would be given more because they need more.

However, the current government is instead pursuing a model of educational equality where everyone is given the same. What could be fairer than that, right?

This commonsense logic falls apart in the application.

If someone in a room is having a heart attack, we don’t administer CPR to everyone just to be fair; we give the specialist intervention to the person who needs it. So it is difficult to understand why this model of “give everyone the same” is so vigorously pursued in education, particularly when it appears to have been spectacularly unsuccessful over the years.

A long history of inequity
Our results in international tests, and in our own homegrown testing, reveal the most unsavoury of educational gaps. We are a country defined as “high quality, but low equity” in education. That means we produce high achievers, but the gap between those who achieve at school and those who don’t is one of the highest among OECD countries.

This is not a new phenomena; it has been a key feature of our PISA test results since we joined that particular international testing club in 2000. In fact, the equity gap is increasing. 14.2% of students were at level one or below in 2010, compared with about 13% in 2000. One proficiency level is about the equivalent of three years schooling – so we are talking about some very large gaps.

And while our slide down the international PISA ladder has prompted all sorts of funding initiatives to increase participation in science, maths and technology at school as we attempt to keep up with the international Jones’, we seem much less exercised about our world-leading educational inequity problem.

Why do we have this achievement gap?
There are many reasons posited for the achievement gap, not least the social and economic disadvantage that so often accompanies those who achieve poorly on measures of educational achievement.

Students who do poorly at school often come from disadvantaged homes; performing poorly at school usually means you will stay economically disadvantaged. It’s a chicken-and-egg cycle that education is supposed to be able to break – except that so far in Australia, it hasn’t.

Access to school learning is a crucial part of solution, but it is very difficult to do well in school when you don’t speak the language of school, and when the cultural references that underpin the curriculum are foreign to you.

It is hard to engage with school when it feels alien, when the school libraries, display walls, textbooks and curriculum are full of people and events that are difficult to relate to.

It is a struggle to find motivation to stay in school when it feels like the things that are important to you in your home life count for nothing at school.

It takes enormous resilience to keep turning up at school when you feel dumb because you can’t do the work, and you can’t do the work because it is being delivered in a language you are not fully proficient in – Standard Australian English. Nobody teaches you how this language works, but they do use a red pen a lot to show you how much you don’t know.

The importance of language teaching
Many of the underachieving students in Australian schools share one common attribute: they don’t speak Standard Australian English.

Achievement in Australian schools is dependent upon your access to Standard Australian English and mainstream cultural references. Schools have a responsibility to initiate all their students into both. This is best achieved by acknowledging, nurturing and using the existing cultural references and linguistic skills of the students, not by pretending they don’t exist.

Indigenous students are highly competent language users. Many arrive at school speaking more than one language or dialect, including Aboriginal English – which is a dialect distinct from Standard Australian English. Their linguistic competency should be the starting point for their instruction in Standard Australian English.

However, this kind of teaching requires teachers with skills in language and culturally responsive teaching – skills we do not currently train teachers for. While teachers speak Standard Australian English they have very little expertise in teaching it as an additional language.

Good money after bad?
Some point to the millions of dollars spent on education initiatives, and the subsequent lack of progress over the decades, as evidence that money is not the solution to this problem. This is the line used by both the current and former education minister as a defence for the refusal to commit to extended funding for education.

This argument is at best disingenuous, at worst ignorant. Education does cost money, and to achieve equality in education some of our students will require more resourcing than others.

Money must be targeted directly at interventions for those students who need them. Accountability must be linked to the educational outcomes of those targeted students, and those outcomes must be measured in far more nuanced ways than blunt and narrowly focused instruments like standardised testing.

Professional development
The starting point should be the professional development of teachers, specifically in language teaching and culturally responsive curriculum planning. This will give them the skills to target those in the ever-growing underachieving tail of Australian students.

(The writer is Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra).

To JNU with love, from Pakistan

February 15, 2016

A tribute to the ethos at the university, not from Hafiz Saeed, but scientist, essayist and staunch secularist Pervez Hoodbhoy

(In an email to Sabrang India)

In 2005, having won the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for science popularisation, I toured seven Indian cities at the invitation and expense of the Indian government. One of my most vivid memories is that of my visit to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. There was intense, but totally peaceful, political activity of every kind. There were banners of student organisations with political leanings all the way from left to middle to right, together with seminars, discussions, and protests. Clearly independent thought in India’s better universities was alive and well.

I particularly remember that I gave a talk and showed my documentary film on Kashmir, at JNU. This was just the day before I was scheduled to meet President APJ Abdul Kalam in his office at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. I learned that office bearers of the JNU student union had been requested by the university’s administration to present flowers to President Kalam at the annual convocation. They flatly refused, saying that he is a nuclear hawk and an appointee of a fundamentalist party that does not respect human rights. Moreover, as young women of dignity they could not agree to act as mere flower girls presenting bouquets to a man.

Eventually the head of the physics department, also a woman, somewhat reluctantly presented flowers but said that she was doing so as a scientist honoring another scientist, not because she was a woman.

Bravo! I have not seen comparable boldness and intellectual courage in Pakistani students. Student unions in Pakistan have been banned for three decades. I felt envious.

It is therefore with sadness that I read of intolerance taking over in India. I hope it is temporary and will go away with the next government.

Hoodbhoy who was in India last month gave a series of lectures at Indian universities, colleges, and various public places. On his return to Pakistan, he wrote an article for the daily Dawn making some interesting observations on India today:

Rarely are Pakistanis allowed to cross their eastern border. We are told that’s so because on the other side is the enemy. Visa restrictions ensure that only the slightest trickle of people flows in either direction. Hence ordinary academics like me rarely get to interact with their Indian counterparts. But an invitation to speak at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, and the fortuitous grant of a four-city, non-police reporting visa, led to my 11-day 12-lecture marathon at Indian universities, colleges, and various public places. This unusual situation leads me here to share sundry observations.

At first blush, it seemed I hadn’t travelled far at all. My first public colloquium was delivered in Urdu at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad. With most females in burqa, and most young men bearing beards, MANUU is more conservative in appearance than any Urdu university (there are several) on the Pakistani side. Established in 1998, it seeks to “promote and develop the Urdu language and to impart education and training in vocational and technical subjects”. Relative to its Pakistani counterparts, it is better endowed in terms of land, infrastructure and resources.

But there’s a still bigger difference: this university’s students are largely graduates of Indian madressahs while almost all university students in Pakistan come from secular schools. Thus, MANUU’s development of video “bridge courses” in Urdu must be considered as a significant effort to teach English and certain marketable skills to those with only religious training. I am not aware of any comparable programme in Pakistan. Shouldn’t we over here be asking how the surging output of Pakistani madressahs is to be handled? Why have we abandoned efforts to help those for whom secular schooling was never a choice?

To my embarrassment, I was unable to fulfil my host’s request to recommend good introductory textbooks in Urdu from Pakistan. But how could I? Such books don’t exist and probably never will. Although I give science lectures as often in Urdu as English, the books I use are only in English. Somehow Pakistan never summoned the necessary vigour for transplanting modern ideas into Urdu. The impetus for this has been lost forever. Urdu, as the language of Islam in undivided India, once had enormous political significance. Education in Urdu was demanded by the Muslim League as a reason for wanting Pakistan!

Modern face
A little down the road lies a different world. At the Indian Institute of Information Technology, the best and brightest of India’s young, selected after cut-throat competition, are engaged in a furious race to the top. IIIT-H boasts that its fresh graduates have recently been snapped up with fantastic Rs1.5 crore (Indian) salaries by corporate entities such as Google and Facebook.

This face of modern India is equally visible at the various Indian Institutes of Technology, whose numbers have exploded from four to 18. They are the showpieces of Indian higher education. I spoke at three ‒ Bombay, Gandhinagar, and Delhi ‒ and was not disappointed. But some Indian academics feel otherwise.

Engineering education at the IITs, says Prof Raghubir Sahran of IIT-GN, has remained “mainly mimetic of foreign models (like MIT) and captive to the demands of the market and corporate agendas”. My physicist friend, Prof Deshdeep Sahdev, agrees. He left IIT-K to start his own company that now competes with Hewlett Packard in making tunnelling electron microscopes and says IIT students are strongly drill-oriented, not innovative.

Still, even if the IITs are not top class, they are certainly good. Why has Pakistan failed in making its own version of the IITs? One essential condition is openness to the world of ideas. This mandates the physical presence of foreign visitors. Indeed, on Indian campuses one sees a large number of foreigners ‒ American, European, Japanese, and Chinese. They come for short visits as well as long stays, enriching universities and research centres.

Not so in Pakistan where foreigners are a rarity, to be regarded with suspicion. For example, at the National Centre for Physics, which is nominally a part of Quaid-i-Azam University but is actually ‘owned’ by the Strategic Plans Division (the custodian of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons), academic visitors are so tightly restricted that they seek to flee their jails soon after arrival. Those who came from Canada, Turkey and Iran to a recent conference at the NCP protested in writing and privately told us that they would never want to come back.

Tensions apparent
Tensions between secular and religious forces appear high in Modi’s India. Although an outsider cannot accurately judge the extent, I saw sparks fly when Nayantara Sahgal, the celebrated novelist who was the first of 35 Indian intellectuals to hand back their government awards, shared the stage with the governor of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. After she spoke on the threats to writers, the murder of three Indian rationalists, and the lynching of a Muslim man falsely accused of possessing beef, the enraged governor threw aside his prepared speech and excoriated her for siding with terrorists.

Hindutva ideology has put the ‘scientific temper’ of Nehruvian times under visible stress. My presentations on science and rationality sometimes resulted in a number of polite, but obviously unfriendly, comments from the audience. Legitimate cultural pride over path-breaking achievements of ancient Hindu scholars is being seamlessly mixed with pseudoscience. Shockingly, an invited paper at the recent Indian Science Congress claimed that Lord Shiva was the world’s greatest environmentalist. Another delegate blew on a ‘conch’ shell for a full two minutes because it would exercise the rectal muscles of Congress delegates!

Pakistan and India may be moving along divergent paths of development but their commonalities are becoming more accentuated as well. Engaging with the other is vital ‒ and certainly possible. Although I sometimes took unpopular political positions at no point did I, as a Pakistani, experience hostility. The mature response of both governments to the Pathankot attack gives hope that Pakistan and India might yet learn to live with each other as normal neighbours. This in spite of the awful reality that terrorism is here to stay.

When Speaking Truth is Sedition: A Letter to JNU Comrades from Assam

February 14, 2016

As I type this, I get to see news, of course not from Times Now or Zee News – let’s not even talk about the latter – of a march of more than 3,000 people from the JAwaharlal Nehru University (JNU) demanding the release of the president of the university’s student union and a stop to the witch hunting by Delhi Police as ordered — confirmed by his interview to the media — by none other than the honorable home minister of the country. That 3,000 people instantaneously and spontaneously pour on to the streets against this travesty of democracy, polyphony and heteroglossia is a sign that all hopes of sanity and a better tomorrow are not yet lost.

Since this letter is written PDQ, I will not go into how Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code is so outrageous that even Nehru in 1951 would call it obnoxious and objectionable and want to ‘get rid of it’. Nor delve into the fact that this law is so old that when it was born, Old Monk must have been New Monk and the Old Testament was still the New Testament, as they joke.

People have mentioned this in the small, marginalised space they are getting, as are you, brave comrades, in the TV ‘debates’ (whatever happened to dictionary meaning of words?) by jingoists and self-proclaimed representatives of tax-payers masquerading as journalists.

This, then, does bring me to the small thing I want to go into here. As someone writing to you from a perennially circumferential, marginalised, contentious state and indeed, region, I must, on this concerned, distressed and disquieted night, write to you of concord, concurrence and camaraderie because we understand what you mean. Because we have suffered. Because the Indian Army for us crores of people in the North Eastern Region is not what it is to Arnab Goswami and Sudhir Chaudhary.

If we remember soldiers braving snow, we also remember them in not so brave acts in my state and my region for decades, as we do in Kunan Poshpora, as we do in the eyes of our mothers and sisters who cross the river to safety in other villages if they hear of these law-keepers visiting their own, on any hungry night.

Events like the one you organized on February 9 are platforms that must remain in order to talk of dissent and shaping and unshaping, if peoples, regions and communities in the country should not continue to feel insignificant and peripheral. If asking for self-determination, freedom of speech, analysing and even questioning the judiciary or executive or legislature is anti-national, then is forced mono-ethnicisation, homogenisation, hegemonisation, division and communalism national?

If protests expressed by you against the UGC discontinuing fellowships – which are anyway peanuts in terms of rupees– braving the cold month after month in front of the Commission, if protests by all of you in front of Assam Bhawan against the rape of Karbi women by jawans or the dissatisfaction by you against the widely-discussed and debated trials of Yakub Memon or Afzal Guru or GN Saibaba amount to such reactions from the state, either the state is fascist or it is damn scared. But wait, they are the same thing, aren’t they?

If a few Kashmiri students in the programme raised slogans that the Indian state is not comfortable with, the state must first listen to them instead of hounding them. By hounding and hunting them, they also kill the issue – the issue of arguing about the judicial excesses, about capital punishment, about 377, about socio-religious bias and so many other issues that the state does not want any kind of minority to argue about. The argumentative Indian must be an oxymoron,the state seems to resolve. You must fight that, Kanhaiyas and Umars. So must all of us.

The history of the relationship of my state, Assam with the Indian state is no different. All discontents existing for decades have been termed as ‘law and order’ problems, all dissenters as being on payroll of foreign countries, or simply as misguided youth. Lack of jobs and underdevelopment may not be the only reasons for unhappiness, they can also be ethnicity, language, identity, resources and the nature of vision and attention from the Centre.

As you must be aware from your training in revolutionary history and thoughts, this state has always stood up against chauvinism, or rather, chauvinisms. At different points of history, it has resisted different attempts at despotism.

It has fought the Bengali hegemony in the nineteenth century over the Assam identity, as the state in the twentieth century fought fierce battles to throw away a consolidated Assamese (-speaking) hegemony. If the peasants have stood up against ecological hazards called the big dams in sustained, successful movements, the Bengali speaking Muslims have stood up for themselves, against de rigueur assimilation.

If it has produced 'lumpens' like Arnab Goswami, it has also produced revolutionaries like Bishnu Prasad Rabha.

Dissent does not look for a denouement. It is a perpetual reality, against newer tyranny, newer totalitarianisms and dictatorship, with newer vigour and plenty of welly. Dissent is a birth right.

Recently, you have been relentlessly expressing this dissent; for students’ fellowships as you have also done to protest how Dalit scholars are officially treated in this country’s central universities.

Salutes to you from a colonial hinterland.

(The writer is a struggling freelance journalist and unknown poet, Jyotirmoy Talukdar divides his time between Assam and Delhi. He takes everything with a pinch of salt, and hence prefers Tibetan tea. He can be contacted at jyoti.feedback@gmail.com)

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

February 13, 2016

About: Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) is an international solidarity network that provides information, support and a collective space for women whose lives are shaped, conditioned or governed by laws and customs said to derive from Islam.

For more than two decades WLUML has linked individual women and organisations. It now extends to more than 70 countries ranging from South Africa to Uzbekistan, Senegal to Indonesia and Brazil to France. It links:

women living in countries or states where Islam is the state religion, secular states with Muslim majorities as well as those from Muslim communities governed by minority religious laws;
women in secular states where political groups are demanding religious laws;
women in migrant Muslim communities in Europe, the Americas, and around the world;
non-Muslim women who may have Muslim laws applied to them directly or through their children;
women born into Muslim communities/families who are automatically categorized as Muslim but may not define themselves as such, either because they are not believers or because they choose not to identify themselves in religious terms, preferring to prioritise other aspects of their identity such as political ideology, profession, sexual orientation or others.

Our name challenges the myth of one, homogenous ‘Muslim world’. This deliberately created myth fails to reflect that: a) laws said to be Muslim vary from one context to another and, b) the laws that determine our lives are from diverse sources: religious, customary, colonial and secular. We are governed simultaneously by many different laws: laws recognised by the state (codified and un-codified) and informal laws such as customary practices which vary according to the cultural, social and political context.

Aims and focus: The network aims to strengthen women’s individual and collective struggles for equality and their rights, especially in Muslim contexts. It achieves this by:

Breaking the isolation in which women wage their struggles by creating and reinforcing linkages between women within Muslim countries and communities, and with global feminist and progressive groups;
Sharing information and analysis that helps demystify the diverse sources of control over women’s lives, and the strategies and experiences of challenging all means of control.

WLUML’s current focus is on the critical issues identified as our priorities for collective analysis and action:

Peace-Building and Resisting the Impact of Militarisation
Preserving Multiple Identities and Exposing Fundamentalisms
Widening Debate about Women’s Bodily Autonomy
Promoting and Protecting Women’s Equality Under Laws

As a theme, violence against women cuts across all of WLUML’s projects and activities.

Contact: wluml@wluml.org

Website: www.wluml.org/

Not so Smart, the Smart City

February 13, 2016

Last week, the Modi Government announced the names of the first set of twenty cities slated to become ‘smart’. The intention of building Smart Cities was a promise contained in the pre-election manifesto of the BJP. While initially the idea was to build 100 new cities with state-of-the art technology, there is now occurred a shift in the Mission’s focus from Green Field Development to Brown Field development. This shift has taken place after the BJP being put into power. In August 2014, the Modi Government asked state governments to select existing cities in each state for development under the ‘National Sustainable Habitat and Smart City Mission’.

The Government of India (GOI) allocated Rupees 7060 crores for the Smart Cities Mission in its interim budget of 2014-15. The budget of 2015-16 had a provision of Rupees 6000 crores for the Mission and the development of 500 habitations under the National Urban Rejuvenation Mission (NURM). A government panel has approved the allocation of Rupees 2.73 crores over the next ten years for the development of 100 smart cities under the NURM.

The ‘Mission Statement and Guidelines’ for the Smart Cities Mission released by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) on June 25, 2015 identified in the Mission the following strategic components for implementation: retrofitting, redevelopment, green field development and pan-city development. The MoUD is in the process of setting up the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for the Mission. Convergence with other government schemes, are also the guidelines for the release of funds for the Mission.

However, there are key issues that need to be publicly debated and discussed — regarding the very concept of Smart Cities in general and the Smart Cities Mission, in India – that are yet to be discussed publicly by opposition political parties and within the Indian parliament. From a bare reading of the concept and thrust of the policy document, it is quite obvious that the model as conceived by the GOI will lead to non-inclusive development. Smart Cities are being seen as meeting the aspirations of only India’s educated middle class.

The focus is on the implementation of technology for providing the middle classes with the instruments of online access for the use of public services. Smart technology (ICT) based solutions will require large investments from high technology vendors identified as originating from the United States coupled with the real estate builders from India. The likes of McKinsey Global Institute and Price Waterhouse Coopers have been roped in, to prepare the reports. Needless to say these investors will demand handsome returns on their investment.

While the users of these new technologies among the middle classes will pay only in part to provide for these returns, it is the Indian poor as a whole, who will be bearing the burden of public investment promised by the Modi Government. The poor will also pay for the Smart City projects in the form of displacement. The poor will pay through the loss of their existing homes to pave the way for the implementation of new projects of redevelopment and Greenfield development.

While the users of these new technologies among the middle classes will pay only in part to access these services in return, it is the Indian poor as a whole, who will bear the burden for the public investment promised by the Modi Government. The poor will also pay for the Smart City projects in the form of displacement. The poor will pay through the loss of their existing homes to pave the way for the implementation of new projects of redevelopment and Greenfield development.

The smart cities programme envisages the implementation of projects with the help of public private partnerships (PPPs). The land to be acquired for smart projects under these will affect not only slum dwellers but also the farmers living within peri-urban areas. The dream of 24×7 water supply of the middle classes will be realised but at what kind of social cost for the poor? The crucial issue of decent living (liveability) for the urban poor needs to be central to any development, including the envisaged Smart Cities concept. The resource requirements, including energy and its associated environmental impact –costs of an instrumented automated wired city —raise concerns on the front of environmental sustainability too.

The social exclusion of citizens lacking in information technology (IT) competence and categorising them as IT uneducated is also a serious issue that needs to be tackled up front. Smart Cities in the Indian socio-economic context mean dilution of the democratic right of the poor to the city itself, this time the exclusion will be routed through technology. The technology divide can be expected to deepen further through these burgeoning smart cities.

The last decade saw the initiation of e-governance programmes as part of the municipal reform agenda. Experience indicates that the poor have remained excluded from the e-platforms, and the municipalities have had to continue with the use of manual systems of capturing data and complaints in parallel with computerised systems.

Information available on the funding strategy for smart cities suggests that Rupees 7 lakh crores will be required over the next 20 years to provide for the infrastructure. Some estimates suggest that Rupees 35,000 crores per year will be required to support the Smart Cities Mission. However, it is not clear whether this amount covers on-off investments. Obviously private sector investment will be ad hoc and will further be driven solely by a profit motive. It is however not clear as yet who will have to pay for the maintenance of this infrastructure. Without a substantial share of funding coming from either the GOI and state governments, can we expect urban local bodies in poor financial health to pay for the maintenance of technology based infrastructure of Smart Cities into which the Modi Government plans to lock-in a huge amount of public investment?

Foreign and private capital will be mainly targeting investments that have a higher rate of return, and the expansion of public services to be implemented in a universal service framework will not come into existence. The guidelines and notes released do not provide information on this aspect at all.

Delivering good governance to all –Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas —implies that the government needs to pursue a universal approach on the providing of public services. If the Smart Cities by design are not targeted to undo the un-smart expansion of real estate into the wetlands and commons that served the cities’ drainage needs, it would not be incorrect to presume that we should be ready to face more urban (manmade) disasters of the likes of the Chennai floods (and earlier Mumbai, 2005) and the accompanying misery that these brought to their residents. All the cities, big and small, face the challenge of having to prepare themselves in advance to face extreme weather conditions that are expected to multiply.

Wireless technologies, sensor networks and digital (surveillance) will not make cities smart and sustainable. What Chennai saw in respect of the flooding of its own international airport will be repeated if we are not willing to undo un-smart expansion of the cities driven by corporate greed. Let us remember that the Chennai floods did not spare even the office of Infosys. How we can expect the IT infrastructure to be spared in Smart Cities?

If we are not willing to act against the big offenders among the high tech companies and real estate developers in respect of encroaching on the urban commons (land), then surely as a nation and its people we must discuss the Smart Cities mission threadbare, before-hand.

The Modi Government must be made to rethink the focus and emphasis behind this Mission of city development. While it appears that soot-boot ki sarkar wants to help its friends among the corporates, the opposition has a task cut out for itself. Opposition parties need to expose the undemocratic design of Smart cities. They should not allow the Modi Government to hide behind its self-acclaimed tag of smart governance. The process of development of Smart Cities is neither participatory nor transparent. It is an undemocratic project which needs to be opposed, tooth and nail.

(The author is the Convener National Working Group on Patent Laws; his email is dinesh.abrol@gmail.com)

MuslimGirl

February 13, 2016

ABOUT:
When you first heard our name “MuslimGirl,” one of two things probably happened.

If you’re a Muslim, you were like, “Yes, finally — that’s me!”

If you’re not a Muslim, you might have flinched and thought something along the lines of, “Ugh, not these people…”

And that’s why we’re here.

We’re normalizing the word “Muslim” for both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. MuslimGirl.net was launched from the bedroom of a high school girl that was fed up with the misleading misconceptions surrounding Islam — the way the news coverage and media outlets kept skewing the image of Muslims into a nasty one; the mistrust, racism, and flat-out hatred that the inaccuracies flamed; the muting of young Muslim voices from mainstream society; and the resulting disillusionment that young Muslims suffer about their religion in the tornado of it all.

We at MuslimGirl are taking back the narrative. We use our own voices to speak up for ourselves. We are raising the place of Muslim women in mainstream society. We are drawing awareness to the Qur’an’s message of gender equality and Islam’s principle of peace. We are paving the way towards a world in which every woman can raise her head without fear of being attacked for her gender or beliefs.

We write articles that relate to young modern women all over the globe and kickstart an open honest dialogue about Islam in today’s society. Here at MuslimGirl we like to talk about things that might be a little too embarrassing for mom, to bridge the gap between different religions through the spirit of sisterhood, and to host interfaith discussion to combat growing stereotypes within our society and tackle social issues that may otherwise be shied away from.

The MuslimGirl Clique is a global society of talented and driven Muslim women that are revolutionizing the way Islam is delivered the world over. The members of MGC are movers and shakers that are dedicated to exemplifying the ideals and principles of being a modern Muslim woman. They represent an international sorority of like-minded young innovators that are committed to combatting stereotypes and changing the view of Muslims as we know it. Their lives are a testament to the strength and power of our generation. MuslimGirl may personally extend an invitation for membership, otherwise there are currently three ways to be a part of the clique:

Contact: amani@muslimgirl.net

Website: http://muslimgirl.net/

The MuslimGirl: ‘Pam Geller wanted us to draw Mohammed so we did’: http://muslimgirl.net/12016/dm2015/

NY’s Public Theater cancels Palestinian production, ‘The Siege,’ it agreed to stage in May

February 13, 2016

Courtesy: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/02/nys-public-theater-cancels-palestinian-production-the-siege-it-was-to-stage-for-may/

This is tragic news. The Public Theater is slamming the door on Palestinian artists. The US Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre in Palestine made this announcement today:

A message from the US Friends of The Jenin Freedom Theatre regarding the plans to present The Siege in partnership with the Public Theater:

It is with deep regret that we announce that the Public Theater has decided not to proceed with the plans to showcase The Freedom Theatre’s The Siege in May, 2016.

Regardless of the difficulties, we intend to present this play to the US public. We are disappointed, but we are working to find another comparable venue for the play in the fall of 2017.

Thank you,
Friends of The Jenin Freedom Theatre
Constancia, Inea, Kathy, Felice, Yoram, Noelle, Liz, Jen, Josh, Margo, Terry, Dorothy, Dana, Lisa, Shaina, Linda, Gary

The production had already been postponed one year at the request of the Public, but with a promise to put it on this year. It was never on the official schedule; and the decision came down in recent days. I am told that Oskar Eustis, the trailblazing artistic director at the Public, was behind the show all the way. But evidently intense pressure came to bear on the Public Theater board, ala the “Death of Klinghoffer” pressures that came to bear on the Metropolitan Opera over that production, which went off in 2014 but with such opposition that the Metropolitan may well rue that decision. The Public didn’t want to take that chance, evidently.

Here is a description of the Siege, a play about resistance. Account from the International Solidarity Movement:

Inspired by the true story of a group of freedom fighters, now exiled across Europe and Gaza, The Siege tells of a moment in history that took place during the height of the second intifada in 2002. The Israeli army had surrounded Bethlehem from the air and on land with snipers, helicopters and tanks, blocking all individuals and goods from coming in or out. For 39 days, people were living under curfew and on rations, with their supply of water cut and little access to electricity. Along with hundreds of other Palestinians, monks, nuns and ten activists from the International Solidarity Movement, these five freedom fighters took refuge in the Church of the Nativity, one of the holiest sites in the world.

The play gives some insight into what it was like to be trapped inside the church, surviving on so little, with the smell of decaying dead bodies in the building, shot by Israeli snipers. It brings out the hard choice they were faced with between surrendering or resisting until the end. However, no matter what they chose, they were given no other option than to leave behind their family and homeland for ever, as all the freedom fighters – in reality 39 – were deported and have not been able to come back since.

We’ll be following this story, which is so reminiscent of the New York Theatre Workshop’s cancellation of My Name Is Rachel Corrie in 2006. Yes, ten years ago, and I keep saying things are thawing. Not in the belly of the beast. What an insult and rebuke to Palestinian artists. More to come.

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NY’s Public Theater cancels Palestinian production, ‘The Siege,’ it agreed to stage in May

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