6 Years After Narendra Dhabolkar’s Assassination, Masterminds Remain Free

August 19, 2019

While chargesheets against accused Amol Kale, Amit Digwekar and Rajesh Bangera are still pending, the permission to search for the weapon used has only been granted recently.

Narendra Dhabolkar. Image Courtesy : The Indian Express

August 20 will mark six years since the Maharashtra-based rationalist Narendra Dhabolkar was assassinated by bike-borne men while returning home in Pune from a morning walk. As the investigation has evolved over the years, many questions still remain pending, the biggest being, when will the key conspirators be nabbed as the masterminds in the case still remain scot free.

Speaking to NewsClick, Hamid Dhabolkar from the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS), an organisation founded by the rationalist, said, “It’s almost a year since the suspected shooters have been arrested and it has become quite evident from Gauri Lankesh, Kalburgi and Pansare’s case that the murders were a coordinated effort and a conspiracy to eliminate the voices of dissent.” Dhabolkar’s family has been highlighting that the process of the investigation has been extremely slow. Despite the fact that Sanatan Sanstha (SS) and its many splinters have been named in the killings of rationalists by the investigative agencies, these organisations continue to function and are not being investigated properly.

Currently, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested over six people in the case. However, no substantial leads to the key conspirators have been established. Out of the six, the central investigating agency has also taken custody of three, Amol Kale, Amit Digwekar and Rajesh Bangera — who are also accused in the murder of journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh. Lankesh was killed near her residence in Bengaluru in September 2017. In December last year, a court in Pune granted “default bail” to these three suspects in the Dabholkar murder case as the CBI did not file a chargesheet against them within the stipulated period of 90 days. However, they continue to be in jail for their alleged involvement in the Lankesh murder case. Hamid added, “First and the most logical thing that needs to happen is to reach out to the mastermind and the conspirators, otherwise they will keep bringing up people like this.

In June 2016, in a major breakthrough, the CBI had arrested ENT surgeon and Sanatan Sanstha member Virendra Tawade, alleging that he was the mastermind of the conspiracy to kill Dabholkar. In the chargesheet against Tawade, the CBI mentioned the involvement of other Sanatan Sanstha activists Sarang Akolkar and Vinay Pawar and stated that they had shot Dabholkar. But later, the agency claimed that the arrested had accused Sachin Andure and Sharad Kalaskar of shooting Dabholkar.

More names surfaced in May this year, as the CBI arrested Sanatan Sansthan counsel Sanjeev Punalekar in connection with the case. Punalekar, who is currently out on bail, was arrested along with his aide Vikram Vinay Bhave based on an alleged confessional statement by Sharad Kalaskar, who has been named in a CBI chargesheet as one of the two shooters who killed Dabholkar. Kalaskar had allegedly issued the statement to the Karnataka special investigation team (SIT) investigating journalist Gauri Lankesh’s murder. A decision on the bail application of Vikram Bhave is also pending in the court and is likely to be pronounced soon.

Despite the progress being made on the arrests of the persons involved, six years later there is still no probe on the weapon used to murder Dhabolkar. Hamid added, “There are statements that are available from Sharad Kalaskar saying that he has dismantled the gun near Thane. This has been available with the investigating agencies for over seven to eight months now (the chargesheet against the shooters were filed in February 2019), still they have not managed to get a clearance to probe the site. The High Court has also pulled them up a lot of time on this as well saying that the delay can be potentially dangerous. Despite this information being available with the agencies, the permission to probe the assault weapon has been granted recently.”

He added, “On August 10, CBI has also informed the Pune court that it has obtained the necessary clearance from the state environment ministry to conduct a search operation in the Arabian Sea to find out the weapon used to assassinate rationalist Narendra Dabholkar. A foreign company has been given a contract to conduct the operation.”

Every year on August 20, MANS observes a day of protest against the political murder of Narendra Dhabolkar. This year, however, the society, in order to facilitate discussions on science and rationality, has decided to organise a Dr. Narendra Dhabolkar memorial lecture to pay homage to the rationalist.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

Re-Build demolished Ravidas Temple: CPI(M)

August 17, 2019

CPI(M) Polit Bureau Member, Brinda Karat has written to Hardeep Puri, Minister for Urban Development demanding that the demolished Guru Ravidas temple is rebuilt and the samadhis are restored in their original place.

The full text of the letter is being released for publication.

Dear Shri Hardeep Puri ji,

This is to draw your attention to the demolition of the Guru Ravidas Mandir and four samadhis in the “forest area” in Tughlaqabad extension on August 10. I had visited the place on August 14th along with my Party colleagues and office bearers of the Dalit Soshan Mukti Manch and met the petitioners (Guru Ravidas Samiti) who gave me the details and took us to the site.

I had read in the papers that you had met the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi in this connection and are working out “a solution” namely to “allot another place” for the temple and the samadhis. Unfortunately in these developments the DDA, which is directly under your Ministry, has played the worst role in riding roughshod over the legitimate grievances of the petitioners leading to the present plight. I strongly urge you to rectify this by going in for a review petition before the Supreme Court.

The entire approach of the Government is based on double standards. On the one hand the Government is in court in defence of the “faith of people” on the demand to build a temple in Ayodhya on the exact spot where the Babri Masjid stood. On the other hand a spot which has been for decades a pilgrimage centre for the devotees of Guru Ravidas and on which a small temple structure was erected in the decade of the fifties has been demolished by the same Government. Even worse the samadhis of four of the pujaris who have served in the temple since then were also demolished. Even
though there was a strong legal case, the government went against the petitioners. Does it not display a discriminatory attitude because the devotees belong mainly to the Scheduled Castes?

You are well aware that the road adjacent to where the Ravidas mandir stood is named Guru Ravidas Marg and there are two bus stops also with the same name, precisely because of the existence of the mandir. Is this not a recognition of the existence of the mandir now demolished which answers the motivated propaganda against the community as “encroachers”? If it was encroachment then why was a public space named after the mandir? Secondly, if you care to visit the area you will find that DDA has permitted the building of a clubhouse in the same area. Only very recently new roads have
been built in the wooded area. Is this not double standards? I also saw that in the course of the demolition, the DDA had destroyed a number of trees.

The mandir has been operational well before independence whereas devotees have been coming to the spot specifically a pond where they believe their Guru Ravidas had visited for ages. The structure demolished was built in the decade of the fifties to replace a makeshift structure which was there. All this is a matter of record. What is particularly distressing is that the DDA did not even spare the samadhis of the pujaris which were broken up and the stones to mark the graves were also left broken or under the mud. Is this the kind of respect the DDA has for the keepers of a temple frequented by people belonging to the scheduled castes?

The Delhi High Court had made the suggestion to relocate the temple 400 yards away while keeping the samadhis intact. However the DDA by its actions of demolition of the samadhis and the temple has changed the situation.

I therefore request you to ensure that the temple is rebuilt and the samadhis are restored in their original place. This is also to inform you that the CPI(M) has extended support to the struggle of the devotees of Guru Ravidas for justice.

With regards,
Brinda Karat

UAPA Amendment 2019: Petition challenges unilateral power to declare Individuals as Terrorists

August 17, 2019

Just a week after the amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2019 was notified giving the Central Government power unilateral to designate an individual as “terrorist”, a Public Interest Litigation has been filed in the Supreme Court praying that it be declared unconstitutional. A resident of Delhi, Sajal Awasthi, has moved the apex court praying for a declaration that “the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2019 is violative of fundamental rights as enshrined under Article 14 (Right to Equality), 19 (Right to Free Speech and Expression) and 21 (Right to Life) of the Constitution of India.”

The petitioner, defining himself to be a public-spirited person, says UAPA 2019 seeks to substantially modify Chapter VI of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 and Section 35 and 36. “The new Section 35 of the UAPA Act, 1967 empowers the Central Government to categorise any individual as “terrorist” and add name of such a person in Schedule 4 of the Act. It is submitted that conferring of such a discretionary, unfettered and unbound powers upon the central government is antithesis to the Article 14 of the Constitution of India,” says the petition filed through Advocate Pawan Reley. The much-debated recent amendment allows for notification of individuals as “terrorists” while under UAPA,1967, only organisations could be so notified.

UAPA 2019 strikes at Right to Reputation
Submitting that UAPA 2019 strikes at Fundamental Rights of an individual at various levels, the petitioner says it also mars the right to reputation of a person.
“…Right to Reputation is an intrinsic part of fundamental right to life with dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution of India and terming/tagging an individual as “terrorist” even before commencement of trial or any application of judicial mind over it, does not amount to following of ‘procedure established by law’ and is, thus, violative of right to reputation of such an individual who is being categorised as terrorist and being added in Schedule 4 of the UAPA Act, 1967.”

The petitioner has cited the case of ‘Board of Trustees of the Port of Bombay v. Dilip Kumar Raghavendranath Nadkarni & Ors’, while stressing on right to reputation as an integral part of right to life, wherein the Supreme Court had held that, “It is thus amply clear that one is entitled to have and preserve, one’s reputation and one also has a right to protect it. In case any authority, in discharge of its duties fastened upon it under the law, traverses into the realm of personal reputation adversely affecting him, must provide a chance to him to have his say in the matter.”
The petition further states that Section 35 of the impugned law is also violative of international conventions ratified and implemented by India as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1965) recognizes right of reputation of others and right to hold opinions without interference.

Curtails Right to Dissent
Media reports suggest that the petition further states that, “The UAPA, 2019 does not afford an opportunity to an individual, being categorised as terrorist, to present his/her case and let such individuals to live on the whim and caprice of the society thereinafter. The amended Section 35 of the UAPA, 1967 directly and adversely affects the fundamental right to free speech and expression as enshrined under Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution of India. It is relevant to note here that Right of dissent is a part and parcel of fundamental right to free speech and expression and therefore, cannot be abridged in any circumstances except for mentioned in Article 19 (2)”.

“The UAPA, 2019 empowers the ruling government, under the garb of curbing terrorism, to impose indirect restriction on right of dissent which is detrimental for our developing democratic society,” it says.

Arbitrary powers conferred on State; manifest arbitrariness
The petitioner also raises the issue “whether the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2019 suffers from the vice of manifest arbitrariness?”
“prior to passing of the impugned law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 vide its Section 35 authorised only categorising of organisations as terrorist organisations but after coming into force of the impugned law, the same has been extended to individuals as well… it is necessary to draw a clear line of distinction between unilateral categorisation of an organisation as terrorist organisation and unilateral categorisation of an individual as a terrorist because the latter carries with itself far more prolonged consequences and repercussions for a person’s liberty and to live freely with dignity”.
The petition also further argues that the procedure for notification of an individual as a ‘terrorist’ is flawed and devoid of any impartial procedure, as the same lacks any judicial member or retired judicial member, especially in the instant case where fundamental rights of an individual are at stake, the petitioner submits.

The petition also argues that Section 35 of UAPA 2019 “does not specify detailed grounds or reasons based on which an individual can be termed as terrorist and, therefore, conferring of such an arbitrary and unfettered power without any limits or bounds amount to violation of Article 14 of the Constitution of India”.

“…thread of reasonableness runs through the entire Part III of the Constitution (Fundamental Rights) and not even an iota of the provisions contained in Section 35 of the impugned law be termed as fair and reasonable,” it says while citing Supreme Court’s observation in the case of ‘Shayara Bano & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors’ wherein the court dealt with the scope of challenging validity of an enactment on grounds of being manifestly arbitrary and observed, “Manifest arbitrariness, therefore, must be something done by the legislature capriciously, irrationally and/or without adequate determining principle. Also, when something is done which is excessive and disproportionate, such legislation would be manifestly arbitrary. We are, therefore, of the view that arbitrariness in the sense of manifest arbitrariness as pointed out by us above would apply to negate legislation as well Under Article 14,” says the petition.

Pehlu Khan Murder: Courts on trial, where is the substantive justice?

August 16, 2019

This is a question that Indian courts will have to answer. On the eve of India’s 73^rd Independence Day, a travesty of a verdict blotted India’s jurisprudential landscape. Rejecting the weak links in the process of collection of evidence during investigations –which included a video that was not forensically tested by the state’s prosecution—but which clearly could identify the assailants of a 55 year-old cattle trader, Pehlu Khan, an Alwar Court has acquitted all six accused. While undoubtedly there will be an appeal, serious questions on the conduct of the trial arise, given specific questions in criminal law that exist to ensure that courts must step in when the investigation is shoddy and the prosecution lack lustre; especially when issues relate to the administration of public justice.

Though this is certainly not the first time we have seen such a reluctance to punish those guilty of brute crimes, what makes this denial of justice starker, is the prevalent political and social environment, conducive to mob violence that surrounds us. India has seen a spiral in cases of lynchings over the past six years. Many of those who have been mercilessly attacked by ‘the mob’ –that enjoys undoubted political patronage if not outright sanction—have been Muslim cattle traders, several have also been Dalits or belonged to other marginalised sections. On test then is how insulated are our institutions of justice from this pervasive mob psyche.

Indian courts have in the past, in rare moments of judicial vindication transferred cases, stepped in to ensure the integrity of the investigation, questioned the lapses in the prosecution and most crucial of all, actually used the expanse of powers for re-investigation and further investigation given to the trial court under existing Indian criminal law.

Epic pronouncements by the Supreme Court, have ensured a crucial intervention, pointing out the role of the trial court when faced with gross public crimes, made worse by a deliberately botched-up investigation and weak kneed prosecution. Tragically, the absence of a systemised institutional memory within even our courts (higher courts down to trial courts) has reduced these significant pronouncements to glimmers of hope within the broader normal of a low conviction rate coupled with a dulled and hollowed out jurisprudence.

Six of the accused named by Pehlu Khan in his dying declaration (Om Yadav, Hukum Chand Yadav, Sudhir Yadav, Jagmal Yadav, Naveen Sharma and Rahul Saini) were actually dropped as accused when the CBI Crime Branch was brought in to head the investigation. Efforts to arraign them as accused through a Section 319 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CRPC), before the same trial court that finally acquitted the six other accused, were rejected by the judge. The application under section 319 was argued over two days by advocates for the family of the deceased in July 2019.

While the judge has commented on the fact that the Rajasthan crime branch did not produce either the video or the phone on which it was shot before the court, or even get these analysed in a forensic laboratory, the court itself, did little to nudge the prosecution agency into covering the lapses in the probe as the CRPC empowers the courts to do. If the investigation was so shoddy, what should have been the role of the trial court that has been hearing the case for over two years?

The court, in its judgement, even pulls up the police for a delay in the registration of the FIR in the case and comments on the “serious negligence” on part of the investigating officer. However, these officers escape any legal consequences of this gross dereliction in duty. In fact, they are not punished by the court at all. It is not as if the court of Judge Sarita Swamy not made copious note of the weak charge sheet. She observes, “This way, in this case, according to the prosecution, the accused were identified on the basis of two videos of the incident shot on mobile. But surprisingly, the video cited by Ramesh Sinsinwar and the photographs prepared from it was not taken on record and neither was the mobile which contained the video, confiscated,” noted the court in its judgment.

Sinsinwar was the then SHO of Behror police station in Alwar district, and the first investigating officer in the case. In his statement to the court, Sinsinwar said that he had received one of the videos from an informant, but accepted that he hadn’t sent the video to the forensic science laboratory (FSL). He also accepted that he didn’t get a certificate from a nodal officer for the call details of the accused, nor were they verified from anyone. He told the court that he didn’t take any documents such as bills and SIM IDs from the accused which could show that the accused were the owners of the mobiles, and the phones were also not confiscated. But did the court in any way use its power under criminal law, to punish the SHO for this lapses that show a wilful even criminal negligence? Observations apart, the judge has done little to ensure that officers like Sinsinwar do not get away with such criminal negligence in the future.

Sections in the Criminal Procedure Code, section 311 with 165 of the Evidence Act give powers to the presiding judge to summon witnesses, and pro-actively intervene during trial. Section 173(8) empowers the court to ensure that the agencies investigating the case leave no stones unturned to tie up the loose knots in criminal cases.

“..In the case of a defective investigation the Court has to be circumspect in evaluating the evidence and may have to adopt an active and analytical role to ensure that truth is found by having recourse to Section 311 or at a later stage also resorting to Section 391 instead of throwing hands in the air in despair. It would not be right in acquitting an accused person solely on account of the defect; to do so would tantamount to playing into the hands of the investigating officer if the investigation is designedly defective.
Karnel Singh v. State of M.P. (1995 (5) SCC 518.

The lapse or omission is committed by the investigation agency or because of negligence the prosecution evidence is required to be examined de hors such omissions to find out whether the said evidence is reliable or not. The contaminated conduct of officials should not stand on the way of the Courts getting at the truth by having recourse to Section 311, 391 of the Code and Section 165 of the Evidence Act at the appropriate and relevant stages and evaluating the entire evidence;

…It is no doubt true that the accused persons have been acquitted by the trial Court and the acquittal has been upheld, but if the acquittal is unmerited and based on tainted evidence, tailored investigation, unprincipled prosecutor and perfunctory trial and evidence of threatened/terrorised witnesses, it is no acquittal in the eye of law and no sanctity or credibility can be attached and given to the so-called findings. It seems to be nothing but a travesty of truth, fraud on legal process.
Paras Yadav and Ors. v. State of Bihar (1999 (2) SCC 126

Justice has no favourite, except truth. It is as much the duty of the prosecutor as of the Court to ensure that full and material facts are brought on record so that there might not be miscarriage of justice.
Shakila Abdul Gafar Khan v. Vasant Raghunath Dhoble: (2003) 7 SCC 749.

In the especially the famed Zahira Shaikh case, Zahira Habibulla Sheikh v.s State of Gujarat, (2004) 3 SCC has made several serious observations on the role of the Trial Court:
“ ..Discovery, vindication and establishment of truth are the main purposes underlying existence of courts of justice;…
“In a criminal case the fate of the proceedings cannot always be left entirely in the hands of the parties, crimes being public wrongs in breach and violation of public rights and duties, which affect the whole community as a community and are harmful to the society in general. The concept of fair trial entails familiar triangulation of interests of the accused, the victim and the society and it is the community that acts through the State and prosecuting agencies. Interests of society are not to be treated completely with disdain and as persona non grata. Courts have always been considered to have an overriding duty to maintain public confidence in the administration of justice – often referred to as the duty to vindicate and uphold the ‘majesty of the law’”…….

Section 173 (8) provides for new accused to be charged with the offence if the Magistrate thinks so to be fit during the trial of one accused for an offence. So, if A is being prosecuted and during the prosecution the Magistrate believes that B might be another accused in the offence he may charge B with the offence and summon him as an accused. The proceedings against B will start afresh with witnesses giving fresh statements. It must be noted that this provision may be invoked only and only after the court has taken cognizance of the offence. This is the provision for reinvestigation as prescribed in the stage where the prosecution is still in the Sessions Court.

“The Code of Criminal Procedure is an exhaustive Code providing a complete machinery to investigate and try cases, appeals against the judgments. It has provisions at each stage to correct errors, failures of justice and abuse of process under the supervision and superintendence of the High Court as would be evident from the following:

(i) The Court has the power to direct investigation in cognizable cases under Section 156(3) read with Section 190 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
(ii) A Magistrate can postpone the issue of process and inquire into the case himself under Section 202 (1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

“..The power of the Court under Section 165 of the Evidence Act is in a way complementary to its power under Section 311 of the Code. The section consists of two parts i.e. (i) giving a discretion to the Court to examine the witness at any stage and (ii) the mandatory portion which compels the Court to examine a witness if his evidence appears to be essential to the just decision of the Court
If a criminal Court is to be an effective instrument in dispensing justice, the Presiding Judge must cease to be a spectator and a more recording machine by becoming a participant in the trial evincing intelligence, active interest and elicit all relevant materials necessary for reaching the correct conclusion, to find out the truth, and administer justice with fairness and impartiality both to the parties and to the community it serves. Courts administering criminal justice cannot turn a blind eye to vexatious or oppressive conduct that has occurred in relation to proceedings, even if a fair trial is still possible, except at the risk of undermining the fair name and standing of the judges as impartial and independent adjudicators.
( Zahira Habibulla Sheikh v.s State of Gujarat, (2004) 3 SCC 158)

The failure of the court lies in presiding over this sham of a prosecution and investigation, and in fact functioning as merely as a silent spectator.

Enforcing Discrimination one Colour at a time: TN

August 16, 2019

Systems will continue says the Minister in response to own circular prohibiting the practice: Education Minister’s U-turn on Casteist practice

The Tamil Nadu School Education Minister K.A. Sengottaiyan said that the recent circular by his department concerning the wrist band(s) which enforced caste discrimination among young students, was issued “without the knowledge of the department”. The minister was responding to questions from the media on the issue after he attended an Independence Day celebrations at an event in the state’s capital, Chennai.

He said the circular issued by the department to all Chief Educational Officers was not initiated by the department. He added, “The order from the Adi Dravidar (and Tribal) Welfare department was simply forwarded by our department.” He desisted from clarifying whether his statement meant that there will be no ban on wrist bands and added, “Whatever system remained in schools, will continue.”

A representation made by IAS 2018 officers in July had stated that some schools in Tamil Nadu, children are made to wear wrist bands in order to identify their castes. The wrist bands which come in the shades of red, yellow, green and saffron, indicated whether a child is from ‘upper caste’ or ‘lower caste’.The issue came up during a discussion in Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, as per the officers of IAS 2018 who made the representation.

Later, on July 31, a circular was issued by the director of school of education demanding “strict action”. The circular said, “In some schools in Tamil Nadu, students were made to wear colour-coded wrist bands. In the circular, the state school education department had asked its officers to identify and crack down on such schools.

It urged senior officials to take appropriate steps to identify such schools and asked them to “…issue suitable instructions to headmasters to prevent such a practice immediately and also take severe action against persons responsible for the discrimination”.

Strangely, the circular had noted that the students had enforced the practice upon themselves!

Interestingly, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader H Raja welcomed the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK)’s move. On Thursday, he tweeted that the circular was withdrawn by the ruling AIADMK and said, “The circular bans a tilaka on the forehead. How can a government ban Hindu symbols? When you allow crosses to be worn and you don’t ban pardha, how can the government do this? Raja even went the extent of demanding punishment for the government officials behind the circular. He also avoided acknowledging caste discrimination in the instance. He had even called the move, ‘Anti-Hindu’.

Activists have explained how discrimination starts in these schools from the anganwadi (child care centres) onwards. “In anganwadis of some schools, non-Dalit children are allowed to bring separate vessels from home. Discrimination differs through the years of their education,” alleged a Madurai based activist ‘Evidence’ Kathir who works for the empowerment of Dalits. He said that the practice continues in various states.

Kathir also highlighted the issue of one school in Pollachi, Coimbatore in a Hindu report saying that some schools call Dalit students minus while Upper caste students as Plus.

Advocating an increase in the number of schools for children from Adi Dravidar community, Mr. Kathir said the Goal 4 of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals is to ensure quality education before 2030.

“This doesn’t mean only infrastructure but a discrimination-free atmosphere for the children,” he added. These practices supposedly were being used for sports team selection, reassembling during class and lunch intervals.

Dhongi Aditynath’s Ulta Pradesh: Withdrawing Cases Against The Riots Accused

August 16, 2019

The Uttar Pradesh Govt has decided to withdraw seven cases against a BJP MLA Sangeet Som. These cases include Muzaffarnagar riots cases. UP is ruled by a saffron-clad self-styled Sanyasi (monk) Yogi Adityanath. I call him Dhongi Adityanath because he has Gorakhpur riots blood on his hands. Dhongi Adityanath reportedly called upon Hindus to pull out Muslim ladies from their graves and rape them! Dhongi Adityanath’s original name is Ajay Singh Bisht. He is a Thakur/Rajput and his Hindu Yuva Vahini mainly consists of Rajput goons who molest Dalit girls and celebrate the Rana Pratap Jayanti! In short, the Gorakhpur riots accused has decided to withdraw cases against the Muzaffarnagar riots accused. “Chor-Chor Mausere Bhai” goes an old Hindi saying. To jog readers’ memory, let me remind them that just before 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Sangeet Som and his blood-thirsty gang engineered communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, a town in the Western UP. In the surcharged post-riots atmosphere, Jat and Muslim voters got polarised and the blood-thirsty Ram Bhakts reaped a very good electoral harvest. As political analysts tell us that rains of blood are followed by bumper crop of votes!

Sangeet Som (L) and Yogi Adityantah both are known for their Anti Muslims politics in the region

Ever since Dhongi Adityanath became the UP CM, the law and order has gone for a six. The Rajput CM has made a Rajput IPS the state DGP: OP Singh. And a Rajput MLA Kuldeep Sengar has gone berserk. The Unnao rape case has made international headlines. A Rajput MLA raped a girl and got her father murdered. Then an “accident” took place and the victim’s aunt was killed. But the Rajput CM and his pet Rajput DGP looked the other way. The girl is still on a ventilator. The Supreme Court of India finally intervened. The girl was given compensation, the CRPF protection and the trial was shifted to Delhi.

The terror unleashed by Rajput goons in UP is unparalleled. In UP towns, big and small, Rajput hoodlums gather under the pretext of celebrating Maharana Pratap Jayanti. They all are armed to the teeth. Then they raid Dalit homes and rape Dalit girls at gun point. Sometimes, they damage Ambedkar statues claiming that Ambedkar points his finger towards Rajput ladies! When the Bhim Army retaliated in Saharanpur, the Rajput hooliganism caught national attention.

The biggest mafia don in UP is a Rajput: Raja Bhaiyya. The MLA from Kunda is known as Kunda Ka Gunda. His name figured in the murder of Zia ul Haq, a senior police officer. But the CBI, called a “caged parrot” by the Supreme Court, gave him a clean chit. Mayawati invoked the dreaded POTA against Raja Bhaiyya but with Dhongi Adityanath at the helm, Raja Bhaiyya is a monster unchained. The Chief Minister is busy changing names. From Prayagraj to Allahabad, from Mughalsarai to Deen Dayal Nagar. Adityanath also wants to ban the Hindi word “gorakh-dhandha” (a racket) because the word insults Guru Gorakhnath! And Raja Bhaiyya is left untouched in his palace.

The UP Govt has put Muslims on its hit list. Kafeel Khan, Azam Khan etc. Dr Kafeel Khan was made a scapegoat after 70 kids died in a Gorakhpur hospital when the oxygen supply was cut off. And Azam Khan’s Jauhar University is raided day in and day out. Target Kafeel Khan and Azam Khan because they are Muslims. Don’t touch Kuldeep Sengar and Raja Bhaiyya because they are Muslims. Dhongi Adityanath’s policy is clear in UP, now called Ulta Pradesh by many.

As far as the withdrawal of riots cases against Sangeet Som is concerned, I hope that the Govt orders will be challenged at the Allahabad High Court. When the forest brigand Veerappan kidnapped Kannada super star Dr Rajkumar, the state Govt decided that cases would be dropped against Veerappan’s accomplices. But a police martyr’s father challenged the Govt move in the Supreme Court and the apex court ruled against the withdrawal of cases. I hope that families of Muzaffarnagar riots victims will oppose the withdrawal of cases against Sangeet Som. And Allahabad High Court will call Dhongi Adityanath’s bluff. Ulta Pradesh has suffered enough.

(Mr. Amitabh Kumar Das is a 1994 Batch IPS Officer. His views expressed here are personal.)

First published on http://www.themorningchronicle.in/

How the U.S. Created the Central American Immigration Crisis

August 16, 2019

It’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife.For two years, members of my little Episcopal church joined other neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner’s office continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already reported — that he had indeed been running away from those officers when they shot him. In the end, the San Francisco district attorney declined to prosecute the police for the killing, although the city did reach a financial settlement with his family back in Guatemala.

Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he — like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations — was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month — May — of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.”

It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president’s wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s, dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the region) with U.S. economic and military backing.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes in genocidal wars on its indigenous Mayan majority. To top it off, climate change, which the United States has done the most of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.

U.S. Actions Have Central American Consequences
Scholars who study migration speak of two key explanations for why human beings leave their homes and migrate: “pull” and “push” factors. Pull factors would include the attractions of a new place, like economic and educational opportunities, religious and political liberties, and the presence there of family, friends, or community members from back home. Push factors driving people from their homes would include war; the drug trade; political, communal, or sexual violence; famine and drought; environmental degradation and climate change; and ordinary, soul-eating poverty.

International law mandates that some, but not all, push factors can confer “refugee” status on migrants, entitling them to seek asylum in other countries. This area of humanitarian law dates from the end of World War II, a time when millions of Europeans were displaced, forcing the world to adjust to huge flows of humanity. The 1951 Geneva Convention defines a refugee as anyone who has “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…”

Almost three-quarters of a century later, that legal definition still theoretically underlies U.S. policy toward refugees, but this country has always welcomed some refugees and not others. In the 1980s, for instance, Salvadorans fleeing U.S.-supported death squads had almost no hope of getting asylum here. On the other hand, people leaving the communist island of Cuba had only to put a foot on U.S. territory to receive almost automatic asylum.

Because of its origins in post-war Europe, asylum law has a blind spot when it comes to a number of forces now pushing people to leave their homes. It’s unfortunate that international law makes a distinction, for instance, between people who become refugees because of physical violence and those who do so because of economic violence. A well-founded fear of being shot, beaten, or raped may get you asylum. Actual starvation won’t.

Today, a number of push factors are driving Central Americans from their homes, especially (once again) in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Key among them are political corruption and repression, the power of the drug cartels, and climate change — all factors that, in significant ways, can be traced back to actions of the United States.

According to World Bank figures, in 2016 (the latest year available), El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, 83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras took second place with 57 per 100,000, while tenth place went to Guatemala, with 27. Mexico wasn’t far behind with 19. (By comparison, with 5.3 per 100,000, the United States was far down the list.)

By any measure, the three Central American nations of what’s sometimes called “the Northern Triangle” are dangerous places to live. Here’s why.

Political repression and violent corruption: Honduras, for example, has long been one of Central America’s poorest and economically most unequal countries. In the 1980s, the United States supported a military-run government there that routinely “disappeared” and tortured its opponents, while the CIA used the country as a training ground for the Contras it backed,who were then fighting the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua (who had recently deposed their own U.S.-backed dictator).

By the turn of this century, however, things were changing in Honduras. In 2006, José Manuel Zelaya became president. Although he’d run on a conservative platform, he promptly launched a program of economic and political reforms. These included free public education, an increased minimum wage, low-interest loans for small farmers, the inclusion of domestic workers in the social security system, and a number of important environmental regulations.

In 2009, however, a military coup deposed Zelaya, installing Porfirio Lobo in his place. Four of the six officers who staged the coup were graduates of the U.S.’s notorious School of the Americas, where for decades Latin American military officers and police were trained in the ways of repression and torture.

Washington may not have initiated the coup, but within days Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had given it her seal of approval, supporting that power grab in defiance of the Organization of American States. Since then, murder rates have skyrocketed, while corruption and drug trafficking have flourished as the drug cartels and local governing bodies as well as the national government melded into a single countrywide nightmare. In a recent New York Times report, for instance, Sonia Nazario detailed what this has meant just for public transportation where anyone who operates a taxi or a bus must pay a daily tax (double on special days like Christmas) amounting to 30% to 40% of the driver’s income. But this isn’t a government tax. It goes to MS-13, the 18th Street gang (both of which arose in the United States), or sometimes both. The alternative, as Nazario reports, is death:

“Since 2010, more than 1,500 Hondurans working in transportation have been murdered — shot, strangled, cuffed to the steering wheel and burned alive while their buses are torched. If anyone on a bus route stops paying, gangs kill a driver — any driver — to send a message.”

The police, despite having all the facts, do next to nothing. Violence and corruption have only become more intense under Honduras’s current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who returned to office in what was probably a stolen election in 2017. Although the Organization of American States called for a redo, the Trump administration hastily recognizedHernández and life in Honduras continued on its murderous course.

The drug business: Along with coups and Coca-Cola, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is another U.S. import to Central America. Although Donald Trump likes to cast most refugees as dark and dangerous gang members from south of the border, MS-13 had its roots in Los Angeles, California, among Salvadorans who had fled the U.S.-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. When young people who grew up in Los Angeles returned to El Salvador at the end of that country’s civil war, MS-13 went with them. What had begun as a neighborhood street gang created to protect Salvadoran youth from other gangs in that city has now grown into a vast criminal enterprise of its own — as has the 18th Street gang, or Calle 18, which also came out of Los Angeles, following a similar path.

Without a major market for their product, drug cartels would have vastly less power. And we all know where that market lies: right here in the United States. Fifty years of this country’s “war on drugs” turn out to have providedthe perfect breeding ground for violent outlaw drug cartels, while filling our own jails and prisons with more inmates than any other country holds. Yet it has done next to nothing to stanch addiction in this country. These days, if they remain in their own lands, many young people in the Northern Triangle face a stark choice between joining a gang and death. Not surprisingly, some of them opt to risk the trip to the U.S. instead. Many could have stayed home if it weren’t for the drug market in this country.

Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: Even if there were no corrupt regimes, no government repression, and no drug wars, people would still be fleeing Central America because climate change has made their way of life impossible. As what the New York Times calls the biggest carbon polluter in history, the United States bears much of the responsibility for crop failures there. The Northern Triangle has long been subject to periods of drought and flooding as part of a natural alternation of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena in the Pacific Ocean. But climate change has prolonged and deepened those periods of drought, forcing many peasants to abandon their subsistence farms. Some in Guatemala are now facing not just economic hardship but actual starvation thanks to a heating planet.

All along a drought corridor that runs from Nicaragua through Guatemala, the problem is a simple lack of water. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports that, in El Salvador, many people now spend their days in search of enough water to keep their families alive. Even where (unsafe) river water is available, the price — in money or sex — extracted by the gangs for using it is often too high for most women to pay, so they are forced to rely on distant municipal taps (if they even exist). While El Salvadorans live with strict water rationing, the U.S.-based multinational Coca Cola remains immune to such rules. That company continues to take all the water it needs to produce and sell its fizzy concoction locally, while pouring foul-smelling effluvia into nearby rivers.

In Honduras, on the other hand, the problem is often too much water, as rising sea levels eat away at both its Atlantic and Pacific coasts, devouring poor people’s homes and small businesses in the process. Here, too, a human-fueled problem is exacerbated by greed in the form of shrimp farming, which decimates coastal mangrove trees that normally help to keep those lands from eroding. Shrimp, the most popular seafood in the United States, comes mostlyfrom Southeast Asia and — you guessed it — Central America. Whether it’s shrimp or drugs, the point is that U.S. desires continue to drive devastation in Central America.

As the Trump administration does everything it can to accelerate and deepen the climate crisis, Central Americans are literally dying from it. Under international law, however, if they head for the U.S. in an attempt to save their lives and livelihoods, they don’t qualify as refugees because they are fleeing not physical but economic violence and so are not eligible for asylum.

No Asylum for You
These days, even immigrants with a well-founded fear of persecution who perfectly fit the Geneva Convention’s definition of “refugee” may no longer get asylum here. The Trump administration doesn’t even want to offer them a chance to apply for it. The president has, of course, called such groups of migrants, traveling together for safety and solidarity, an “invasion” of “very bad people.” And his administration continues to take a variety of concrete steps to prevent non-white refugees of just about any sort from reaching U.S. territory to make such a claim.

His early efforts to deter asylum seekers involved the infamous family-separation policy, in which children who arrived at the border were taken from their parents in an effort to create the sort of publicity that would keep others from coming. An international outcry — and a federal court order — brought an official end to that policy in June 2018. At the time, the government was ordered to return such children to their parents.

As it happened, the Department of Homeland Security proved largely incapable of doing so, because quite often it hadn’t kept decent records of the parents’ names or locations. In response to an ACLU lawsuit listing 2,700 individual children living without their families in this country, the administration acknowledged that, in addition to named children, thousands more fell into that category, lost in what can only laughingly be called “the system.”

You might think that, if the goal were to keep people from leaving their homes in the first place, the Trump administration would do what it could to improve life in the Northern Triangle. If so, however, you would be wrong. Far from increasing humanitarian aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the administration promptly slashed those funds, ensuring yet more misery and undoubtedly forcing yet more to flee Central America.

Its most recent ploy: to require refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they come to after leaving their own. Because Guatemala lies between Mexico and the rest of the Northern Triangle, that means Salvadorans and Hondurans will officially have to apply there first. President Trump even used the threat of new tariffs against Guatemalan goods to negotiate such an agreement with that country’s outgoing president Jimmy Morales to secretly designate his nation a “safe third country” where migrants could apply for asylum.

There is something more than a little ironic in this, given that the Guatemalan government can’t even offer its own people anything like safety. Significant numbers of them have, of course, been fleeing to Mexico and heading for the U.S. border. Trump’s solution to that problem has been to use the threat of tariffs to force Mexico to militarize its own border with Guatemala, in the process frustrating the new administration of president Andres Manuel López Obrador.

On August 1st, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction against that “safe third country” policy, prohibiting its use for the time being. For now (at least theoretically), migrants from the Northern Triangle should still be able to apply for asylum in the U.S. The administration will certainly fight the injunction in the courts, while doing everything in its power to stop those immigrants in any way it can.

Meanwhile, it has come up with yet another way to prevent people from claiming asylum. Historically, family members of those persecuted in their own countries have been eligible to apply, too. At the end of July, Attorney General William Barr announced that “immigrants fearing persecution because of threats against their family members are no longer eligible for asylum.” This is particularly cruel because, to extort cooperation from their targets, drug gangs routinely make — and carry out — threats of rape and murder against family members.

A Real Crisis
There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to attend to their claims in a timely way — or in any way at all.

It’s time to recognize that the American way of life — our cars and comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our government’s actions in our regional “backyard” — has created this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won’t be) our responsibility to solve it.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org/

How A Kerala District Is Helping Migrant Children Stay In School

August 16, 2019

Ernakulam (Kerala): Supriya Debnath, 24, a migrant from Odisha’s Kendrapara district, sat in a blue and white salwar kameez in one corner of the upper primary government school in Edappally, in central Kerala’s Ernakulam district. A thin vertical streak of vermillion reached the horizontal dash of sandalwood paste on her forehead. Next to her, Hasina Khatun, 27, a migrant from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, sat listening in rapt attention to her colleagues who were sharing their teaching experiences, as part of a programme called Roshni, a project helping migrant workers’ children stay in school by helping them become proficient in Malayalam.

Children learn Malayalam as part of Roshini, a program to help children of migrant workers in Ernakulam learn Malayalam in government and government-aided schools, through the use of multiple languages, including their mother tongue.

Non-native Malayalam speakers such as Debnath and Hasina are among Roshni’s 40 education volunteers helping migrant workers’ children learn the local language and perform better in tests in 38 government and government-aided schools in Kerala.

About 2.5 million migrants make-up 8% of Kerala’s population, according to a 2013 study by the Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation for the Kerala labour department, and about 38% of the total Indian population migrate for work or family, according to the 2011 census. Children of migrants, whose families travel back and forth from their native land, are more likely to drop out of school, impacting their skills and opportunities in the future, according to experts.

In Kerala, the largest proportion of migrants hail from West Bengal (20%), Bihar (18.10%), Assam (17.28%) and Uttar Pradesh (14.83%), the 2013 study noted, and most of them would find it challenging to study with Malayalam as the medium of instruction. Programmes such as Roshni could help bridge the education gap for migrant children.

Roshni trains volunteers in government and government-aided schools to help more than 1,000 migrant workers’ children learn Malayalam through the use of multiple languages as the medium of instruction, including the children’s mother tongue. Its breakfast component ensures the children do not go hungry, incentivises attendance, and helps them assimilate into the local culture.

The Roshni project, launched by the Ernakulam district administration in 2017, has supported 1,265 migrant workers’ children from lower primary to high school. School dropouts across 20 schools reduced by nearly half (48%) to 65 in 2018-19, when compared to 2017-18, data from the programme show.

Kerala’s economy is dependent on migrants
With Kerala sending out large numbers of workers overseas–2.4 million in 2013, based on a May 2018 report by the Centre for Development Studies–it needs migrants from other Indian states for Kerala’s economic activities, explains Benoy Peter of Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), an Ernakulam-based non-profit.

“Kerala has immensely benefited from migration,” said Peter. “But given unemployment among the educated and a population which will see a negative growth (two district already do) in the future, there is a need for migrant workers for the state to maintain its economic activities.” The exact number of migrants coming to Kerala is unknown. As much as 11% of the population now (between 3.5 and 4 million) could be migrant, according to estimations in a 2017 study by CMID.

The government has been “more proactive compared to other states”, Peter added, with migrant welfare programmes such as Apna Ghar, accommodation for interstate migrant workers on rental basis, and Aawaz, a health insurance scheme, and education schemes like Roshni.

Making it easier for migrant children to stay in school
“Enniku Malayalam annu easy (I find Malayalam easy),” said Susmitha, as her schoolmate, Anjali, nodded in agreement. “Paanch saal ho gaya hai mujhe yahan, isliye Malayalam easy hai (I have been here for five years, so Malayalam is easy),” said Anjali, after an initial reluctance to speak in Hindi. Although from Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, both 10-year-olds at Ernakulam’s Malayalam-medium Binanipuram Government High School are more comfortable speaking the local language than their mother tongue, Hindi. They have been living in Kerala for over half a decade, since their fathers moved here for work. Most of their conversations, except with their parents at home, are in Malayalam.

Susmitha and Anjali were part of the first group of students in 2015-16 to learn Malayalam as part of the pilot programme before Roshni was formally launched in 2017, Jayashree K, academic coordinator of Roshni told IndiaSpend.

Susmitha (left) and Anjali are from Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. They are more comfortable conversing in Malayalam than their mother tongue Hindi, they say.

The number of migrant students in Ernakulam’s government and government-aided schools increased 44% to 3,985 over a year to 2019-20, according to data from the government’s education portal, Samagra Shiksha Kerala (SSK).

“Our survey each year finds between 150-200 migrant children who are out of school. This year [2019-20] we found 160,” Sajoy George, district programme officer for Ernakulam, SSK told IndiaSpend. “Often these children are first generation school goers.”

Each year there are between 150-200 migrant children who are out of school, and often they are first generation school goers, says Sajoy George, district programme officer for Samagra Shiksha Kerala.

One of the challenges with the nature of migrant work is keeping children enrolled in school. Often migrant families return to their home state for family functions or festivals and do not return, or leave the children behind when they come back.

Further, natural calamities, like the August 2018 flood, have an adverse effect on migration. In 2018-19, 26 students dropped out due to job losses caused by the flood, 24 due to family issues, and 15 due to seasonal festivals, according to data from the Roshni programme for 20 schools.

“There are three types of migrant workers here; those who come for work and settle down, those who look for work temporarily, and seasonal migrants. The migrant student drop-out rate depends on the nature of migration,” said George.

Children like Mohammed Dilshad, whose family has lived in Kerala for years, have benefited from the programme. He topped the school with an A+ in all subjects. Although he knew Malayalam when the pilot began in 2015, “it helped him improve his Malayalam skills by learning songs and poems”.

Dilshad, the eldest son of migrants from Bihar’s Darbhanga district, and a first generation student, wants to be an engineer when he grows up. His father, Mohammed Sajid, is uneducated, works in a shoe factory in Ernakulam, and is the sole breadwinner for a family of seven. Dilshad’s mother Abida Khatun has attended a madrassa (school for Islamic teaching) in her village in Samastipur.

Mohammed Dilshad topped his class 10 exams in his Malayalam medium high school in Binanipuram. He is the eldest of five children of illiterate parents from Darbhanga, Bihar.

“I still find it difficult to speak Malayalam, although it is better than before,” Khatun, who has lived in Kerala for over two decades, told IndiaSpend. “It is peaceful here” compared to Bihar, which she has not visited in five years. Despite her limited education Abida wants her children to study.

“We used to spend Rs 200 a month on Dilshad’s tuition when he started school. We hardly saved anything,” said Abida. “Abhi bhi wohi halaath hai (Circumstances have not changed). But I want all my children to study and pursue whatever they wish to.”

“Learning Malayalam through pictures and drawings helped when I joined the school in Binanipuram in class 5 after moving from Bihar,” said Dilshad’s schoolmate and neighour Daraksha Parveen. Parveen, who is studying to be a fashion designer, believes that a programme like Roshni helps migrant students. Neither of them prefer Hindi, except when talking to their parents.

The Birth of Roshni
“When I was appointed as an upper primary teacher in Binanipuram in 2014, I noticed that more than 50% of the children in the school were migrant children and were having trouble learning Malayalam, and therefore other subjects in school due to the medium of instruction,” Jayashree, the academic coordinator of Roshni, said.

The problems persisted even after the headmistress informed officials about the high number of migrant children, and a volunteer would help these students understand Malayalam. Since 2008, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) has had volunteers in schools with a large number of migrant children to help school teachers communicate. Still, migrant children faced a tough time in school understanding Malayalam, the medium of instruction.

In September 2015, a research group consisting of the headmistress, class teacher, a volunteer from SSA, and Jayashree as a teacher researcher developed a pilot project in Binanipuram school to help 11 migrant workers’ children–the majority were Hindi speakers–learn Malayalam.

“The challenge is that teachers in schools are monolingual, and may not be able to communicate in the child’s language. This is still an issue, but volunteers help,” said Jayashree. “Language lives as discourses. We speak to a newborn through songs or lullabies. In the same way we cannot expect a child to pick up a language by just teaching them alphabets when they join school. It is unscientific.”

During the pilot, Jayashree slowly developed the teaching module and pedagogic method based on class interactions and teachers’ reflections on each day. “There was already a programme [Malayalathilakkam] to teach Malayalam to primary school students in Kerala. I managed to adapt the modules to include graphic reading for migrant children,” said Jayashree. The pedagogy (for Roshni) was developed under the guidance of linguist K N Anandan.

In this method, the teacher “code switches” from the migrants’ language to Malayalam and writes sentences, uses graphic representations, drawings, songs, etc., so that children are able to identify letters in a sentence and develop proficiency.

In three months, by December 2015, the children had developed phonemic awareness (ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken word) for 16 of the 56 letters in Malayalam, according to Jayshree. This pilot turned into the programme Roshni.

“We speak to a newborn through songs or lullabies. In the same way we cannot expect a child to pick up a language by just teaching them alphabets when they join school. It is unscientific,” says Jayashree K, academic coordinator of Roshni, who is helping develop teaching modules for volunteers and pedagogy.

In October 2017, Mohammed Safirulla, former district collector of Ernakulam, was informed about the project. Four schools were shortlisted, including the one in Binanipuram, for the first phase of Roshni. With Roshni’s launch, the language-based intervention has come under the district administration and not the state education department.

“It is an additional package for boosting their [children’s] performance, not a parallel schooling process,” Safirulla told IndiaSpend. “The focus was to reach more and more students initially.”

“A priority area was migrant welfare,” said Safirulla. “There were a large number of children of migrant workers who were out of school. The migrant workers often start their day early, and sometimes children did not receive sufficient nutritious food. I wanted to ensure that a food component was included in the project.”

The project, costing nearly Rs 1 crore annually, is financially supported by the district’s education funding, and in part by Bharat Petroleum’s (BPCL) corporate social responsibility (CSR) fund. The food component includes Rs 20 for each child and Rs 100 a day as cooking charge per school per day. It also includes Rs 20 per child, on average, for stationary and crafts.

“The food component is supposed to be an incentive for the children to attend school in the morning given that Roshni classes begin 90 minutes before regular classes start at 10 AM,” said Jayashree.

“We see Roshni as a flagship project,” Ancy Jhonson, manager CSR of BPCL, told IndiaSpend. “Often companies invest in capital expenditure, but here, although there is nothing to showcase in terms of physical infrastructure, the impact is more.”

The project expanded to 20 schools in the second phase in 2018-19, and to 38 in the third phase in 2019-20.

Although the “intent is positive”, experts such as Peter of CMID believe that it may be too early to judge on Roshni’s impact, given that its impact would measure both the impact of Roshni and the longer running government programme since 2008.

As both programmes (the one started in 2008 with three volunteers, and Roshni) have the same aim of helping migrant children, they can be converged at a later stage to ensure “synchronisation and avoid de- duplication”, said S Suhas, district collector of Ernakulam.

Making language learning easier
“It is difficult to learn Malayalam,” said Debnath, the education volunteer. “Yes, I mean, naallu is four, naalley is tomorrow. Similarly vallum is boat and vellam is water. It is very confusing at first,” concurred Hasina with a smile. When she came here after her marriage to Mafikul Mondal, a driver, she knew Bengali, a smattering of Hindi, and no Malayalam. “I confined myself to my house due to the language barrier,” she said.

Supriya Debnath (left), speaks Odia, and Hasina Khatun, Bengali. They are volunteers helping migrant children learn Malayalam through Roshni.

Marriage is the biggest reason for migration of women, and nearly 97% of 211 million married people who said marriage was the reason for migration were women, according to census 2011 data.

But things changed for the high-school graduate when she had to enrol her daughter at school where many children were Bengali speakers, and the headmistress requested her assistance. “Initially I did not know how and what to teach. I was asked to help communicate with students in Bengali. But then as I started helping the class teacher I learned more. I ensured that I spent more time in class 1 where the basics of Malayalam are taught,” said Hasina, preferring to respond in Malayalam.

Similarly, Debnath, who instantly took a liking to Kerala during her first visit after marriage to Prashanth Samal, a supervisor at a plywood company, said that she too was asked to help out in a school where most of the students were Odia speakers.

“I could speak very little Malayalam,” she said. “But I thought that just teaching children Odia would not offer them a future. When I came to know about the interview calls for volunteers for Roshni, I prepared by learning to read and write Malayalam by watching YouTube videos.”

“Volunteers like Hasina and Supriya are vital for the project as the number of migrant workers’ children increases,” said Jayashree of Roshni.

Currently the programme has 40 volunteers across 38 schools. Two schools which have high number of migrant students have two volunteers each. Roshni’s volunteers are multilingual (Hindi, English, Tamil speakers) and from Kerala, except for Hasina and Debnath. They are paid Rs 10,000 a month from the SSA and BPCL funds.

The volunteers are given teaching modules and provided training. Based on class interactions, they share their reflection each week on a WhatsApp group that other volunteers can learn from. “I also share feedback over the course of the month to help the volunteers based on their issues,” said Jayashree.
While Hasina is improving her skills by teaching fellow migrants’ children, she is glad her daughter, Aliva, is doing well in school. “She has received awards. Importantly she knows Malayalam and four other languages (Hindi, English, Bengali and Arabic). I often take her help with Malayalam,” said Hasina.

Forty education volunteers teach in 38 government and aided schools in Ernakulam. Their work has helped more than 1,000 migrant children learn the local language and stay in school.

Scalability and sustainability
Ensuring that the funding for the project and its pace continues even if key officials are transferred in the district administration should not be an issue, according to Safirullah, the former district collector. The funds for salaries of the education volunteers should not be a problem considering that CSR funds are available. “The funding required is small, which the government can afford if need be, but the impact is enormous,” said Safirulla.

“Language is the gateway to the [local] culture and Roshni will help the second generation of migrants assimilate into the local culture.” If government plans to expand the project to other districts, “it should be done in phases”, he said, as it may be more effective to focus on districts that have a higher population of migrants.

More education volunteers from the migrant workers’ community or those who can speak the children’s language must be included, like Hasina and Debanth, Peter of the think tank CMID noted.

Samagra Shiksha Kerala, the government’s education department, plans to develop a bridge programme in Perumbavoor, which has a high population of migrant families, to help seasonal migrants’ children assimilate into schools, and support more than 2,700 migrant students in Ernakulam who are not currently covered under Roshni. “We also plan to create bridge material in the next few months including best practises from Roshni to be shared across other districts,” said George, the district programme officer of Samagra Shiksha Kerala.

“If we can successfully show that Roshni can be scaled across the district in the next year or so, I do not see why it cannot be done across the state,” Suhas, Ernakulam’s district collector, told IndiaSpend.

(Paliath is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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