Bill Cosby exposed by the media – but it was women who brought him down

April 28, 2018

So much has happened in three and a half years: several abusive men have been exposed, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have gone international, millions have marched, and now an actual conviction for a man who appeared impervious to justice – a man protected by producers, high-profile friends, and fans.

Attorney Gloria Allred, surrounded by Cosby accusers and their supporters after the guilty verdict. EPA-EFE/Tracie Van Auken

So much has happened it is easy to forget the video that circulated on social media of comedian Hannibal Buress calling out Bill Cosby in his stand-up routine: “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches …” he said in October 2014. Over the years, Buress has criticised Cosby, but it wasn’t until the video of him went viral that things began to change.

Buress importantly brought attention to Cosby – but he is not the reason for the changing media coverage and ultimately Cosby’s conviction. It’s actually all the brave women who have come forward that have forced the news and entertainment industries to pay attention.

Shortly after the Buress video went viral, actress Barbara Bowman frustratedly asked in The Washington Post: “Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story?”, pointing to the double standards of taking men seriously but not women. Even so, it is what the 60-plus women who have come forward against Cosby have faced that has finally forced the public and media outlets to care about the systemic sexual violence perpetrated by some powerful men like him.

Remember when CNN host Don Lemon asked one Cosby accuser Joan Tarshis why she didn’t just bite Cosby’s penis? Well he doesn’t ask questions like that anymore. Or when Canadian basketball star Andrea Constand originally took Cosby to court in 2005 and no one paid attention? Well the jury certainly paid attention to Costand this time around. Or when supermodel Janice Dickinson went on The Howard Stern Show in 2006 and only hinted about Cosby’s behaviour because she was too afraid of being sued to say more? She has now spoken publicly to many news outlets and even testified in this last fateful trial.
Cosby leaving court after the guilty verdict. EPA-EFE/Tracie Van Auken

But even with the improvements, news media still need to do better when it comes to interviewing and profiling women who come forward. Rape culture that is so common in societies, still plays out in news coverage. Specifically, women who come forward are doubted and disparaged. And powerful people who question, insult, and dismiss accusers coming forward are given ample attention in the coverage.

When the Access Hollywood tape was released, featuring Donald Trump‘s unsavoury comments about grabbing women by the pussy, Trump was given carte blanche to call the women coming forward to accuse him of harassment liars and ugly and threaten to sue them. The women who accused Trump on the other hand, have always been given minimal exposure. Actor Daman Wayans famously stated that some of the women accusing Cosby were “un-rape-able”. Trump, of course, subsequently won the 2016 presidential election.

Meanwhile Fox presenter Bill O’Reilly, sacked from Fox News amid allegations of sexual harassment – said for years that he was merely a target for opportunistic women, with little push back. The examples go on.
Proving credible

Consequently, when interviewed, accusers/survivors are often forced to “prove” themselves rather than just tell their story. Or worse, are asked – Like Lemon did to Tarshis – why didn’t they just prevent this from happening? They have to justify their previous actions and even their character traits, which research shows does not determine whether or not a woman is assaulted.

When the Cosby story broke three and a half years ago, former co-star Phylicia Rashad notably said “… this was not about the women. This is about something else. This is about the obliteration of legacy”. Jerry Seinfeld said something similar about the value of Cosby’s body of work – although to be fair he later went back on those comments.

But in the end, the women in this case finally (and rightfully) made it about them. News coverage reflected this – even if they were 30 years late. Moving forward the biggest challenge will be making this the norm and not just the exception.

Read more: It takes guts and hard work to expose a scandal like that of Harvey Weinstein – but it’s just the start

News coverage of the #MeToo movement that began in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s demise, has often played devil’s advocate, asking (and sometimes emphatically stating) it has gone too far. This is without considering the international systemic problem of physical and sexual violence against women. Or the relatively short time the movement has existed as opposed to centuries of gender inequality. More context is needed when we read the news.

Also, more attention must be paid to surviving sexual abuse and misconduct, rather than the triumphant comeback stories that are now in the works for accused harassers, such as the disgraced CBS anchor Charlie Rose and former Today host Matt Lauer.

While recent news coverage has finally embraced reporting on sexual abuse allegations, there is still far to go before the issue itself and the problematic way we discuss all forms of violence against women is eradicated. Luckily, this didn’t deter the brave women who helped bring Cosby to justice.

Lindsey Blumell, Lecturer in Journalism, City, University of London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Israel vs Iran, a looming war

April 28, 2018

A low-key raid in Syria, and Iran’s growing influence, sharpen the risk.

lead Israeli construction of a wall on the Lebanese border and the growing arsenal of Iran-backed Hezbollah have contributed to the spike in tensions. Metula, Israel in February, 2018. Nir Alon/Press Association. All rights reserved.The joint cruise-missile attack on Syria by forces of the United States, France and the United Kingdom on the night of 13-14 April was a largely symbolic gesture. It warns Bashar al-Assad’s regime against further use of chemical weapons, but does little else. Such at least is the conclusion of a new Oxford Research Group analysis of the operation and its context.

From the perspective of Damascus, the use of chemical weapons has a narrow and localised role as a form of terror to force the evacuation of districts. More widely, the Syrian regime’s overwhelming weapons of choice remain air and artillery attacks, which will no doubt be used extensively in forthcoming actions against the holdout rebel-held areas in Idlib province along part of Syria’s border with Turkey (see “After the Syria raid: what next?”, 17 April 2018)

The regime’s main backers, Russia and Iran, draw from the US-led raid the lesson that they have little to fear of further western interventions and have free rein to continue their support for Assad. In Iran’s case, this support has less to do with Syria’s leadership itself and much more to do with Israel, where by contrast there is consternation in government circles over the modest nature of the western assault. The ORG briefing says:

“Unless the Assad regime miscalculates in its military operations against the remaining rebel centres in Idlib Province, the most probable consequence of the Western raid on Syria will be increased Israeli involvement in the conflict. Given the rising influence of anti-Iranian hawks within the Trump administration, that escalation will not necessarily be confined to Syria.”

Before the western action, there was welcome if deliberately low-key support in Jerusalem for President Trump’s decision to reshuffle his foreign affairs and security teams. There have been three notable appointments. The hawkish anti-Iran and anti-Russia figure of John Bolton became national-security adviser, replacing the more thoughtful HR McMaster. The religious conservative Mike Pompeo survived a nomination process to exchange his role as director of the CIA for one as secretary of state, after the resignation of Rex Tillerson from that job. Gina Haspel, Pompeo’s own proposed replacement, has a dubious record on the “robust interrogation” of Islamist suspects.

The main role of a national-security advisor is to present to the head of state a considered view of security issues and appropriate responses. McMaster, as a retired general, was thought by many observers to be likely to emphasise military options, a view reflected in several of these columns (see for example, “The Trump wars era”, 30 November 2017). In practice he was more cautious than was anticipated, whereas Bolton’s long track record is consistent and forceful. It follows that the one-off joint military operation fell short of a frontal challenge to Assad, and as such represents a success for the Pentagon.

The hawks’ moment

This in turn constitutes a great concern for Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. Here, the context is that the civil war in Syria has considerably strengthened Hizbollah, allowing it to expand beyond its base in southern Lebanon through Syria itself. The war has also enhanced the influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), especially the special-force component known as the Quds force.

Iran is regarded as the greatest single threat to Israel, whose right wing sees Iran as an existential threat which simply has to be confronted. In its view, that Iran now has strong influence and an increasing military presence so near to Israel’s border is simply unacceptable. A further issue is Iran’s sway over the Shi’a government in Baghdad, which reportedly now includes close Iranian input in the redevelopment of Iraq’s own military-industrial complex. Israel sees this as further proof that Iran is spreading its military influence across the region (see “Syria’s wars: a new dynamic”, 15 February 2018).

Syria, however, is the more immediate worry. In recent weeks, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) sources have been registering a steady increase in direct Iranian military engagement there. Iran may even be able to link up with militias that control territory uncomfortably close to the Israeli ceasefire lines on the Golan heights (see Nicholas Blanford & Jonathan Spyer, “Bordering on Chaos”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, February 2018). This deepens the existing bond between Iran and Hizbollah, and further allows the transfer of weapons across Syria in transit to southern Lebanon.

The latter trend has frequently been met with IDF airstrikes. Indeed the level of Israeli military operations in Syria is almost entirely unrecognised outside the region. A recent estimate is that, since the civil war began in 2011, Israel has conducted around a hundred strikes across the border.

Two new reports signal the accelerating military pace. In one, the IDF claims that the Iranian military now have a substantial presence at five different air bases scattered across Syria. Moreover, Iran now possesses a drone known as the Simorgh, based on the US’s RQ-170 “stealth” reconnaissance drone that crashed in Iran in December 2011 and has since been re-engineered and put into production by Iranian technicians (see “An asymmetrical drone war”, 19 August 2010).

Another report, in a US military journal, says that one of these drones, shot down in March when flying over Israel, was actually armed with an explosive charge rather than just functioning as a reconaissance drone. There isn’t yet any independent corroboration of this, but from an IDF perspective it would mean that Iranian government forces – rather than their Hizbollah surrogate in Syria alone – are prepared to attack the state of Israel in its own territory.

A single drone with a small explosive charge overflying Israel can be seen as highly provocative yet to an extent gestural – a response to Israel’s own raids into Syria. But Israel’s calculation goes much further. IDF sources point to the establishment of Iranian ballistic-missile bases in Syria for the storage of short- and medium-range missiles.

On the political front, Israel’s government is wary of the intensive European efforts to dissuade Trump from his intended repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal by 12 May. The state visit to Washington of Emmanuel Macron, quickly to be followed by Angela Merkel’s one-day working trip, is at least partly about saving the agreement. Israel continues to want a much tougher line against Tehran (see Khaled Hroub, “Middle East nightmare, made in Washington”, 20 April 2018).

For Israel, the current cycle is thus proving decidedly uncomfortable on several fronts. Tensions with Hizbollah and Iran are rising, while hopes that the White House new arrivals John Bolton and Mike Pompeo would sway Trump further against Iran are in the balance. Trump is notoriously unpredictable. But at least for now, the main consequence of the US-UK-France raid on Syria really is an increased risk of wider war: less “mission accomplished” than yet more blowback.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy’s international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

Why Pakistan cannot say sorry to Bangladesh

April 28, 2018

Any apology to Bangladesh would imply that Pakistan’s use of terror was self-destructive

An army-dominated deep state Photo: REUTERS

For some time now, Bangladesh has been pressing Pakistan to apologize for the genocide of the Bangali population in 1971. The occupation army showed no compunction in butchering an estimated three million of their (mostly unarmed) fellow citizens over a nine-month period to quell a liberation struggle in its then eastern wing.

In reply, Pakistan has urged Bangladesh to forget the unfortunate incidents of the past and move on to a new, better relationship. Well short of an apology, its utterly inadequate response glosses over what remains the most shameful blot in Pakistan’s less-than-stellar history.

However, given Pakistan’s gradual morphing into a terror-sponsoring state from its theocratic origins, beginning from its intervention in the Afghan civil war, its refusal to apologize to Bangladesh is not surprising. Countries with a firmer commitment to a democratic system and minimal respect for established norms of governance would have found it easier to offer a brief, heartfelt apology.

A dignified regret would have helped Islamabad get rid of a permanent embarrassment in a civilized manner. If anything, by demanding an apology instead of adequate reparations, Bangladesh had prepared the ground for a graceful ending to a painful episode of history and for a new beginning in bilateral ties.

Evidently, the army-dominated deep state in Pakistan has little concern for either the country’s international image, its place in world history, to say nothing of the damaging legacy it leaves behind for its younger generations.

So far so bad — yet it is possible to see the signs of a major political change for the better among the younger Pakistani citizens, which augurs well for South Asia.

From Pakistan’s point of view, any apology to Bangladesh would have implied that its use of terror as an instrument of state policy had proved self-destructive. Its exploitative policy towards its eastern province was morally reprehensible and utterly wrong.

More importantly, to disavow terror as an acceptable political tactic would have significantly reduced Pakistan’s acceptability among organizations like the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Lashkar–e-Toiba (some of which are internationally blacklisted), and their shadowy underworld backers.

Pakistan’s refusal to apologize to Bangladesh even in 2018 indicates how little the country has changed since 1971

So there could be no apology to anyone on the break-up of 1971, because that would have meant a loss of face for the India-hating Pakistani ruling establishment. For the military hawks, drug lords, and Islamic extremists running Islamabad’s foreign policy, it was preferable to go along with international Muslim terrorism and maintain a pro-Jihadi image post-1971.

After the emergence of Bangladesh, Pakistan became blindsided on the east. It opted wholeheartedly to concentrate on and participate in developments more closely in the deeply disturbed West Asian region. If this meant inviting unrest and chaos, there were compensations too.

So long as the US and the EU continued to use Islamabad as their ally in the battle against Islamic terrorism, the dollars kept coming — never mind the international revulsion and the moral opprobrium, which can be borne better when people are well-fed and elections are a joke.

It is another matter that the US and the West have gradually become wiser to the implications of Pakistan’s running with the hares and hunting also with the hounds, in the matter of fighting Islamic extremism.

Pakistan’s refusal to apologize to Bangladesh even in 2018 indicates how little the country has changed since 1971.

And yet, it is not fair to condemn Pakistan as a country for the shocking killing of nearly three million people in 1971. There are any number of ordinary, decent Pakistani citizens who deeply regret the breaking up of their country and the loss of its eastern wing. Mostly these are younger generation Pakistanis who have no direct experience of the Liberation War in Bangladesh.

But there are elder citizens too, including senior people in the administration, in different political parties, not to mention journalists and members of the commentariat who are bitterly critical of the 1971 break-up.

There are several Pakistani TV channels where the younger set are shown discussing how Bangladesh has left Pakistan well behind in creating better health facilities for the people, in women empowerment, poverty reduction, family planning, and general education.

Pakistan may boast of having more cars than Bangladesh and smartphones, but the former eastern province enjoys better forex reserves ($32 billion as against $14bn), more mobiles (84% of people as against 68%), registers a better GDP growth, and less foreign debt, despite receiving only a fraction of Pakistan’s level of foreign aid.

The average Pakistani is marginally healthier than the Bangladeshi, but joblessness in Pakistan is much more than pronounced, not to mention the terrorism-related violence and the socio/political cost thereof. The fact that Bangladesh is poised to reach a GDP of over $273bn by end 2018 and overtake Pakistan’s GDP by 2021 at present rates is highly appreciated.

Bangladesh does not suffer crippling power cuts like Pakistan, consuming around 16,000 megawatts daily, a figure expected to touch 22,000 MWs in the 2020s. In garments exports, it ranks second in the world.

By 2021, along with Myanmar and Laos, Bangladesh is poised to join the ranks of middle-income countries, an elevation from the ranks of 47 least developed countries, at its present rate of growth — in the sectors of personal income, economic vulnerability, and human assets creation.

It needs stressing here that the present writer has taken these figures mostly covering the 2016-17 period, from Pakistani print and electronic media. Especially on TV channels, it has been heartening to see young Pakistanis listening with interest to the Bangladeshi national anthem and wishing their “brothers in the East all well.”

It was also encouraging to see similar programs related to the present status and growth of major Indian cities like Kolkata on some Pakistani channels where most people expressed their appreciation. Their obvious interest in the economic growth of Bangladesh and India was a healthy sign for the political future of South Asia as a whole.

As for reactions in India to developments in Bangladesh and Pakistan, especially among the young, this writer can personally confirm that there exist a matching interest and curiosity to learn more about their (former compatriots and current) neighbours with whom they have so much in common in terms of food, language, culture, and religion.

As analyst Charubrata Ray puts it: “When today’s young generation assumes power in all three countries of the sub-continent, who knows what new possibilities may open up? Maybe Pakistan will unhesitatingly apologize to Bangladesh and India, and Pakistan may well apologize to each other — and a new era of hope may prevail in South Asia?”

An added point of interest is that of late, even blaming India for “having taken advantage of the problems in Bangladesh” is no longer done by the older generation of Pakistanis with the anger and vigour of the past. Col Sabyasachi Bagchi says, “they agree that if they were in Mrs Indira Gandhi’s place, they would have done exactly the same in Bangladesh, in a world dominated by realpolitik.”

Ashis Biswas writes from Kolkata, India.

This article was first published on Dhaka Tribune

A Dalit Family’s Struggle Shows How India’s Justice System Is Failing Its Lowest Castes

April 28, 2018

Navi Mumbai: Past the newly constructed Eastern Freeway and its scenic seaboard views, about 35 km from one of India’s costliest business districts, Nariman Point, the car hit a stretch of tar lined with yellow butterfly-winged streetlights, heralding passage into Navi Mumbai.

Swapnil Sonawane (16), a Dalit from Navi Mumbai, was allegedly assaulted and murdered on July 19, 2016, for dating an upper-caste girl from his school. Nearly two years later, the trial has yet to begin.

Formerly called ‘New Bombay’, the township was part of a 1960s and 1970s dream to create a better-planned, egalitarian, and greener version of its namesake, ‘Bombay’, Maharashtra’s capital city. Celebrated architect Charles Correa, renowned for his work on housing the urban poor, had hoped New Bombay would emerge as the New Delhi for the financial capital, and give India’s most populous city something inconceivable at the time: A new beginning.

In the following years, even as a lack of political will left much of this dream unrealised, Navi Mumbai, with wide roads, well-planned localities, swathes of green open spaces, and less-expensive homes than Mumbai, sold dreams of a better life.

It was with this hope that the Sonawane family moved here in 1996.

Shahaji Sonawane, a staffer at the nationalised State Bank of India, married Gauri in 1999, three years after he moved to Navi Mumbai from Mankhurd, one of the least developed neighbourhoods in Mumbai’s central suburbs. A year later, in 2000, they had their first child, a boy. They named him ‘Swapnil’, the Sanskrit word for “dream”. In 2002, Swapnil’s sister, Sakshi, was born.

A smart student, Swapnil scored 85% marks in grade X and was admitted to Navi Mumbai’s famous D Y Patil college in July 2016, said 40-year-old Shahaji, beaming. “He dreamt of becoming a motorman.”

But before Swapnil’s first day in college could end, on July 19, 2016, he was dead, his skull cracked, chest and groin injured, as a consequence of an alleged romantic relationship with a 15-year-old girl from his school. The issue of contention: Swapnil was a Dalit–previously regarded as ‘untouchable’ and relegated to the bottom of the Hindu caste system–while the girl belonged to the Agri community of Maharashtra–classified as an ‘other backward class’ in 1993 owing to their poor socio-economic development, but claiming lineage to the upper caste Kshatriya, or warrior caste.

“We had never raised our children to know caste. We didn’t even feel the need to talk about it. We really can’t say we felt discriminated for being Dalit until now. Now caste is all we think about,” said Gauri, adding that the family has since learnt every nook and cranny of the law for the prevention of atrocities against scheduled tribes and scheduled castes–as Dalits are constitutionally called.

Even as more Dalits complete school and enrol in colleges, even as their incomes increase and poverty rates reduce, opposition to inter-caste marriages still rears its head in urban areas like Navi Mumbai–ranked eighth cleanest in India, with one of its best sports facilities, and the venue for international pop sensation Justin Bieber’s Asia tour in 2017.

Swapnil’s murder is a manifestation of a deeper conflict simmering within Indian society, and of India’s failure to provide justice to its lowest castes. Upper caste resentment of Dalits–comprising 16.3% of India’s population–as they assert their rights after centuries of subjugation under the Hindu caste system, has escalated into a political flashpoint in the run up to the 2019 general elections, and eight state assembly elections in 2018.

This story is the second of a two-part series, the first of which showed how Dalits across four Indian states are questioning centuries-old traditions such as those restricting their rights to mount a horse or walk in a procession on the village main road.

‘For the last 600 days, this is all we do’

Elderly women draped in worn chiffon saris walked under the evening shadows of wilted Ashoka trees, and children on rickety bicycles drew number eights on a narrow street of railway colony, Juinagar. Coloured clothes, from a spectrum of faded to shiny new, hung off boxed grill-windows of tiny flats in four-storeyed buildings, with worn out paint, a stark contrast to the swanky high-rises in the background.

Across the road, as the sun set over a wild cricket ground, two armed policemen got out of a dusty Maruti 800 car. Shahaji Sonawane, a short man with deep set eyes and dark circles, dressed in a short-sleeved white vest, khaki pants and black leather shoes, and Gauri, a petite woman, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and dressed in a magenta pink and dull gold kurta (a long top) worn over gold leggings, followed.

She was exhausted. They both were.

“We spend most of our time here so, by default, the police are here too,” Shahaji told IndiaSpend, sitting cross-legged on the mosaic-tiled floor on the ground floor one-room-kitchen flat of their lawyer, Amit Katarnavare.

Katarnavare, a man with ruffled hair, sat propped up by two pillows on the bed, his legs stretched out. A pair of crutches lay across the wooden table, cluttered with papers and books. Since the murder, when Katarnavare and his wife, Mamta, also a lawyer, took on the case pro-bono, the former railway clerk, with a masters in law, has been attacked twice. The latest incident left him hospitalised for over two weeks.

His 10x10ft bedroom, painted in mauve, had turned into a war room. The three spend six to seven hours every weekday, and all weekend, studying laws and strategising the case of Swapnil’s murder, they said.

“For the last 600 days, this is all we do,” Gauri said, as she sat leaning against a wooden almirah.

Numerous hurdles riddle the path to justice from the time a crime is committed against a Dalit until the court of law pronounces the verdict.

Even as reporting of crimes against Dalits grew by 26% over a decade to 2016, from 16.3 cases per 100,000 to 20.3 per 100,000, conviction rates remain low, IndiaSpend reported on April 4, 2018.

In the decade to 2016, across India, cognisable crimes against Dalits pending police investigation rose 99% from 8,380 cases in 2006 to 16,654 cases in 2016, according to the latest available data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

In 2016, 89.6% of crimes against Dalits were awaiting trial, which was 2.2 percentage points higher than the 87.4% of crimes against the general population awaiting trial.

In Maharashtra–where Dalits constitute 11.2% of the state’s population–crimes against Dalits rose 25%, from 10.6 per 100,000 Dalits in 2006 to 13.2 in 2016. Cases pending investigation rose 137% from 346 cases in 2006 to 821 in 2016. Cases pending trial were up 28% from 6,181 cases in 2006 to 7,913 cases in 2016, data show.

The ‘wilful negligence’ of public officials

On the evening of Monday, July 18, 2016, exactly 649 days ago, 15-year-old Swapnil sat down to eat his favourite food, a box of chicken momos. “That’s when he received the call,” said Shahaji. A man waiting outside their building asked Swapnil to come down with his phone and a flashdrive. When Swapnil came down, the man accused him of dating his sister. The man and his friends pushed Swapnil into a rickshaw and beat him up as it drove away.

The same evening, the family of his alleged girlfriend called Gauri and her sister-in-law to the Nerul police station. The girl’s family (names withheld to protect the identity of the minor) said they did not accept their daughter’s relationship with a lower caste boy, and demanded Swapnil immediately end the relationship, Katarnavare told IndiaSpend.

The police allegedly asked the Sonawanes to ensure the boy ends the relationship. “The lady police inspector told my wife–‘Aap log bachhon ko school mein ladkiyon ko patane ke liye bhejte hain kya? (Do you send your child to school to pursue girls?) Why are you acting like characters in Sairat? Your story will also turn out the same way. There will be bloodshed in your home’,” Shahaji alleged.

Sairat, a 2016 Marathi film, released three months before Swapnil’s death, is the story of a romance between a low-caste boy and a rich upper caste girl, ending in the tragic murder of the young lovers by the girl’s family, for ‘family honour’.

After Swapnil returned from his first day of college, on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, Shahaji took him to the police station to file a complaint against the girl’s family for protection, but a police officer refused to let him speak to the senior inspector. “My complaint against the girl’s brother was not registered. If they had listened to us and taken us seriously, my son would have been alive today,” the father alleged.

“Since the matter is now in court, we cannot comment on details,” a senior police officer at the Navi Mumbai Nerul police station told IndiaSpend.

The delay in registering first information reports (FIRs) is the starting point of delayed justice for Dalits. It results in a delayed arrest of the perpetrators–which as per the then SC/ST Act rules should have been immediate. (The law had now been changed.) “The delay provides an opportunity for the accused to then use various means to stop registration of the case, or to influence the police officer in charge of the police station to dilute the information,” said Sukhadeo Thorat, a professor emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and managing trustee of the New-Delhi based Indian Institute of Dalit Studies.

Apart from reflecting caste bias and corruption, FIRs are delayed because of the pressure on police to keep the reported crime rates low in their jurisdiction, as a high crime rate is not viewed favourably among police personnel, according to a 2014 National Human Rights Commission study. “Police views the Act as an obstacle to caste harmony,” the report added.

In an assessment of the country-wide implementation of the SC/ST Act, the ministry of social justice described key problems in its implementation, including such behaviour as “wilful negligence of a public servant in discharging duties for registration of complaints, recording statement of witnesses, conducting investigation and filing charges”, in its 2016 annual report.

While Swapnil and Shahaji were at the police station, Shahaji’s daughter called to tell him of some men who were banging at their front door. When he rushed home, he found 15 to 20 men gathered outside their home. “They forcibly took me, Swapnil, my wife to the girl’s house,” Shahaji alleged. When they reached there, the girl’s father hurled casteist slurs and slapped them, even kicking Swapnil in the groin.

“At that point, we ran out of the building. We tried to flee but the family’s relatives and friends chased us. They were intent on thrashing him,” Shahaji told IndiaSpend. On the street outside the building, the group brutally assaulted Shahaji, Gauri and his son, Shahaji alleged. The police station was 5 minutes away.

“They only left us when Swapnil was unconscious. We rushed Swapnil to the hospital but looking at his face, we knew he was gone,” Shahaji said.

Swapnil, with a cracked skull and injuries to his chest and genitals, was dead when he arrived at the hospital, the Indian Express reported on July 21, 2016.

The girl’s parents, brother and seven others were arrested on several charges, including kidnapping, murder, promoting enmity, rioting and unlawful assembly under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

If “the police had acted in time, there would not have been such an incident”, the defence said, in a bail application for Vikram Thakur, a friend of the main accused, the girl’s brother. The application also said that the post mortem reports imply the injuries pointed to an accidental, not homicidal death, and challenged that Swapnil had suffered a head injury. “There is no fatal injury. There were 15 to 20 persons who gave kicks and fist blows,” the defence argued, insisting “there was no intention to kill”.

The court denied Thakur and several other bail applications, based on the prosecution’s evidence of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage and eye-witness accounts, available court data show.

Many crimes against Dalits have more than one perpetrator

Like the attack on Swapnil, in 86%–or 45 of 52–Dalit atrocity cases in Maharashtra reported between 2013 and 2016, the crimes involved more than one perpetrator, found a 2017 study on the pattern of atrocities in the state by Thorat, the professor.

“The collective involvement of high caste members is much higher in cases of heinous crimes like physical assault and murder and destruction of property,” Thorat wrote.

Thorat’s study, which will soon be published in a book, is the first comprehensive analysis of caste-based access to justice in Maharashtra, based on 139 fact finding reports on cases between 2007 and 2016 by multiple civil society organisations. The study also included cases in Beed between 1990 and 2008.

Loopholes in the SC/SC Act

The disparity in access to justice is clear from the gap in the conviction rate between Dalits and the rest of the population.

Among cases of crimes against Dalits that do go to court, conviction rate for crimes against Dalits was 26% in 2016, a decline of two percentage points from 2006 (28%), even as conviction rate for general cognisable crimes increased 4 percentage points from 43% in 2006 to 47% in 2016.

While Maharashtra’s conviction rate for crimes against Dalits nearly tripled since 2006 (4%) to 11% in 2016, it was still less than half of the the all-India average conviction rate (26%) for caste crimes. In other words, 89% of caste crimes in the state lead to acquittals in court. In contrast, Maharashtra’s general conviction rate for all cognisable crimes, at 34.3%, in 2016, was three times as high as that for crimes against Dalits.

Concerned about the high acquittal rate in caste crimes countrywide, assuming these are the outcome of a misuse of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, the Supreme Court on March 20, 2018, ruled there shall be no immediate arrest of a citizen or public servant for crimes under the Act, without prior permission. It also introduced the provision of anticipatory bail if the complaint was found to be malafide.

In early April 2018, the judgement triggered widespread violent protests by Dalit and Adivasi (tribal) organisations across the country, in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Odisha, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh, resulting in the death of 11 people. In response to the central government’s plea to review the decision, the SC refused to stay its order, asserting that the amendment was meant to protect the rights of innocent people without affecting those of marginalised communities.

“The court’s doublespeak on the matter of atrocities is breathtaking,” wrote Alok Prasanna Kumar, a senior resident Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy in New Delhi, an independent legal policy advisory group, in this April 2018 FirstPost editorial. “On the one hand, no effort is made to find out the impact of the law in improving the lives of Dalits or Adivasis…on the other, it is assumed that it is the law itself that is not promoting constitutional values of fraternity and integration of the society. It’s quite obvious where the court’s sympathies lie.”

One of the reasons he points out is the lack of diversity in the judiciary. In the past eight years, no Dalit or Adivasi judge has been elevated to the Supreme Court, and none of the 24 high courts have a serving Dalit judge, The Print reported in April 2018. In lower courts, Dalits comprised less than 14% of judges, and tribals 12%, the Times of India reported in January 2018.

“If the problem with the Act was misuse, at the first stage, when produced before the magistrate court itself the police would file more false reports,” said Thorat, adding that fewer chargesheets would be filed if cases were false.

Of 40,801 crimes against Dalits reported in 2016, police found 7.6% or 5,347 cases to be false, 2016 NCRB data show. Chargesheets were filed in 78% of cases.

Most of the cases of acquittals under the SC/ST law are because of procedural lapses such as delays in filing an FIR, and investigations done by incompetent authorities, rather than for substantive reasons such as witnesses turning hostile or lack of evidence, found a 2014 National Commission for Dalits Human Rights (NCDHR) study on cases in five courts in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh.

For example, after a crime and registration of an FIR, an officer at least of the rank of a Deputy Superintendent of Police must visit the site of the incident to assess the extent of the crime, number of victims, extent of damage to the property, and list of victims entitled for relief, for a report to the state government. “However very often, an officer of a lower rank is sent to investigate the site and this information is used by the defence lawyers to have the case dismissed,” Thorat said.

“It appears to be highly discretionary as to whether the police and then the public prosecutor ensure that the correct sections of the law are applied while charges are framed in the Special Courts” under the SC/ST law for caste crimes, said the 2014 NCDHR study. For instance, when crimes are registered under the Act, sections involving milder punishment are applied more often than others, the study observed.

In several cases, police doesn’t provide protection

Gauri (left) and Shahaji (centre) Sonawane at their lawyer, Amit Katarnavare’s (right) house in Railway colony, Juinagar, Navi Mumbai. The Sonawanes spend most of their time here preparing for the trial of Swapnil’s death.

The rules of the SC/ST Act mandate the police protect the witnesses in the case and provide immediate relief to the victims. Yet, in 66% of 52 cases in Maharashtra, victims were initially not provided with police protection, according to Thorat’s analysis of civil society reports.

In the Sonawanes’ case, the family has 24-hour police protection. Katarnavare, their lawyer, also filed for police protection, first in September 2017 and later in November 2017, after the second attack on him. For three months, he did not hear back. He had also applied for a license to bear arms, but did not hear back from the Navi Mumbai Police

“We spend most of our time here (at Katarnavare’s house) so that he also gets protection,” Shahaji said, of the time when their lawyer did not have police protection. Katarnavare quit his job at the railways, and said he doesn’t move around outside his home without company or, “witnesses”, as he calls them.

On March 16, 2018, four months after the second attack and a few days after IndiaSpend visited the family at the lawyer’s house, the Thane sessions court directed the Navi Mumbai police to provide protection to Katarnavare.

“We decide cases for police protection on the basis of merit. We assess the threat perception and grant the applicant an answer. We had initially denied the lawyer’s application but now basis the court’s order we have given protection,” a senior police official told IndiaSpend, on the condition of anonymity.

‘Exclusive courts’ overburdened by non caste crimes, delay caste-related crimes

For speedy trials for crimes against Dalits, the SC/ST Act proposes setting up special courts. “It is the duty of the State Government to establish adequate number of Courts to ensure that cases under the Act are disposed of within a period of two months, as far as possible,” the 2014 amendment to the law stated.

The chargesheet in the Sonawane case was filed on September 13, 2016, 56 days after the murder. If a trial is to be completed within two months from the date of filing the charge sheet, according to the 2015 amendments to the SC/ST Act, the Thane special court is already past its deadline in this case.

In fact, more than 15 months later, the Sonawanes’ case is about to begin stage two, where the accused will be plead “guilty” or “not guilty” to charges framed against them in 2016. Thereafter, the prosecution’s victims and witnesses will be examined, statements of the accused heard, defence witnesses cross-examined, and final arguments heard before the judge pronounces a verdict that may be then challenged in the High Court.

Currently, 195 exclusive special courts have been set up in 14 states covering 27% of 716 districts across India, according to the 2016 annual report of the ministry of social welfare and justice. In 2011, the Maharashtra government had promised six such courts. Today, of the 35 districts in Maharashtra, special courts had been set up in three–or 8%–of districts at Thane, Aurangabad and Nagpur.

These courts appear to be buckling under the weight of trying cases unrelated to caste crimes, the 2014 NCDHR report found. “Exclusive Special Courts are not functioning as exclusive courts in reality. This seems to be occurring regardless of the high number of atrocity cases pending trial before the Exclusive Special Courts.”

“The most significant link between prolonged trials and obstructions to justice is that, in the interim, pressure can be exerted on the victims and witnesses to recant their statements as to the atrocity,” observed the NCDHR report.

Counter cases filed against victims worsen the situation as often the victims are too poor to fight simultaneous cases leading to further delays, Thorat said.

The prolonged wait for the start of a trial also affects the victims and witnesses’ ability to recall incidents accurately, thus compromising the case, Thorat pointed out. “By the time of the hearing, there is a difference between what is said in the FIR and what is said in the chargesheet and this is used to the advantage of the defence,” he added.

Fearing this, the Sonawanes’ lawyers have requested the family to refrain from retelling the crime to unknown people to prevent their words from being twisted in court at the time of the hearing.

The Sonawanes also refused to testify in court unless the proceedings were recorded on camera. On July 8, 2017, 355 days after Swapnil’s murder, the Thane district and sessions court, designated a special court, ordered all further hearings in the case to be on camera. As of March 2018, the court had yet to acquire these cameras, court documents show.

Since the first hearing in the case on November 25, 2016, the 10 accused, including the girl’s parents and her brother, have posted several bail applications, available data from Thane Sessions court show.

Days after the crime, the girl had reportedly blamed her father for the incident, the Indian Express reported on July 26, 2016. “She said that the rest of the family simply followed his lead,” the report said, adding that the minor’s education had also been affected since she moved to a Children’s Home.

A month later, a juvenile magistrate found Swapnil’s reported girlfriend innocent in the crime, and released her from the Bhiwandi Children’s Home. She now lives with her uncle’s family, the Indian Express reported on August 23, 2016.

“The girl has resumed her education and appeared for her 12th state board exams recently. She doesn’t talk much about the incident and we don’t either, the focus is on rehabilitation and helping her move forward in a positive way,” Vijay Doiphode, chairman of Mumbai’s child welfare committee, told IndiaSpend. Until recently, Doiphode was a senior social worker at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences working on the girl’s case. “She goes to visit her family in jail on and off,” he added.

The two police officers–assistant inspector Yogesh Mane and sub-inspector Sonali Rajguru–who had been suspended for dereliction of duty and for passing the casteist “Sairat” remark at the Sonawanes the night before Swapnil’s death, resumed duty three months after Swapnil’s death, a police officer at Nerul police station said.

About sixteen months later, on November 21, 2017, the girl’s mother, and a friend, among the 10 persons the Navi Mumbai police arrested for the murder, were granted bail, the Indian Express reported on December 22, 2017. The court had previously rejected the bail application of the girl’s mother on August 2, 2017, observing “the prosecution has successfully shown” that she was “a member of unlawful assembly who killed Swapnil Sonawane”, court documents show.

Eight of the accused still remain in jail.

The next court hearing is scheduled for May 8, 2018. So far, the Sonawanes have attended 33 hearings, though the trial is yet to begin, court data show. “Every month, they give us a date and then for some reason or the other, the hearing is adjourned. This has been going on for months on end,” Shahaji said.

‘Don’t they deserve justice too?’

Sakshi, Swapnil’s sister, is set to start college this year. “She doesn’t talk much anymore. We thought about changing her school but her friends have been very supportive so we decided not to,” Gauri, her mother, said. “She misses her brother but she doesn’t say anything. She fears that if she talks about her pain, it will remind us of our own pain,” she said wistfully. “I want to see justice for my son.”

The long-running case has not deterred the Sonawanes but they said it has left them isolated. “Since then (the day of the murder) our neighbours don’t talk to us anymore. Nobody has come forward to help us, in fact they have made things more difficult for me at work. But it doesn’t matter, we just want justice for our son,” Shahaji said, shrugging his shoulders.

“This is all we care about. We died that day along with Swapnil. Now what happens to us doesn’t matter. We just want justice,” he repeated, as if in prayer.

Their lawyer cited the example of another case in Maharashtra, and said he wishes Swapnil’s case proceeds in the same way, especially as there is a special law for the protection of Dalits.

On July 13, 2016, six days before the murder of Swapnil Sonawane, a 15-year-old girl was found brutally raped and murdered in a field in Kopardi village in Ahmednagar, less than 300 km away from Navi Mumbai. The crime, perpetrated by three Dalit men of the Mahar sub-caste, horrified the Maratha community the girl belonged to, and sparked state-wide protests, demanding speedy justice, an amendment to the SC/ST Act and reservations for the Maratha community in educational institutions and government jobs. Two weeks later, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis visited the family of the victim.

On November 18, 2017, after 15 months, the Ahmednagar sessions court found the three Dalit men guilty, and within 10 days, on November 29, 2017, sentenced them to death.

“Those men deserved the strictest punishment for the heinous crime they committed–and justice should be delivered so quickly,” said Katarnavare, their lawyer.

“We’re only asking why is there a difference in the way the police, administration and the courts handles these cases? There is no question that someone has killed the Sonawanes’ son. Don’t they deserve justice too?” he asked.

This is the second of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

Mridula Garg on writing, censorship, and her latest novel

April 28, 2018

The author in conversation with Lourdes M Supriya

Image Courtesy: The Hindu

Lourdes M Supriya (LMS): Could you talk a little about how censorship is an impingement on the rights of the writer? What does it say about our society?

Mridula Garg (MG): I was arrested by the police in 1982 for my novel Chittacobra, which was published in 1979. I The censorship of my novel was an impingement on my rights not only as a writer but also as a citizen. I was deprived of not just the freedom of expression but my liberty to live as a citizen. Of course, even in cases where the authors are not arrested but hounded in other ways by the society—having their effigy burnt; publicly abused; tormented at work; having their books banned—the authors are deprived if their liberty as a citizen. They are deprived of the freedom of expression, which is a fundamental right guaranteed by our Constitution.

The worst result such censorship can have is to provoke the writer into practicing self censorship,

shying away from writing the truth as he or she sees it. In fact, I was told by some of my female colleagues that my being censored had frightened them off writing their novels. This did not happen to me. In the very next year, I wrote another controversial novel, political this time, Anitya (1980). In 1997, a well-known journalist and writer dissuaded Penguin from publishing the book in English, claiming that it was too “philosophical” (read political). It was only in 2010 that it’s English translation was finally published by Oxford University Press. So, the censorship did have an indirect effect on my work. In fact, Hindi scholars keep harping on about the arrest to date, using it to disparage me and my writing. My decision to write the novel, The Last Email, in English (with no intention of rendering it in Hindi) might have been partially influenced by this.

Incidents like these paint an ugly picture of our society. It shows that out so called intellectuals are intolerant, regressive, and bigoted. Hardly any of them had spoken up against the censorship when I was arrested.

LMS: Do you think things are different now? Or, do you think censorship of this kind has increased again in the last couple of years

MG: Are things different now? Well, yes and no.

In 2014, nearly three decades after the incident, when I read out the “objectionable” excerpt from Chittacobra for a Doordarshan’s serial Kitabnama, it was never telecast. However, the interview in which I mentioned the book was. Ironically, it was the interviewer who insisted that I read that particular excerpt, even though I wanted to read from another book. Interestingly, that episode was called ‘Women Writers Uncensored’ while the original title was supposed to be ‘Mridula Garg Uncensored.’ At least that’s what I was told.

As far as depiction of female sexuality or any sexuality is concerned, much more leeway is allowed now. But,

things have become worse on other fronts.

Caste bias, religious dogma, provincial politics, narrow definition of Hinduism as Hindutva, these are all playing havoc with writers’ lives and works. The goons in the street have taken over the censorship of literary activity with full support of the government. Dissent is as little tolerated here as in China. The means of quelling it might be different but not always, as the recent murder of Gauri Lankesh demonstrated once again.

LMS: Are there other books (both in Hindi and English literature) that explore relationship, love, and desire in aging individuals, or is your book an exception?

MG: I do not know of any such book in Hindi but in English there is the celebrated novel, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Actually, it was originally written in Spanish. But, since then, it has been translated in all European languages including English. In the book, the elderly protagonists, in love in their youth, get married fifty years nine months and four days but after they were first separated. The man, Florentino, has had 622 affairs in the intervening period. The woman, Fermina, is widowed. Fifty years nine months and four days.

Unlike this,

in my novel, the protagonists re-open contact and re-affirm their love via email, while continuing in their marriages to others. What they celebrate is a union of spirit and memory without an actual physical meeting.

The extent of trust and empathy that the protagonists have for each other is well demonstrated in this excerpt. The woman, Maya is able to talk to her lover Kevin frankly about her intense affection and affinity for a young boy, and he can appreciate it.

There are some other novels in English where the protagonists are elderly men and women but usually they are husband and wife. A celebrated one is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. It is an allegorical tale with an elderly couple at its centre. It’s a tender love story which deals with the nature of memory and forgetfulness, much like mine. However, in this book, the couple have been married for a long period of time.

Some other English novels about long marriages I know of are The Tree of Man by Patrick White, The Rainbow by DH Lawrence, and the Rabbit series by John Updike. All of these follow a marriage from beginning to end, allowing the reader to see the shifts and fascinating complexities in old relationships.

But, as you can see, my book is a departure from that kind of text. It does not deal with a married couple but lovers estranged for 40 years and reuniting through words that invoke the intense memories of sexual intimacy without trying to meet again.

LMS: What made you write a novel about old lovers reconnecting again?

MG: I did not make a conscious decision to sit down and pen a story about old people. It was an essential part of my psyche that was bound to come to pass one day. What happened was that,

as I grew older, I realised that as far as longing and love were concerned, age was no barrier.

All it did was teach patience without dissipating the passion. In fact, I had voiced this sentiment in my novel Chittacobra in 1979. Its young lovers took a pledge to meet after 30 years when they were old and free of social dictates. Here are a few lines from it which clarify what I am saying.

“Thirty years more… then I’ll be with you.”
“Only thirty.”
“They will stop feeling threatened if we don’t meet for thirty years.”
“Time stretches on when no moment is precious.”
“For me each minute will be precious because I’ll know you are there”
“Thirty years, only thirty. Then we will have our honeymoon.”

These lines presaged The Last Email.

It had to happen sometime. Poetic justice demanded that it wait for 30-40 years and that was exactly how it came about.

Read an excerpt from the novel here.

Mridula Garg is an Indian author who writes in English and Hindi. She has authored over 30 books. She has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, among others.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

“BJP is the Mother of All Reddy Brothers. All Three Reddys are in the BJP.”

April 28, 2018

The scam-accused Janardhana Reddy, in order to avoid another prosecution, needs a victory of the BJP government, as much as the BJP government needs his clout for a victory.

Only weeks after BJP’s national president Amit Shah distanced his party from the 35,000 crore rupees-scam accused mining baron by saying that “BJP has no relationship with Janardhan Reddy,” who is out on bail after spending 3 years in jail, Janardhan Reddy, clad in a saffron scarf, took out a roadshow outside Bellary day before yesterday, campaigning for his close aide and “adopted brother” B. Sreeramulu, who is given by the party a high profile ticket to contest from Badami, where he will be challenging the incumbent Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.

BJP has also hinted that Sreeramulu, a close confidant of the infamous and tainted Reddy brothers, might be made the deputy Chief Minister if the party wins the election in Karnataka on May 12. Janardhan Reddy had to carry out his campaign outside of Bellary as his bail terms does not allow him to enter the region, which was the heartland of his mining empire.

Asked about Amit Shah’s denial of BJP’s association with Janardhana Reddy, “No controversy questions please. Be positive,” Reddy told told NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain from his campaign vehicle. “I am working for the BJP”. His brother Somashekar Reddy added, “BJP is the mother of all Reddy brothers. All three Reddys are in the BJP.”

Somashekara Reddy and Karunakara Reddy are also given party tickets. The Reddy brothers were at the heart of the iron-ore mining scam that brought down Chief Minister Yeddyurappa of the first BJP government in South India in 2011, after he was indicted by the Lokayukta for being complicit in the Reddy brothers’ illegal mining. Months later, he was arrested .

Janardhan Reddy’s nephew H. Suresh Babu, uncle Sanna Fakeerappa, his wife’s relative Lallan Reddy and film-actor Saikumar are others from the Reddy camp that are contesting in the upcoming Karnataka elections from BJP ticket. Among them, Lallan Reddy has the other high-profile ticket to contest against the incumbent Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy from BTM layout in Bangalore.

With tickets being denied to Yeddyurappa’s son B. Y. Vijendra, who had already begun campaigning in Varuna constituency, and to his close confidant and sitting M.P Shobha Karandlaje who is widely perceived to be a competent administrator, it appears that the chief ministerial candidate is cornered within his own party, which is now increasingly reliant on the Reddy brothers’ clout, which cannot be done without, even if it costs some embarrassment to the party’s national president Amit Shah and to Prime Minister Modi, who, after accusing Siddaramaiah-led Congress government of corruption, has been positioning himself as an anti-corruption crusader who can rid Karnataka off corruption.

“It is going to be a tough election. Every seat counts. Had we not taken them (the Reddy brothers) back in the party, they would have worked against us, defeating the BJP in at least 10-12 seats. Yeddyurappa’s ‘magic’ is also not working in the state. Left with no other option, we have welcomed them back, giving them seven seats,” a senior leader of Karnataka BJP reportedly told News 18.

However, it appears, the possibility of falling back on Reddy brothers’ support was something the party had been counting on, at least since September last year, when the CBI, firmly under the centre’s control, ended its investigation of the case against Janardhan Reddy at the very preliminary level, citing technical reasons.

Accusing BJP of extending political patronage to Reddy with the elections of this year in mind, JD(S) President Kumaraswamy had alleged , “There is a fixed deal. Reddy would give Rs 500 crore to BJP for the next election and all cases against him would be rendered too weak to probe. Why do you think properties that had been seized from him are now being given back?”

Santosh Hegde, a former Supreme Court judge and the Lokayukta of Karnataka from 2006-11, who had, in his report, meticulously drafted evidence against Janardhan Reddy, had also expressed his disappointment at the CBI’s decision.

“After submitting documented proof, the effort has been wasted,” he had complained, adding, “All the documents were attached with the report. So, was the material provided of no merit at all? Should we think about how the justice system works? I am sorry that it turned out this way.”

The report Hegde was referring was the second one regarding illegal mining operations in Bellary region. The first was submitted in 2008 soon after, under Yeddyurappa’s leadership, the first BJP government was formed in South India. Hegde was hopeful that action will be taken. In his second report, he noted:

“When I submitted my first Mining Report, I hoped that illegal mining would be reduced in the Districts of Bellary, Chitradurga and Tumkur. But I am sorry to note that, the same has been increased very much after my first report, mainly because of the failure of the Government to implement that report.”
A Mafia type of operation to run the illegal mining racket

Far from implementing the report, Janardhana Reddy, who was then a cabinet minister under Yeddyurappa government, “took over as Minister Incharge of the District” after which the “Bellary District came to be referred to as “Republic of Bellary”.” Since Reddy’s appointment, “a mafia type of operation have started with the full connivance and support of Politicians” and various bureaucrats.

After he “took over as Incharge Minister of Bellary District, the entire administration system of mining has drastically changed,” Hegde wrote in the report. “[T]he system and officials were used by the Minister to the personal advantage of himself and his family. He has used the officials for the other mining companies to share their produce on the promise of providing.. [them] with all necessary permits and assuring them a free and uninterrupted transportation of their material to the destination of their choice.”

Further describing the intimidation and harassment Reddy used to coerce those who did not go along, Hegde elaborated, “There are instances when those companies or miners who did not agree to cooperate and accede to the demand of the minister or his followers… were refused transport permits, thus making the transportation of their produce impossible. The Minister has also used his muscle power and has organized trespassing into the mines owned by individuals/companies and compelled such companies..”

“No officer”, he said, “would dare to question his acts.. They supported his acts either for consideration or out of fear.” The Chief Conservator of Forests, U. V Singh, who was one of the main investigators contributing to the report, was also threatened while carrying out on-ground investigation by none other than Somashekara Reddy, who has now been given a party ticket by the BJP. Through this sophisticated combination of bribing, sharing of profits and intimidation, Janardhan Reddy facilitated illegal extraction and export of Rs.35,000 crore worth of iron ore.

“Very sadly,” Hegde added, the Yeddyurappa-led “government at Bangalore, though knew about all these irregularities, did not take any action to stop these irregularities, may be.. (because) this Minister and his followers are originally responsible for supporting and appointing the Chief Minister. The Chief Minister has reportedly stated once that there are irregularities happening in Bellary. But he is unable to stop it. The officials who were to work in Bellary and surrounding area were handpicked by this Minister, whether belonging to his portfolio or not they were posted in Bellary.”

The report also notes various instances of Yeddyurappa’s family members receiving tens of crores in “donations”, which in effect were alleged bribes. “At one stage”, however, perhaps sensing the dangers continuing these illegal operations will put his government into, the C.M Yeddyurappa fell out with the mining baron and, in an apparent attempt to put an end before it was too late, had all the relevant officers from Bellary transferred.

“But the clout of this Minister (Janardhana Reddy) was such that within a couple of days of the transfer, officers were reposted to their original places in Bellary.” “Sadly”, Hegde added, the Chief Minister “reportedly pleaded helpless”.

After the release of this report, which recommended the “Competent Authority to take appropriate steps to initiate criminal proceedings against the Chief Minister and such other persons who are involved”, Yeddyurappa was forced to resign by the party’s high command in June 2011. This was followed by his arrest in a Rs. 40 crore bribery case related to the illegal mining in October that year, a month after Janardhan Reddy was arrested.

Out on bail in 23 days, Yeddyurappa quit BJP the following year to flout his own party, writing an angry letter to the then party president Nitin Gadkari stating , “To make somebody Chief Minister, you removed me from the post. To make somebody Chief Minister and implement the conspiracies hatched by some vested elements in the party, I was repeatedly pilloried”.

But as the 2014 lok sabha elections came closer, Yeddyurappa announced the merger of his newly formed KJP (Karnataka Janata Party) with the BJP. In 2016, with BJP in the centre, a CBI court acquitted him. And in September last year, CBI’s anti-corruption Branch sent a missive, informing the Chief Secretary of Karnataka that the agency will be closing the preliminary investigation in Janardhan Reddy’s case.

“The Modi government has come to the rescue of what the Kannadiga called the Bellari Gang… responsible for denuding Kannadigas of their rich natural resources through a puppet and captive CBI,” Surjewala of the Congress party has recently said.

With his announcement that the Congress party would order state officials to probe the case afresh, it appears that Janardhana Reddy, in order to avoid another prosecution, needs a victory of the BJP government, as much as the BJP government needs his clout to win.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

Delhi High Court revokes suspensions of JNU Professors removed arbitrarily

April 27, 2018

JNU faculty breathed a sigh of relief today as the Delhi High Court passed an interim order to revoke the (arbitrary) suspension of faculties from different Centres. The court was presiding over a petition jointly filed by Kavita Singh, Dean of School for Arts and Aesthetics, Udaya Kumar, Chairperson of Centre for English studies, B. Sarangi, Chairperson of Centre for French and Francophone Studies, Sucheta Mahajan, Chairperson, Centre for Historical Studies and one more professor from Centre for Political Science. All their suspensions will be revoked and they will be reinstated at their respective positions. The next Court date is on May 11, in which the Court is expected to pass a detailed order.

Commenting on the development, Kavita Singh said, “It is a huge relief granted to us. We welcome this decision of the Court. We were exercising our conscience and didn’t engage in any disruptive activities. We are grateful for the court’s decision and look forward to the next hearing and a detailed order”

Through the petition, the petitioners contested the legality of the decision regarding their suspension, as well as the decision on attendance by the 144th AC meeting held on 1 December 2017.

Earlier, through a shocking order in March, the JNU VC removed at least seven Deans/Chairpersons in a seemingly arbitrary manner for ““not complying with or refusing to implement the mandatory attendance system” in their respective Schools/Centres. Previously, the university said that it planned to set up an enquiry committee to look into the cases which didn’t fulfil the newly introduced mandatory attendance criteria.
The new rule had met with fierce opposition from both students and faculty previously.

The order for expulsion was issued to the chairpersons of the Centre for French and Francophone Studies; Centre for Linguistics; Centre for Historical Studies; Centre for Economic studies & Planning; Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Thought; and the Centre for English Studies. Similar order was also issued to the Dean of the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Kavita Singh on Wednesday. The order signed by the Section Officer (Academic), A D Bahuguna said, “The Executive Council in its 272nd meeting held on March 13 confirmed the decision taken in the 271st (emergency) meeting of the EC on resolution number 08 of the 144th (A) meeting of the Academic Council, held on Dec 1, 2017 regarding compulsory attendance in all regular courses, and authorised the Vice-Chancellor to replace the existing Deans of Schools/Chairpersons of Centres who have not complied with, or refused to, implement the attendance system in the university, with the Acting Deans/Chairpersons.”

Why Chomsky felt ‘guilty most of the time’: war research and linguistics at MIT

April 27, 2018

This article continues our ongoing debate on whether military funding affected Chomsky’s linguistics. The author contests the argument that, for the renowned linguist, such funding was always a non-issue.

A B52 bomber during the US war in Indochina. Wikicommons/USAF. Some rights reserved.

If we want to understand the human potential for radical change – change that genuinely transcends the out-of-control capitalism now threatening the environment and even the future of our species – we need to understand language and its origins. This is because language could not have evolved without extraordinary levels of cooperation, while cooperation is, of course, the key thing we need if we’re ever to overcome the class conflicts, social fragmentation and environmental degradation now afflicting us all.

Language may not always appear to be especially cooperative, particularly when we are involved in a heated argument. But as long as we remain on speaking terms, we are still demonstrating our commitment to cooperate in this most challenging and distinctively human of tasks – striving to make sure that, despite all difficulties, language continues to work.

Successful linguistic communication depends on previous shared understandings, trust in communicative intentions and an ongoing willingness to consider our words from the other person’s perspective instead of just our own. Monkeys and apes are highly intelligent creatures, but in the wild, their social dynamics are just too despotic and competitive for language-like communication to evolve.

It is facts like this which have led to a burgeoning scientific interest in the kinds of politics which best foster linguistic communication. The world’s earliest words and grammatical rules were invented not by hierarchically organised city-dwellers or farmers but by hunter-gatherers. And it is no accident that even to this day, indigenous people who practice that ancient lifestyle continue to live by the most cooperative, communistic and egalitarian political ideals ever known.

Based for sixty years at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky is not only the world’s most famous linguist; he is also, probably, the world’s best-known critic of contemporary capitalism. So you might expect him to be at the forefront of current debates concerning the social origins of language. Unfortunately, not only is Chomsky not involved in this area of research: his whole theoretical approach is widely considered to be a hindrance. He claims, for example, that language is not social at all. He says it was not designed to facilitate social communication. Setting aside social cooperation, Chomsky argues that language was suddenly installed in the head of one human ancestor by a chance mutation. Equipped with its new ability, that individual then proceeded to talk silently, just to itself.

A non-issue?

These ideas are so far removed from what modern evolutionary scientists have discovered about language, the brain and human evolution that it is hard to know how to respond. My book, Decoding Chomsky: science and revolutionary politics, along with my recent Open Democracy article, ‘Chomsky’s Choice’, are attempts to understand this whole situation – a situation which, for those of us who love Chomsky’s politics, is both frustrating and tragic.

Frederick Newmeyer is well-known and respected as the intellectual historian who has done most to present Chomsky in a positive light throughout the many disputes and controversies which have afflicted linguistics since the 1950s. Responding to my article in Open Democracy, Professor Newmeyer denies that the military funding of MIT’s linguistics programme played any role in shaping Chomsky’s foundational contribution to that programme. In fact, he denies that military funding was ever an issue for Chomsky at all.

Robert Barsky, who is an even more sympathetic biographer of the renowned linguist, adopts a similar position, claiming that the whole topic of military funding was always a non-issue. I have long been familiar with this line of argument, which accurately mirrors Chomsky’s own stated position.

Chomsky rejects outright just about everything I say, as does Barsky. According to Chomsky, I am mistaken for a fundamental reason: with the exception of certain departments, ‘MIT itself doesn’t have war work’. Or again, for Chomsky, the questions I am intrigued by are a non-issue because, in fact, ‘There was zero military work on campus’. By contrast, Newmeyer disputes only the second half of my two-pronged argument, regarding it as interesting and significant that during the early years, a number of Air Force colonels and other prominent figures in the US military hoped to derive ‘command-and-control’ applications from Chomsky’s research in a Pentagon-funded electronics laboratory in MIT.

If I understand him correctly, Newmeyer agrees with me on the following four points:
1)   Chomsky was operating within a heavily militarised institutional environment.
2)   He was officially employed to help develop computerised language processing including machine translation.
3)   The military implications would have been unmistakable had things worked out as the Air Force colonels hoped.
4)   No workable applications actually materialised.

During the early 1960s, Chomsky was in receipt of significant Air Force funding for a project being conducted by a team of his students in the MITRE Corporation, an institution that specialised in developing practical military applications out of the latest theoretical scientific work.
The aim of this particular project was to connect Chomsky’s ideas about grammar in the abstract to something more specific, namely the grammatical structure of just one particular language, English. The reasoning here was that since most US military commanders were fluent only in English, it would be best if their computerized command and control systems could be designed to accept input in that particular language.

One of Chomsky’s most promising MIT/MITRE students, Barbara Partee, entitled her thesis ‘Subject and Object in Modern English’. She recalls her high ambitions during that time: ‘Actually, my dissertation proposal, which Chomsky agreed to with enthusiasm, was to write a grammar of English, synthesizing all that had been done in transformational grammar up until then’. In the end though, Partee only had time to explore a limited fragment of English.

Grammatical structure in the abstract

Left to his own devices, I suspect that Chomsky would have encouraged his students to turn their minds in the exact opposite direction. Instead of focusing on the grammatical peculiarities of English, he would surely have preferred a steady focus on the complexities of grammatical structure in general, perhaps using English sentences as examples but, in the process, driving the investigation to ever deeper levels of universality and abstraction.

Chomsky’s overriding focus, then as now, was grammatical structure in the abstract. Although in his early years he was happy to explore variations in pronunciation in spoken English or Hebrew, neither Chomsky nor any of his followers ever got round to publishing a transformational grammar of any particular language.

Apart from the intrinsic difficulties, there was always a deep philosophical reason for this. When speaking as a scientist, Chomsky refuses to acknowledge that there is even such a thing as ‘English’, regarding this and other so-called ‘externalizations’ of language (broad cultural categories such as ‘French’, ‘Swahili’ or ‘Mohawk’) as far too arbitrarily defined and messy to be studied using the methods of natural science.

At all times, Chomsky has felt most comfortable when free to pursue his fascination with purely abstract, eternally fixed and universal underlying linguistic forms, almost as if linguistics could be reduced to mathematics. By contrast, the military, naturally enough, wanted concrete results which they could use – developments in computerised command and control which would assist them in efficiently killing people in distant countries such as Vietnam.

I don’t see how anyone can seriously deny that the US military needed workable applications and were prepared to finance Chomsky’s research in the hope of finding them. Naturally, I am delighted that a colleague with Newmeyer’s reputation as an intellectual historian agrees with me, stating that I am ‘right on the mark’ in this respect.

Chomsky’s fears

Now let me turn to the second prong of my argument, which Newmeyer disputes. I can think of three possible ways to interpret Chomsky’s decision to accept military funding of his linguistic research:
1) He took the money and happily colluded with those who were providing it.
2) He took the money but refused to collude.
3) It was not an issue. He didn’t care either way.
Needless to say, these are not cut-and-dried alternatives – we might envisage all kinds of uncertainties and in-between positions. But I would be surprised if any serious historian or biographer selected the first option or anything like it. The idea that Chomsky, of all people, would happily collude with the US military is just not likely – and I don’t believe it for a moment.

Yet I also find the third option – the possibility that Chomsky had no worries on this score – equally inconceivable. If he had no worries, it seems odd that he seriously considered resigning from MIT in the mid-1960s. He explained his misgivings in these words:

I have given a good bit of thought to … resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of ‘defense’. … I think that its involvement in the war effort [in Vietnam] is tragic and indefensible. One should, I feel, resist this subversion of the university in every possible way.

Some eight years previously, Chomsky was already worried about the danger that he might unwittingly collude with military aims. We know this because when Carol Chomsky, Noam’s wife, began working on air defence research at MIT’s Lincoln Labs in 1959, the project’s leader, Bert Green, soon realised that the university’s ‘linguists were not at all happy’.

The project in question was called ‘Baseball’. According to an article authored by Professor Green and Carol Chomsky, the project was intended to lead to a situation in which people could communicate with their computers in ‘natural language’, the wider aim being to enhance both ‘military command and control systems’ and civilian computer systems. Green elaborates:

The linguistic side of our Baseball program was prepared by Carol Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s wife. Noam was very nervous about our work, and met with me to voice his concerns. Since the work was being done at an Air Force lab, he believed that the Baseball thing was just a mask, and that we were really working on voice activated command and control systems. I tried to convince him that we were not, and that there was nothing sinister about interrogating a database.

However impractical such voice-activated systems were during these early years, it was not unreasonable for Noam to feel ‘very nervous’. After all, he was initially employed at MIT to work on machine translation, a project whose prime purpose was the large-scale translation of Soviet bloc documents for the Pentagon and CIA. The person who recruited Chomsky to work on this project in 1955 was Jerome Wiesner, who later co-founded MIT’s linguistics programme. It was Wiesner who, in the 1950s, made sure that MIT and its associated labs both played a leading role in setting up the US’s air defence system and in continuing to develop computerised systems for nuclear weapons command and control. I cannot believe that Chomsky would have happily colluded with any of this.

Both Wiesner and MIT were also involved in the Vietnam War. To give openDemocracy readers some idea of this involvement, here is an MIT student activist describing his university’s role in that unprecedented hi-tech massacre:

MIT’s Lincoln Labs have taken the lead in developing systems of sensors to detect anything on the ground, computer systems to direct bombs and shells to these targets, and radar/electronic countermeasures and ultrasophisticated bomb guidance to make sure the bombs get to the targets. … In each phase of the war, MIT’s contributions have become progressively more important, until now MIT-based technology dominates the air war, and in some cases makes it possible. Failure to put a stop to MIT’s work in the past has made possible the air war and social redesigning (i.e. genocide) in Indochina today.

And here is another anti-war activist, Fred Branfman, describing Noam’s attitude and reactions when, during his 1970 tour of Indochina, he met refugees who had directly experienced this bombing:

[Noam] downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. … He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. … [I was] stunned when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping.

Some time later, Branfman asked Chomsky if he had any regrets about his life as an activist: ‘His answer shocked me. Muttering more to himself than to me he said, “I didn’t do nearly enough.” ’

In recent years, Chomsky seems to have convinced himself that, at places like MIT, military sponsorship was mainly ‘a funnel by which tax-payer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the future.’ But I doubt whether he favoured that theory while speaking to those refugees who had fled from bombing raids that relied so much on technology developed at MIT. It was certainly not uncommon for those of us who protested against the Vietnam War to feel pangs of guilt that we still hadn’t done enough. But it was surely his university’s direct involvement in this war that made Chomsky feel ‘guilty most of the time’, to use his words quoted in the New York Times in 1968.

Chomsky’s choice

In the light of all this, I feel confident that throughout his later years at MIT, Chomsky would have moved mountains to avoid returning to the situation in which he found himself in the mid-1960s. He may not have been directly colluding with the US military at this time, but he came dangerously close. These, for example, are the words of former Air Force Colonel Anthony Debons:

Much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop . . . languages for computer operations in military command and control systems.[i]

I cannot believe that Chomsky would have been happy about any of this.

Interior of SAGE Combat Center CC-01 at Hancock Field, NY, 1950’s. Wikicommons/ United States Air Force. Some rights reserved.

So, to go back to my list of options, if we exclude options one and three, this leaves only the second option. Chomsky was willing to accept military funding but only on condition he could do so with a clean conscience, knowing that he could explore the abstract nature of language in his own chosen way. In effect, this meant that he was at all times refusing to collude.

Having claimed that Chomsky’s research had ‘direct application’ to the efforts of military scientists to develop new systems of command and control, Colonel Debons (in the passage quoted above) qualified this by observing that Chomsky’s theories ‘have not as yet led to any appreciable success’ in terms of military applications. In other words, nothing worked. And, I suspect, Chomsky was quite content to keep things that way.

Chomsky addresses an Occupy protest in 2011. wikicommons/Andrew Rusk. Some rights reserved.

Did such projects fail because the linguistics was defective? Or were the endless failures somehow deliberate on Chomsky’s part? I can appreciate why Chomsky himself needs to avoid the whole question: either answer might pose difficulties for him. Not wishing to discuss these dilemmas, he chooses instead to keep things simple. He does this by denying that military applications were ever on the horizon.

Viewed from another angle

These days, the approach to grammar developed by Adele Goldberg – her particular version of what is termed ‘construction grammar’ – is considerably more influential and widely admired within the discipline of linguistics than Chomsky’s so-called ‘generative’ approach. Goldberg criticises what she terms the ‘ever-increasing layers of abstractness’ characteristic of Chomsky’s formal representations of grammatical structure. All scientific concepts are abstract, and necessarily so. But, she argues, when abstraction is carried too far, theory no longer connects up with anything practical or real.

When Chomsky came up with his startlingly new ‘Minimalist’ programme in the 1990s, displacing much that had gone before, he commented with pride that Descartes and Plato – those most abstract of philosophers – might have been pleased. The switch to Minimalism represented yet another intensification of abstractness – taken to such extremes that in 2003, Frederick Newmeyer, who for decades had been a committed supporter, published a review in the journal Language expressing his exasperation with this latest turn.

My own view is that we need to explain why Chomsky kept retreating into ever deeper layers of formalism and abstraction. I fully acknowledge Newmeyer’s point that a fondness for this kind of thing was always there, even before Chomsky got his first job at MIT. But other linguists might have been prepared to compromise, permitting their abstractions to be tweaked or amended to make them fit more closely with reality.

Had Chomsky in his early years gone down that road, allowing his models to become more concrete and useable, it would have been the US military who benefited most. To his credit, Chomsky was never willing to do this. My argument is simple. As soon as an approach of his looked as if it might work, he began to feel anxious. His conscience was too strong and before long he would recoil back – always toward some further extreme of other-worldliness and abstraction.

Chris Knight is a research professor at University College London and a co-founder of the international evolution of language conference series, EVOLANG. His latest book is Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics, Yale 2018. His website is www.scienceandrevolution.org

[i]. http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2018/1/28/the-mitre-corporations-project-to-use-chomskys-linguistics-for-their-weapons-systems

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Why Chomsky felt ‘guilty most of the time’: war research and linguistics at MIT

This article continues our ongoing debate on whether military funding affected Chomsky’s linguistics. The author contests the argument that, for the renowned linguist, such funding was always a non-issue.

A non-issue?

Grammatical structure in the abstract

Chomsky’s fears

Chomsky’s choice

Viewed from another angle

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