A young woman who was allegedly raped repeated by a godman for the past three years, chopped off his genitals with a knife before he could do it one more time.
The 54-year-old named Sreehari, is also known as Ganga Shashwatapada Swamy. The swamy who is from an ashram is Kerala’s Kollam district has been admitted to the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College.
The woman complained to the police that she was the repeated of repeated sexual assaults by the man for the past three years, since she was a minor. On Friday, when he attempted a fresh assault, she sliced off his genitals with a sharp knife. The attacker was later taken to the hospital by the girl’s family.
A case under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) has been registered against the man. The victim’s mother has been taken into police custody as well as she is believed to have worked in connivance with the godman.
The Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan has come out in support of the young woman saying, “It was a courageous step, no doubt about it.”
Pattabhi Rama Reddy’s movie, based on UR Ananthamurthy’s novel, is a bold and blistering attack on the caste system.
Girish Karnad in Samsara
A group of Brahmins is furiously debating Naranappa’s cremation. They hated Naranappa for his meat-eating, alcohol-drinking and non-Brahminical ways. He even caught fish in the temple pond and abandoned his Brahmin wife to live with a Dalit woman. Can Naranappa be considered a Brahmin at all – and should he be cremated as one?
Just then, Chandri, Naranappaa’s mistress, enters and hands over all the gold she possesses to pay for the funeral rites. The Brahmins stare at the gold. The discussion changes from who is a good Brahmin to who should get the gold.
UR Ananthamurthy’s 1965 novel Samskara and Pattabhi Rama Reddy’s 1970 film adaptation are both blisteringly bold attacks on the caste system and the moral superiority of Brahmins. Ananthamurthy’s novel provoked one man in particular to turn to filmmaking. When he read Samskara, he was so excited by it that he felt that “here was material that was crying out to be filmed”.
That man was Girish Karnad.
Samskara (1970).
“I talked to a lot of people about the book, suggesting that they make a film of the novel,” Karnad said in an interview to India Today. “I was involved at the time with an amateur theatrical group called the Madras Players, and Pattabhi Rama Reddy, who was also with us, said, ‘OK, I’ll find the money, we’ll make the film…’ Looking back, I realize that I would probably have been drawn to film one way or another, it would have been impossible to ignore the medium altogether, but the accident of reading the book was the spark.”
The film was a team effort by a group of friends. Along with Reddy, there was his wife Snehalata Reddy (as plays Chandri), artist SG Vasudev, Australian filmmaker Tom Cowan and filmmaker and writer Rani Day Burra.
Karnad acted as the protagonist Praneshacharya “against his will”. Praneshacharya, revered Brahmin in the Brahmin quarter known as the agrahara and respected for his high moral standards and adherence to caste rules, has the dirty job of deciding the fate of Naranappa’s body. Praneshacharya’s wife is bed-ridden and we see the devout man dedicating his life in the service of his wife.
Karnad’s screenplay makes us believe that such a man will indeed find a suitable caste-bound solution to Naranappa’s cremation. Days pass and the body rots away. Unable to find an answer, Praneshacharya prays to the god Hanuman for help.
Shame and freedom
However, when Praneshacharya runs into Chandri, she fills him with a desire he has never known. The two have sex in the forest. Spontaneous and fiery, this scene remains startling especially because the film betrays no hint of such a turn of events. Reddy ensures that we see two bodies in contact instead of two flowers touching. A rebellion against film convention, if you will, mirroring the breaking of false ideas of caste purity.
The encounter triggers an enormous tumult within Praneshacharya, who flees the agrahara to run away from what he has just discovered about himself. He meets Putta, a non-Brahmin, who stuns him with his kindness. In Putta, Praneshacharya sees the value of living a life without judgment and in touch with one’s feelings in all honesty. It is a life outside of caste where humanity is all that matters. The film ends with Praneshacharya returning to the agrahara where a plague has caused the villagers to flee. A plague triggered by a rotting body – and the rottenness of the caste system.
Karnad captures the essence of Praneshacharya’s turmoil with remarkable ease and fealty. The transition from a self-assured man to a man cowering in shame at what he has discovered about himself is stark and accurate. The camera too begins to corner him as he runs away from himself, moving from wide angle shots to tight frames that trap Praneshacharya.
Samskara was part of the Indian New Wave that spread across various Indian states in the late 1960s and ’70s. Reddy’s film was banned initially for fear of a backlash from the Brahmin community, and was released shortly later. It went on to win the National Award for Best Film that year.
Ananthamurthy’s novel too had been both popular and controversial. It outraged members of the Brahmin community, but was equally hailed as a landmark in the Navya movement of modernism in Kannada literature.
As much as he loved Samskara in 1970, Karnad shared an uneasy relationship with Ananthamurthy’s other novels, even going to the extent of openly dismissing the late writer’s legacy. On the same occasion, Karnad even called Samskara “baseless” and “shallow”.
But in 1970, the book, the actor and the writer were all on the same page. And Indian cinema is thankful for that.
After much controversy on the ethical standards around clinical trials in India, show cased in gross violations in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, India's apex medical research body along with other leading groups will now adopt UN health agency's recommendations to register and publicly disclose results of all clinical trials they fund or support.
Image Courtesy: Livemint
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the Norwegian Research Council, the UK Medical Research Council, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Epicentre (its research arm), PATH, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Institut Pasteur, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust agreed to develop and implement policies within the next 12 months that require all trials they fund, co-fund, sponsor or support to be registered in a publicly-available registry.
They also agreed that all results would be disclosed within specified timeframes on the registry or by publication in a scientific journal. "We need timely clinical trial results to inform clinical care practices as well as make decisions about allocation of resources for future research," said Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. "We welcome the agreement of international standards for reporting timeframes that everyone can work towards," Swaminathan said.
Currently about 50 per cent of clinical trials go unreported, according to several studies, often because the results are negative. These unreported trial results leave an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the risks and benefits of vaccines, drugs and medical devices, and can lead to use of suboptimal or even harmful products.
Background
In January 2013, the Supreme Court directed the health ministry to monitor and regulate all clinical trials of experimental drugs in the country until further notice and observed that unregulated trials have caused “havoc”. The apex court order had revoked the power of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization under the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), which has so far been the nodal agency for monitoring clinical trials in India. The Supreme Court was hearing a lawsuit filed by non-profit Swasthya Adhikar Manch in February, which had alleged that participants in such clinical trials faced health problems and had even died because of the practice. Advocate Sanjay Parikh had appeared in the matter.
“Uncontrolled clinical trials are causing havoc to human life. There are so many legal and ethical issues involved with clinical trials and the government has not done anything so far,” justice R.M. Lodha said while hearing the petition. Livemint reported that the court has directed the health secretary to file an admissible affidavit within four weeks after it refused to accept one filed by deputy drugs controllers as it failed to comply with the court’s order passed in October 2012.
Then, in October 2012, the apex court had said it may bar clinical trials in the country unless the health ministry provided information within a month regarding deaths during such programmes, besides compensation and general practices when new drugs are tested on Indians.
DCGI had submitted in court on Thursday that 475 human clinical trials for “new chemical entities not approved as drugs for human use anywhere in the world” were approved by the Indian drug regulator between January 2005 and 30 June 2012. Out of the 475 experimental drugs, 17 have been given approval for marketing, according to court records.
During the period, 11,972 serious adverse events, excluding deaths, were reported, out of which 506 have been attributed to clinical trials. None of the victims has been compensated. A total of 57,303 subjects were enrolled in these clinical trials and 39,022 of them have completed the trials.
“The magnitude of the problem is now emerging with the government admitting that no laws were in place between 2005 and 2012 for new chemical entities and yet the government was approving trials so casually,” said Amulya Nidhi, an activist with Swasthya Adhikar Manch. “Our whole plea has been to stop testing for experimental drugs unless there is a regulation in place for it. Besides, there is no mention of rules regarding compensation in the Drug and Cosmetics Act. We hope to strengthen our campaign for relevant amendments in the Act.”
In response to interim applications seeking information on experimental drugs being tested in India, between January 2005 and 30 June 2012, the Indian Union government said there were no records for trials conducted between 2005 and 2007. Since 2008, government records showed that 80 deaths can directly be attributed to clinical trials and 40 of these victims have been compensated.This is the first time that state governments have been asked to put comprehensive data on clinical trials in the public domain, according to Chinmay Mishra, one of the petitioners.
According to conservative estimates by Swasthya Adhikar Manch, there have been 2,374 reported deaths during clinical trials since 2007.
India’s clinical trial industry has been mushrooming since the introduction of patent protection laws in 2005, drawing multinational companies because of its ethnically diverse pool of patients with low entitlement literacy and huge regulatory void, according to Mishra.
The rationale behind conducting clinical trials in India is that these can bring down research and development costs by nearly 60% for big pharmaceutical companies, according to industry estimates. “We don’t know what exactly the court has expressed by revocation of DCGI’s power. The department of health is the authority which makes the policy for clinical trials,” said Arun Bhatt, president of Clininvent Research Pvt. Ltd, one of the country’s top clinical research organisations.
Monitoring Norms
With the latest developments, "Research funders are making a strong statement that there will be no more excuses on why some clinical trials remain unreported long after they have completed," said Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation at World Health Organisation. The signatories to the statement also agreed to monitor compliance with registration requirements and to endorse the development of systems to monitor results reporting.
In 2015, WHO published its position on public disclosure of results from clinical trials, which defines timeframes within which results should be reported, and calls for older unpublished trials to be reported. That position builds on the World Medical Associations Declaration of Helsinki in 2013.
Todays agreement by some of the world's major research funders and international NGOs will mean the ethical principles described in both statements will now be enforced in thousands of trials every year.
Most of these trials and their results will be accessible via WHOs International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, a unique global database of clinical trials that compiles data from 17 registries around the world.
Human rights violations in clinical trials in India, the case of the HPV vaccination project
In 2009, the States of Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat launched a research project for the vaccination against the human papilloma virus (HPV) which can cause cervical cancer. Adolescent girls between the ages of 10 – 14 in the States of Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat were to be vaccinated. The vaccines were provided by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck. The project was designed and executed by PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) and funding was received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In April 2010, however, the Government of India suspended the program as several violations of ethical standards by PATH were widely reported by human rights organizations. However, by that time, 24,000 girls had already been vaccinated.
Maharashtra has reported 852 farmer suicides in the four months between January to April this year, according to government data. Times of India reports that this means an average of seven farmer suicides were reported every single day during this period. As many as 409 cases – or 48% – are from Vidarbha region, from where chief minister Devendra Fadnavis hails.
Overall, the figures are lower than the 1,023 cases reported during the same span last year, when the state was in the grip of a severe drought and water crisis. Subsequently, the state experienced a good monsoon.
Within the cotton belt of Vidarbha, the bulk of farmer suicides are from the five districts of Amravati, which reported 324 cases. This is not much lower than the 339 cases reported during this period last year. So far, 85 cases have been reported from Nagpur division. Marathwada region, which had experienced successive years of drought, reported 291 cases till April this year, or 34% of the total. Last year, by April, the figure was 375.
North Maharashtra reported 132 farmer suicides by the end of April, or 15% of the total cases. The Konkan belt reported only one case so far, while the sugar belt of Western Maharashtra has reported 19 cases, according to revenue department figures.
The Opposition has been demanding a farm loan waiver, the issue which led to its Sangharsh Yatra. But the state has refused to grant it, saying it would cost Rs 30,500 crore and that the earlier waiver did not stem suicides.
Farm leaders say the government has not done enough to address the critical issues of pricing and farm loans. "As we face the monsoon, many farmers who have not been able to repay existing loans will not be eligible for fresh loans," says farm leader Vijay Jawandhia. Pointing to the tur dal glut, he said the government did not act quickly enough to impose restrictions on imports.
People living in underdeveloped parts of central India are most vulnerable to the health impacts of heat waves, a Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI) for India has found.
The index considered various factors including a person’s age, caste, income and health, as well as the green cover in an area, as having a bearing on people’s heat vulnerability, and its analysis of 640 (of the 707) districts in the country finds ten districts to be “very high risk.” Six of these are in relatively underdeveloped areas in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In contrast, the 20 districts in the “very low risk” category are mostly in the relatively developed states of Kerala and Goa and the union territory of Lakshadweep.
The Index was published in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, in March 2017.
Researchers used data from the 2011 Census of India, the District Level Household Survey-3 and the Indian Space Research Organisation, combining it statistically to create the index, according to this Rand Corporation blog post by two of the authors, Gulrez Shah Azhar and Jaime Madrigo.
The very high-risk areas, concentrated in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, are less urbanised and people there have fewer household amenities as well as lower rates of literacy and access to water and sanitation.
These high-risk areas are not the same as areas with high or rising temperatures — the correlation between the HVI and average land surface temperatures is moderate. “When we think of temperature, there are several issues to consider–in addition to temperature there is effect of humidity and radiant heat on mortality. At the same time, local populations are adapted to (used to) the prevailing temperatures. Deaths happen when heat exceeds these adaptation thresholds,” Gulrez Shah Azhar, one of the authors, told IndiaSpend.
Azhar gave the example of Dehradun, which reported heat wave deaths at lower temperatures than neighbouring cities in UP last year. “In UP there were much higher temperatures but no reported deaths, since the much higher temperatures are normal for UP,” he said, adding, “If we include temperature as a variable in the index itself, it would bias the results towards places with higher normal temperatures.”
India’s largest avoidable natural disaster
The number of deaths due to heat waves recorded in 2015–more than 2,400–was higher than the number of deaths caused by any other natural disaster, according to the ministry of home affairs. In 1998 the death toll was 3,000 and in 2002, over 2,000, according to data from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) 2016 action plan for the prevention and management of heat waves. The NDMA is an agency under the ministry of home affairs.
A heat wave is a period of abnormally high temperatures (more than the normal maximum temperature) that occurs during the summer season, with the resultant atmospheric conditions causing physiological stress, and sometimes death, among affected populations, according to the NDMA.
The Indian Meteorological Department uses several factors to quantify a heat wave:
a. Hot weather conditions are not considered a heat wave unless the maximum temperature reaches 40°C in plain areas and 30°C in the hills.
b. If the normal temperature in an area is less than 40°C, an increase of 5-6°C above 40°C constitutes a moderate heat wave while an increase of 7°C or more is a severe heat wave.
c. When the normal temperature is more than 40°C, an increase of 4-5°C from this normal is considered a moderate heat wave, while an increase of 6°C or more is a severe heat wave.
d. When the actual maximum temperature remains 45°C or more for two consecutive days, irrespective of normal maximum temperature, it is considered a heat wave.
Despite casualties, and the fact that heat wave deaths occur due to atmospheric conditions, heat waves are not included in the notified list of natural disasters, according to this response by the ministry of home affairs to a question asked in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament.
In 2016, the NDMA prepared guidelines for state governments to formulate action plans for the prevention and management of heat waves, outlining four key strategies: forecasting heat waves and enabling an early warning system; building capacity of healthcare professionals to deal with heat wave-related emergencies; community outreach through various media; and inter-agency cooperation as well as engagement with other civil society organizations in the region.
The NDMA says adopting these measures has brought heat wave-related mortality down in many places such as Ahmedabad. The city experienced a major heat wave in 2010, and registered over a 1,000 additional deaths in May that year that could be attributed to heat wave conditions. In 2013, the city adopted a ‘Heat Action Plan’ (HAP) that has reduced mortality in succeeding years. The primary objective of the HAP is to alert populations most at risk of heat-related illness to existing or impending extreme heat conditions, and to take precautions.
At the same time, the India Meteorological Department publishes daily bulletins containing information about the prevailing temperature and a warning for coming days. For example, on May 17, severe heat wave conditions were observed at isolated places over coastal Andhra Pradesh, and heat wave conditions at isolated places over Odisha, Vidarbha and Tamil Nadu, according to this IMD bulletin.
“The combination of exceptional heat stress and a predominantly rural population makes India vulnerable to heat waves. Vegetable vendors, auto repair mechanics, cab drivers, construction workers, police personnel, road side kiosk operators and mostly weaker sections of the society have to work in the extreme heat to make their ends meet and are extremely vulnerable to the adverse impacts of heat waves such as dehydration, heat and sun strokes,” the NDMA guidelines say, “Therefore, it is not surprising that these workers, homeless people and the elderly constitute the majority of heat wave casualties in India.”
The HVI confirmed as much. Pointing out that the high and very high HVI districts are in the central part of the country,the paper said that with a higher tribal population, these states have been at the lower end of various health, education, economic and population growth indicators.
Some Solutions
a. Further research using sub-district level data to provide separate indices for urban and rural areas to enable more targeted geographical interventions.
b. Deeper analysis of urban ward-level data to provide intra-city vulnerability patterns.
c. Provision of public messaging (radio, TV), mobile phone-based text messages, automated phone calls and alerts.
d. Promotion of traditional adaptation practices, such as staying indoors and wearing comfortable clothes.
e. Popularization of simple design features such as shaded windows, underground water storage tanks and insulating housing materials.
f. Provision of drinking water within housing premises and indoor toilets.
Wanted by India: Zakir Naik. Photo credit: Middleeastmonitor
Controversial televangelist Zakir Naik who is wanted by authorities in India for alleged terrorist offences, hate speech and money laundering has been granted Saudi citizenship, the Middle East Monitor has reported.
Saudi King Salman reportedly intervened to grant his country’s citizenship to Naik to protect him from arrest by the International Police Organisation (Interpol) on India’s request.
Last month, Indian courts issued a second arrest warrant for Dr Naik in connection with his alleged role in a terror-related case and over money laundering allegations. Naik, who was on tour at the time, decided not to return to India and remained in Malaysia where permanent residency status was granted to him five years ago by the Malaysian government, according to the Middle East Monitor.
The 51-year-old Muslim supremacist was out of India last year when the authorities began investigations against him, following the disclosure by Bangladesh security agencies that one of the terrorists who had died in the Dhaka bomb blasts in July was inspired by Naik’s preachings.
He had since then refused to come to India despite several attempts by the investigating agencies. Naik stated repeatedly that he was willing to be questioned through Skype but declined from returning to India to face the authorities.
The Enforcement Directorate had moved to get Naik’s Indian passport revoked paving the way for his arrest by Interpol.
The Union Ministry for Home Affairs which had cancelled the FCRA registration of Naik's Islamic Research Foundation last year, also cancelled the FCRA registration of his educational trust last month.
The Saudi citizenship has been granted to him even though well aware that the courts in India had issued an arrest warrant against Naik.
If not the only, it is certainly one of the rare cases where Saudi Arabia has granted citizenship to an Indian national.
Arrested for running a sex racket. Photo Credit: New Indian Express
Nine men, including a leader of the ruling BJP, have been nabbed by the cyber cell of the Bhopal police for running an online sex racket.
Among those arrested was Neeraj Shakya (33) who was appointed as state media in-charge of the ruling BJP’s scheduled caste (SC) cell in Bhopal only a few days ago.
Shakya is reportedly close to the fiery VHP leader Sadhvi Rithambra.
Shakya with Sadhiv Rithambara
“Following his arrest by the cyber cell, State BJP president Nandkumar Singh sacked him from the party,” MP state BJP chief spokesperson Deepak Vijayvargiya told the New Indian Express.
The SP (Cyber Cell, Bhopal) Shailendra Chouhan gave the names of the others accused of running the sex racket and arrested as Dinesh alias David Singh, Suresh Gahlot, Ravi Prajapati, Harjit Dhanwani, Manoj Kumar Gupta, KK Jaiswal, Suresh Belani, Miswauddin.
Three customers were also arrested during the raid late on Thursday night.
Four women looking for jobs hailing from Maharashtra, Meghalaya and Panna (MP) were rescued.
In February this year, three ruling BJP cadre, including Bhopal BJP IT Cell chief Dhruv Saxena, were arrested by the State anti-terrorism (ATS) squad for running Chinese simbox enabled illegal telephone exchanges, which allegedly aided spying by Pakistan’s inter-service intelligence (ISI) in India.
According to SP (Cyber Cell Bhopal) Shailendra Chouhan, “our team was working on the matter since three months following specific inputs about an online sex racket running in posh areas of Bhopal through a web portal.” Sustained probe revealed that those operating the racket were regularly scanning resumes/CVs of girls and women urgently needing jobs on various job portals.
The men had listed their own contact numbers on the web portal facilitating the alleged sex racket.
The victims of the July assault have faced three more attacks while some Dalit activists are rallying against ‘fake’ cow vigilantism.
Aarefa Johari
On the morning of May 10, a giant metal cow wound its way through Gujarat’s Surendranagar town, mounted on a tempo and glinting in the harsh sun. It was a compelling spectacle: a cow painted in almost life-like colours, with a cavernous hole in place of its abdomen, stuffed to the brim with greenish, indefinable trash.
“This is the actual plastic waste found in the stomachs of dead cows when Dalit chamars [tanners] skin them,” said Natubhai Parmar, a Dalit rights activist and the man driving the tempo. “This is what is killing our cattle the most, not the Muslims or Dalits that gau rakshaks keep attacking.”
Participating in this unusual rally against what Parmar called fake cow protection vigilantism, as it made its way from the town’s outskirts to the district collector’s office, were around 70 protestors, mostly Dalit and Adivasi youth from across Gujarat. Among them was 21-year-old Ramesh Sarvaiya, one of four leather tanners from Una town who were accused of cow slaughter and assaulted by upper-caste cow vigilantes while they were skinning a dead cow in July. The incident had triggered perhaps the biggest Dalit protest movement in Gujarat in recent history. As angry remonstrators had spilled on to the streets, Parmar had spearheaded a dramatic form of protest – collecting dead cattle from across the region and dumping their carcasses on the roads and in front of government offices. If Dalits were going to be attacked for simply carrying out their traditional occupation, then the carcass protest declared that Dalit tanners would no longer skin dead cattle.
Now, 10 months since the Una incident and six months before the Assembly elections, where does the movement against Gujarat’s cow politics stand? And how much has life changed for Dalits in Una?
During Natubhai Parmar's rally in Surendranagar town on May 10, a truck displays bunches of plastic removed from dead cows, with signs depicting the weight of plastic removed from each animal.
Protest for grazing land
In the weeks following the Una attack, amidst national outrage, 40 men accused of the crime were arrested. But the Dalits, who hoped the government would crack down on self-proclaimed gau rakshaks, were disappointed.
On March 31 this year, the Gujarat government introduced a law that makes cow slaughter punishable with life imprisonment, instead of the previous three to seven years in jail. This stringent law triggered fears of a possible rise in cow vigilantism targeting Muslims and Dalits, and they have not been assuaged. On May 6, an Adivasi man from Sabarkantha district – the first to be arrested under the new law – died in police custody.
In April, even as the Supreme Court sought responses from Gujarat and five other states about the need to ban self-styled gau rakshak groups, news reports indicated that Gujarat’s Gauchar Vikas and Gau Seva Board – a government body dedicated to cattle development – was likely to increase the number of “best gau rakshak” awards it offers from three to six.
These developments drove Natubhai Parmar to pursue a cause he had long been passionate about: juxtaposing the state government’s concern for cows with its alleged indifference to rampant encroachments on gauchar or cattle-grazing land in Gujarat. At his modest rally in Surendranagar, the protestors’ primary demand was restoration of lost gauchar land.
State governments are required to allot tracts of pastoral land for cattle-grazing in every village, but in Gujarat, this gauchar land allotment has been contentious for several years. In 1988, the state government stipulated that 39.5 lakh hectares of land in the state should be allotted for cattle-grazing – at least 16 hectares for every 100 animals. But in 2014, the non-profit Maldhari Rural Action Group conducted an independent survey of three districts and found a 65% shortfall in the total gauchar land that should have been allotted.
A 2011 Supreme Court order also prohibits the sale of gauchar land for industrial or commercial use, but in 2014, various courts in Gujarat were hearing more than 11,000 cases related to illegal possession of such plots. Reports also found that more than 400 villages no longer have any land left for cattle to graze on. Parmar alleges that the land has either been encroached upon by wealthy farmers or sold to various industries.
“Without land to graze on, cows are eating garbage and choking on plastic,” said Parmar, who also belongs to the community of leather tanners. “All these fraud gau rakshaks who harass us don’t care about protecting grazing land, but we demand that the government do a land survey and free gauchar land from industries and encroachers.”
Ramesh Sarvaiya, the Una attack victim who still suffers from back pain, attests to Parmar’s concerns. “Gauchar land around my village has been usurped by big farmers,” he said. “And I know cows are dying of plastic because I have personally pulled out several kilos of knotted plastic from dead cows.”
At the May 10 protest, Ramesh Sarvaiya and others carried 182 bottles of plastic trash recovered from the stomachs of dead cows, one for each of the state's MLAs.
No respite in Una
In Una, Sarvaiya and his relatives who were assaulted in July have given up cattle-skinning for good. But all these months later, they have still not found another vocation.
“I try to do farm labour sometimes, but my body still hurts from the injuries they gave me,” said Balubhai Sarvaiya, Ramesh Sarvaiya’s father. For now, the family is living off the government compensation they received, but Balubhai Sarvaiya is worried about the future. “The government had promised us five acres of land to farm on, but they seem to have forgotten. They also promised that the Una case would be resolved in two months, but in 10 months they have not even found three attackers who are absconding.”
He also blames the government for the atmosphere of fear in which Una’s Dalits continue to live. In the past two months alone, relatives of the arrested gau rakshaks and other members of the higher Darbar caste have been involved in at least three alleged incidents of intimidation and assault on the Sarvaiya family.
In the first incident in March, Ramesh Sarvaiya was returning from a wedding in a neighbouring village when a young woman from the Ahir caste, which is included in the Other Backward Classes in Gujarat, asked him for a lift in his auto, and he obliged. “The woman was from our own village, and the Ahirs did not mind,” said Balubhai Sarvaiya. “But the Darbar men interfered and threatened my son.”
A few days later, when Balubhai Sarvaiya was traveling with four relatives on the highway, a group of Darbars related to the arrested men stopped their auto and forced the Sarvaiyas out. “They issued warnings to the auto driver never to ferry us again, and we went away because we did not want to get into a fight,” he said. “But later, some of us went to the Darbars and warned them that if any such thing happened a third time, we would not tolerate it.”
The third incident occured in April, when Balubhai Sarvaiya’s nephews Mansukh Sarvaiya and Raoji Parmar were waiting for an auto on the highway. “Out of the blue, a drunk Darbar man came up to us, started hurling abuses and hit me with a metal rod,” said 24-year-old Raoji Parmar, who walks with a limp because of a birth defect. While he sustained injuries on his head, Mansukh Sarvaiya, 25, was injured on his hand as he tried to help his cousin.
True to their word, the family did not let this attack slide. They reported the incident to the Una police and the assailant – a relative of one of the men arrested for the July attack – was arrested. “But he is already out on bail, and now out of fear we no longer use that highway,” said Raoji Parmar.
Limited political impact?
The Sarvaiyas and other Dalit activists are certain they will not support the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Gujarat elections due in November. But this may not make a significant dent to the party’s fortunes in a state where most higher-caste voters remain oblivious to the lives of Dalits. During the May 10 rally in Surendranagar, for instance, few citizens of the town showed any curiosity or interest in the cause of gauchar land, while local political leaders from higher castes were even dismissive of the “Dalit protest”.
In other parts of Gujarat, many upper-caste farmers believe the Dalits of Una were themselves responsible for last year’s attack, and refuse to let this belief be challenged. “We don’t really have a gau rakshak problem,” said Govindbhai Gohil, a farmer from rural Ahmedabad and a Congress member of the zila parishad. “Those Una Dalits were beaten because they actually killed a cow.”
Towards new horizons
Despite the wide indifference to their woes, some Dalits from the Una region are now expanding their horizons in the hope of pulling their community out of poverty and oppression. Ramesh Sarvaiya, for instance, has joined a three-month skills and leadership training course at the Dalit Shakti Kendra in Central Gujarat’s Sanand town.
Ramesh Sarvaiya, one of the four Una tanners flogged by cow vigilantes in July last year, says his injuries still hurt.
The Dalit Shakti Kendra was founded by the Navsarjan Trust, Gujarat’s oldest and largest Dalit rights organisation that was abruptly forced to shut down in March after the Central government declared its activities undesirable and revoked its licence to receive foreign funding. While Navsarjan’s former employees, like Natubhai Parmar, have continued their personal activism, the Dalit Shakti Kendra has survived independently, on Indian funding, as an educational centre for Dalit and Adivasi youth from across India.
Last month, it enrolled its first students from Una, thanks to the efforts of a former Navsarjan employee from Surendranagar, Mahesh Rathod. “The Dalits of Una taluka, and in fact all of Gir Somnath district, did not have much education or consciousness of their rights before the attack last year,” said Rathod, who has spent the past 10 months making multiple trips to Una to educate and mobilise the region’s Dalits. “Now, finally, two young boys and two girls from Una are learning vocational skills at the Dalit Shakti Kendra, and they are going to go back and be community leaders.”
For Ramesh Sarvaiya, a Class 8 dropout, this course allowed him to travel outside his district for the first time in his life. “I am learning tailoring so that I can get another job when I go home,” he said. “But more importantly, I am going to serve my community so that what happened to me does not happen to any Dalit again.”
