Members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), a Hindu extremist organisation led by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, stopped a religious meeting in a church in Maharajganj district of Uttar Pradesh. The HYV were aided by the local police in their attempts to stop the meet, which was attended by 11 US nationals.
On Friday morning, a group of around 150 people, including 11 US nationals from the Christian community gathered at a church in Dadhauli village, which comes under Kothibhar police station of Maharajganj district. While the group was praying, some members of Hindu Yuva Vahini reached the place and saw US nationals in the prayer meeting.
Members of Hindu Yuva Vahini reached Kothibhar police station, alleging that the priest and US nationals were involved in a religious conversion in the church premises. Anand Kumar Gupta, SHO Kothibhar station, accompanied them to the church and stopped the prayer. Police found no such practice was being carried out. But police did check the passports and visas of every US national and let them go after finding everything was fine and proper.
While talking with TwoCircles.net, Anand Kumar Gupta said, “They (HYV activists) came to us with the complaint that US nationals were carrying out the religious conversion in the church. We responded to the complaint and found no such thing was happening on the ground. But we did check their papers.”
Witnesses report that the whole fiasco lasted for more than five hours. Police, along with the local intelligence unit checked and questioned US nationals. While the on-site investigation was still on, Hindu Yuva Vahini member kept insisting about filing a case against and the arrest of church priest U Hannah Adam.
The situation got serious after police let the US nationals leave the place. HYV activists created a chaos and questioned the police why they let them go. Angry members of HYV, which included Krishnanandan Puri aka Pappu Puri, Rajesh Kharwar, Manish Sharma and Sheshmani Yadav and others, intensified their demand to arrest the church priest.
However, the police declined all of their demands.
SHO Anand Gupta informed that they were demanding the arrest of priest and US nationals and to investigate the matter thoroughly. “But investigating a simple prayer meeting would mean creating a hindrance in the religious freedom of the individual”, added Gupta.
A source also informed that police intervention was necessary as members of HYV had vandalised a church and beaten people in Belwa village a few weeks ago.
A person related to the local church, who was present at the meeting on Friday morning, said on the condition of anonymity, “We were just praying there. No such conversion was being carried out but goons came and tried to disrupt a peaceful event with the help of the police.”
The body of Mohammad Shalik in hospital on Thursday. Police said three persons have been arrested for the assault.(Photo credit: Hindustan Times)
Even as a 20-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Shalik was beaten to death in BJP-ruled Jharkhand on Wednesday for being in love with a Hindu woman, a right wing group of businessmen from Jammu, affiliated to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) has threatened to kill Rohingya Muslim refugees in the state unless the government took immediate steps to deport them, reports the Times of India.
The Jammu Chamber of Commerce and Industries (CCI) accuses the Rohingya and Bangladeshi Muslims of criminal activities including drug trafficking.
“The state and Centre should book Rohingyas and Bangladeshi nationals under the Public Safety Act and deport them in a month,” CCI Jammu president, Rakesh Gupta said at a press conference. Should the government fail to enact the Chamber he warned “shall have no option but to launch an ‘identify and kill movement’ against such criminals. Gupta added the Chamber is committed to protect the interests of its people as part of its corporate social responsibility”.
According to the Times of India report there are around 10,000 Muslim refugees, most of them settled in the predominantly Hindu Jammu region. The latest threat to mob violence from Jammu businessmen comes close on the heels of the lynching last week of a Muslim dairy farmer, 55-year-old Pehlu Khan, in Rajasthan and the thrashing to death of a 20-year-old Mohammed Shalik in a Jharkhand village on Wednesday for having an affair with a Hindu woman.
According to several news reports, villagers from Soso village in Gumla district, tied a 20-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Shalik, to a tree and thrashed him for several hours for being in love with a Hindu woman. The woman had reportedly asked Shalik to meet her at the Ram Navmi procession in Gumla on Wednesday. It was then that villagers from her village recognised and attacked Shalik. He succumbed to his injuries on Thursday.
Activists have been protesting against the decision of Jharkhand's BJP government for setting up anti-Romeo squads and shutting down slaughter houses and meat shops a la Uttar Pradesh. Police said they have arrested three persons for the killing and lodged an FIR against other unnamed persons.
On Friday, the Supreme Court issued notice to six states, including Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh and also the Centre seeking a response on why cow vigilantes should not be banned.
We spoke to historian Romila Thapar in an attempt to uncover the historical background of dissent and debate in India, and how today, this tradition is aggressively being erased. The space for dialogue and discussion is shrinking in an ideological environment that increasingly shuns the practice of fundamental rationality. Watch the first two parts here:
“Paper trail” is an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections: Supreme Court judgement, 2013
The National Committee on Electoral Reforms set up by the Indian Radical Humanists Association has written to the Chief Election Commission (CEC) asking it to ensure that as per the Supreme Court’s 2013 order, only electronic voting machines (EVMs) equipped with voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) are used in the forthcoming Assembly elections in Gujarat.
Else, the Association has demanded that the CEC revert to paper ballots. It has also expressed the view that paper ballots are the ideal and the safest way for conducting elections in a democracy.
The letter addressed to Dr Nasim Zaidi, Chief Election Commissioner dated April 5 has sought a meeting with the CEC to press home the demand.
A note attached to the letter draws the CECs attention to the October 2013 Supreme Court judgement on the use of EVMs.
A writ petition was filed in the apex court in 2009 questioning the claim that EVMs cannot be tampered with or manipulated. The Supreme Court disposed of the petition asking the petitioners to pursue the matter with the CEC.
The matter was then taken up by political parties with the CEC. The latter appointed a technical experts committee to look into the complaints. Following trials the experts committee opined that EVMs equipped with VVPAT must be used during elections and the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 was accordingly amended.
Thereafter followed an important judgment of the Supreme Court in October 2013, in the case of Dr Subramanian Swamy vs Election Commission of India wherein the apex court ruled:
“From the material placed by both the sides, we are satisfied that the “paper trail” is an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections. The confidence of the voters in the EVMS can be achieved only with the introduction of the “paper trail”. EVMS with VVPT system ensure the accuracy of the voting system. With an intent to have fullest transparency in the system and to restore the confidence of the voters, it is necessary to set up EVMs with VVPT system because vote is nothing but an act of expression which has immense importance in democratic system”.
Taking a pragmatic view of the matter the Supreme Court gave discretionary powers to the CEC to introduce EVMs with VVPAT system to the extent practical for the 2014 general elections. It simultaneously directed the government of India “to provide required financial assistance for procurement of units of VVPAT”.
The CEC had told the court the purchase of VVPATs for all 13 lakh EVMs will cost around Rs 1,690 crore. This by no means is an astronomical figure.
Once again, the CEC has been faced with allegations of large scale tampering of EVMs during the recently concluded Assembly elections in several states, including UP and Punjab, and the demand by several political parties to revert to paper ballots.
While insisting there was no tampering, the CEC has also expressed its helplessness in procuring VVPAT units for all EVMs since the Centre has not made funds available. But as reported by Sabrang India, with clear evidence of tampering of an EVM in MP recently, the reliability of EVMs is once again in serious question.
“The CEC does not have to beg the Centre for funds. Given the clear directive of the Supreme Court in 2013 it must demand it”, Gautam Thaker, national president of the Indian Radical Humanists Association told Sabrang India.
EVMs have been used for elections in India since 1989.
Concerned with ensuring free and fair elections in the face of recurring allegations of tampering of EVMs, the Association appointed a National Electoral Reforms Committee headed by Justice Hosbet Suresh, former judge of the Bombay High Court. The other members of the Committee are Dr Jagdeep Chhokar (ADR), Suresh Mehta former chief minister of Gujarat, Sanjay Parikh, Senior Supreme Court lawyers and others. The letter to the CEC follows the deliberations of the Committee.
JNU administration has drastically cut intake into the university for the next academic session and perhaps for years to come, using the UGC ‘caps’ on research as a pretext. JNU Teachers’ Association demonstrates conclusively here through a survey of 46 Central Universities, that barring a handful which have definitively adopted them, most others are still operating with other Regulations based on the preceding 2009 version. And even the few universities that have adopted them, barring JNU, have implemented modifications by way of harmonisation with the statutes, objects, and past practices of the institutions.
JNU not being targeted using the UGC Regulations as a pretext? Right. Over the past few weeks we have been told that the mandatory nature of the UGC Regulations require them to be implemented by universities immediately and in a chapter-and- verse fashion. JNUTA’s survey of 46 Central Universities however shows that barring a handful who have definitively adopted them, most others are still operating with other Regulations based on the preceding 2009 version. And for even the few universities that have adopted them, barring JNU, modifications in the way of harmonisation with the statutes, objects, and past practices of the institution have inevitably resulted.
Table 1 presents the facts of 46 Central Universities, the year of their founding, and the research programmes they take admission to. To determine whether they had adopted the 2016 UGC Regulations, we examined the Ordinances and notifications on the university website in order to detect its adoption. (The value label unclear is to mark the cases where no explicit information of either type was posted on the university’s website.)
Taking just a few crucial parameters, we find that amongst those universities who have adopted the UGC Regulations 2016, each one of them barring JNU has tried to harmonise them with past practices, standards of fairness of examination and good research.
In fact, the University of Hyderabad, which has more or less a chapter and verse interpretation of the Regulations has decided through its Academic Council, not to reduce intake and has asked the UGC for clarifications.
It is JNU’s tragedy that we have an administration that refuses to stand up for the university in any fora, that refuses to hold an Academic Council meeting, and has implemented a completely unwarranted cull of seats for admissions and the adoption of crippling and illegal eligibility conditions for applications to various programmes, particularly in the science schools. UGC Regulations are being used merely as a pretext to cripple the research programmes of JNU.
Given that the majority of Hindus eat meat, how and why is the democratic state anxious over a non-vegetarian diet?
AFP Photo/STR
If anybody said that I should die if I did not take beef tea or mutton, even on medical advice, I would prefer death. That is the basis of my vegetarianism. — Mahatma Gandhi to the London Vegetarian Society on November 20, 1931.
An increase in meat consumption, intensive animal farming and growing cruelty against animals have given rise to compassion movements across the world. It should be a matter of pride, therefore, that India is among the most vegetarian countries in the world. The Sample Registration System Baseline Survey 2014 notes that close to 30% in India are vegetarians. And that the number of non-vegetarians in India has decreased from 75% in 2004 to 71% in 2014. The rate of vegetarianism is more in northwestern states as compared to the rest of India. And, urban areas are more vegetarian than their rural counterparts. Increased urbanisation could possibly mean further dwindling of non-vegetarianism, particularly in Northwest India.
Pure vegetarian – all good?
Some questions linger, however. For instance, how does meat become a source of contention, violence and even governmental repression in India? Is our vegetarianism based on compassion for animals? If yes, why does this lead to disgust, social distance and even violence against humans?
Indian vegetarianism is not veganism (vegans, in addition to being vegetarians, also abstain from animal products), it does not necessarily involve care for animals. Instead, non-vegetarian food (and non-vegetarian people) generates disgust among vegetarians in India – a peculiar feeling that calls for distance, both social and physical, both from non-vegetarian food and non-vegetarian people. The idea of purity attached with vegetarian food tells us about the ideology of caste and its influence on food preferences in India.
Why do vegetarians in India prefer social distance from non-vegetarians? A look at caste-wise food preferences could provide some insights. As is common knowledge, the ranking of castes is mostly influenced by purity of occupation and diet. In caste-society, to achieve purity of body and spirit, it is necessary to be a vegetarian and religious simultaneously – something best embodied by a Brahmin.
The percentage of non-vegetarians among Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, both for men and women, is much higher than among those who are not from these communities. And in the latter group, the highest incidence of vegetarianism is found among Brahmins at almost over 50%. The higher the caste, the greater the possibility of them being pure vegetarians.
In present times, higher status attached to purity is not rigidly limited to Brahmins, though. Such an assumption would only put the dynamism of caste practice and morals in poor light. It is through change in dietary and ritual practices that the mobility of castes (considered lower) in the higher and pure culture becomes possible. MN Srinivas calls this process Sanskritisation, where a caste or sub-caste (non-Brahmin) strictly follows marriage rules, food habits and other scriptural procedures in the hope of achieving higher social status. Sanskritisation has had a cohesive role of forming unity across castes – such unity is not conjugal or genuinely intimate but a constructed form of society where etiquette of tolerance towards castes-lower could be worked out for their accommodation. The cohesive role of Sanskritisation is not merely limited to social relations across castes, it also helps create a broader Hindu identity with new etiquette and politeness.
Besides the Sanskritised variety, there is also a group of reluctant vegetarians who either purify themselves by not eating meat on certain days and occasions, or eat certain kinds of meat while deploring beef.
One would assume that urbanisation can bring down the hierarchies related to food and caste. One critical aspect of urbanisation in India is the role food preference continues to play in constructing urban neighbourhoods. Compared to rural areas, in Northwest India we notice lower non-vegetarianism in urban spaces. In urban schools, it is not uncommon for parents of non-vegetarian children to be advised to pack appropriate (vegetarian) food for children. Even in institutes of repute, we see non-vegetarian food kept at a healthy distance from vegetarian food. Worse, sitting areas may be marked separately too. This tells us about a specific form of urbanisation and modernity where being vegetarian could possibly ensure accommodation in higher culture.
The burden of diet-purity and vegetarianism is, however, more on women than men.
Vegetarian hegemony
Generally, the Bharatiya Janata Party is framed as an upper-caste party obsessed with vegetarianism and cow protection. However, the BJP draws on the reservoirs of popular vegetarian morals of Northwest India (the cow belt). One should not ignore that the party has not banned beef in Goa and Assam, where it is in power. On the other hand, non-BJP parties have equally promoted the hegemony of vegetarianism.
In October, the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh backed spiritual leader Ramaraju Mahanthi’s vegetarian campaign. For Mahanthi, those who consume non-vegetarian food are demons. He hopes to make such people shed their demon values.
While most Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes are non-vegetarians, state governments find it difficult to even provide eggs for the school mid-day meal scheme for deprived children. The Karnataka government is currently facing opposition from vegetarian communities over its plan to introduce eggs in mid-day meals, based on choice. The plan has been in the works for a few years now but could not be implemented because of the resistance.
Given that the majority of Hindus are not vegetarian, how and why is the democratic state anxious over a non-vegetarian diet, even eggs?
Broadly, present-day vegetarianism in India constitutes a form of moral power of minority within Hindus, with such a power being forced on the non-vegetarian majority – with their consent. This new sociality is a sign of progress in modern caste belief where the seductive power of vegetarianism and its associated purity travels seamlessly across bodies and spaces without dissent.
How fragile must the morals of the vegetarian castes be if they feel threatened by the introduction of eggs for poor children in schools? The morals of Indian vegetarians continue to be based less on compassion for humans and animals, and more driven by ideas of hierarchy and purity. In this scheme of hierarchy, one who eats beef is placed at the lowest rung. Like humans of caste, not all animals carry equal sympathy: there exists some hierarchy where the cow (indigenous, not jersey) takes the highest sacral form compared to the rest. Gandhi improvised his vegetarianism through inflicting violence and control on the self. Present-day caste-subjects and their vegetarianism, however, thrive on violence, both on the self and others. The state across India through various governments has mostly been party to this process, promoting the hegemony of misguided vegetarianism.
Suryakant Waghmore is a sociologist and author of Civility against Caste.
Corrections and clarifications: The figures for men and women in the chart “Percentage of Non-Vegetarians 2014” were erroneously switched in an earlier version of this article.
After all these decades, the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" continue to break the spirit of humanity.
Fifty years ago, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a talk entitled ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break the Silence’ at New York’s Riverside Church. He had come to talk in searing terms about the American war on Vietnam. That American war had begun in 1955, a year after the French withdrawal from their former colony. In the 1960s, US President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the US presence in Vietnam, which faced sustained aerial bombardment. The sheer brutality of the use of chemical weapons and heavy bombs is reflected in the opinion of the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force Curtis LeMay who said, ‘we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.’ It was against this vulgarity that Dr. King decided to speak. Silence was no longer possible. Religious leaders had to move ‘beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent.’ Dr. King, on 4 April 1967, positioned himself squarely on those high grounds.
During that year – 1967 – the United States air force conducted over two thousand weekly bombing runs over both North and South Vietnam. The year’s total ordinance dropped would add up to 15 million tons of explosives. By the time the United States withdrew from Vietnam, it had dropped three times the total tonnage of ordinance used in World War II. On Laos, the US dropped 2.5 million tons of munitions, seven bombs for every Laotian. The nature of the weapons curdles the stomach – cluster bombs, Agent Orange, poisonous herbicide, napalm, and fleshettes. It is important to underline that at least three million Vietnamese civilians died in that war.
Dr. King’s prose is powerful – and unvarnished – on these atrocities. How do the Vietnamese experience the war? ‘They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children…Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.’ Surely, he said, ‘this madness must cease.’
Prelude to King. On April 17th, 1965, two years before Dr. King took the podium, twenty-five thousand people came to Washington as part of a protest called by the Students for a Democratic Society against the US war on Vietnam. The numbers of those who would come onto the streets as part of the anti-war movement would escalate from April 1965 to April 1967, including a hundred thousand people at protests across the country over the weekend of 15-16 October 1965. On 17 February 1966, world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused the draft saying, ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.’ A few months later, Stokeley Carmichael, a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, described the war colorfully as ‘white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people.’
Dr. King joined a major struggle that had begun two years before him. But, in characteristic fashion, Dr. King’s entry into the anti-war movement was both lyrical and decisive. He did not merely speak against the war on moral grounds. The war, he argued, would divert the energy of the United States from the promise of the Civil Rights movement. Precious public funds were being moved from tending to the American poor to warfare, and it was the American working-class of all colors that was being sent to operate in ‘brutal solidarity’ as they burnt the ‘huts of a poor village.’ When America’s dejected took up Molotov cocktails and rifles in 1965, Dr. King went amongst them to plead for nonviolent action. But now the country was using ‘massive doses of violence to solve its problem.’ Was this example not one for ordinary people in the United States to follow?
The war must end, Dr. King said, and to bring it to an end those who had been drafted must object. They must not go to war. The war machine must be paralyzed. The working-class that is forced to go fight the war of the rich must demand that the resources go toward their own broken lives. This was a powerful statement. It echoes in our times.
Shirtless and Barefoot People. Who was responsible for this war? Not the Vietnamese. They were part of the Third World upsurge, which had emerged after World War II in Africa, Asia and Latin America. ‘These are revolutionary times,’ Dr. King said. ‘All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.’ Here is Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950) and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), deeply felt prose on behalf of the world’s shirtless and barefoot peoples. Dr. King was speaking of the Vietnamese, but he had in mind all those others from Ghana (where he had attended the independence ceremony in 1957) to India (where he had been to the ‘land of Gandhi’ in 1959). The world’s people wanted to live with dignity. They had a right to self-determination.
It was the West, Dr. King said pointedly, that was against this upsurge. In his speech he mentioned the ‘counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala’ in 1954 and the actions of the Green Berets in Peru. Why was the United States so involved in ‘counterrevolutionary action’? Dr. King, unlike many liberals in the anti-war camp, went deeply into the heart of the American malady. ‘When machines and computers, profits motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,’ said the Reverend, ‘the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.’ The West, as the spear of global capitalism, wanted to suffocate the aspirations of the world’s people. This warfare, Dr. King underscored, would not only sabotage the planet’s hopes but it would also destroy the promise of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
Fierce Urgency. Three days later, the New York Times wrote an editorial titled ‘Dr. King’s Error.’ The basic point in this essay was that by linking the war with Civil Rights Dr. King had ‘done a disservice to both.’ The mandarins at the Times believed that Dr. King was wrong to say that the war would drain funds from the anti-poverty work in the United States. But the data did show, even in 1967, that the funds for urban redevelopment and for employment in Chicago, Harlem and Watts was being drawn down while the government increased its commitments to the war. It was also clear by 1967 that increasingly numbers of Black and Brown men went to fight in the war, in ‘brutal solidarity’ – as Dr. King said – with white soldiers against a war against the Third World upsurge. What the Times did not see was that the Civil Rights movement was kin to the Third World upsurge and that an attack on one – in Vietnam – was also an attack on the other – Civil Rights in the United States. Dr. King saw this clearly. It was not a matter merely of resources. It was a matter of participating in the global revolutionary dynamic.
As President, Barack Obama liked to quote Dr. King’s line about the ‘fierce urgency of now,’ which is a line that appears towards the end of this 1967 speech. That part of the speech was a rebuke to the kind of thinking in the Times editorial. Why was Dr. King excised with the ‘fierce urgency of now’? Because, he said, in human affairs there is ‘such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is the thief of time.’ Terrible events surround us. These events compel us to voice dissent. ‘Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, Too Late. There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect.’ King wanted to write his name on the side of justice. He was not bothered by the sanctimonious rhetoric from the Times and from establishment liberals who raised their eyebrows at his vigil.
A year later, Dr. King said, ‘Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.’ It was of course dark enough in 1968. Dr. King was killed on the first anniversary of this speech. Whether that was a coincidence of not is not important (Reverend Vincent Harding, who helped King write the speech, thought it was not a coincidence). We are at the fiftieth anniversary of the speech. The sky is now so dark that even the stars are muted. Voices are stilled, afraid to say the full truth – that the ‘giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism’ break the spirit of humanity.
The Supreme Court today issued notice to Rajasthan, the Centre and five other states on a petition asking for a ban on cow vigilantes.
The other states served notices are Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
The petition filed by Congressman Tehseen Poonwala follows in the wake of national outrage and uproar in the Rajya Sabha over the attack on five Muslims in Alwar, Rajasthan last Saturday by self-appointed “gau rakshaks”. One of the victims, Pehlu Khan, 55, succumbed to his injuries.
The apex court has called for a detailed reply on the Alwar lynching within three weeks. The next date for hearing is scheduled for May 3.
According to reports Pehlu Khan and others were daily farmers and not cow smugglers. They had documents to show that the cows were purchased at a Jaipur fair and were being transported to Haryana, the home state of the victims.
