Pakistani feminist Urdu poet and writer Fahmida Riaz passes away

November 23, 2018

Noted Pakistani feminist writer and poet Fahmida Riaz died in Lahore, Pakistan on Wednesday night at the age of 72. The eminent progressive writer, who was also hailed by many as the pioneer in feminist literature, had been suffering from illness for the past few months, reported Dawn news.

Riaz was also a human rights activist and the author of more than 15 books on fiction and poetry.

When “Badan Dareeda”, her second collection of verse, appeared in 1973, she was accused of using erotic and sensual expressions in her poetry. The themes prevalent in her verse were, until then, were considered taboo for women writers.

Born into a literary family of Meerut (India) on July 28, 1946, her family settled in Hyderabad after her father’s transfer to Sindh. She was four when her father passed away and was brought up by her mother. After completing her education she began working as a newscaster for Radio Pakistan. She had started writing at a very young age, managed her own Urdu publication named Aawaz.

Aawaz was later banned for its revolutionary vision and publishing articles containing a liberal view on the then ruling government.

Riaz, in addition to her literary pursuits, always played an active role in social and political activities.

She lived in self-exile for over six years in India when former military dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq ruled over Pakistan. She worked as a poet-in-Residence at Jamia Millia University in this period.

She was appointed managing director of what was then the National Book Council of Pakistan during the first Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government (1988-90).

In Benazir Bhutto’s second tenure as Prime Minister, she became associated with the Ministry of Culture.

In 2009, she was appointed the chief editor of the Urdu Dictionary Board in Karachi.

Famous Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie condoled Riaz’s death and termed her “one of the brightest of lights in the dark days” of dictatorship.

Senior journalist Raza Rumi called her the “finest of our poets, writer, and translator, activist” on Twitter.

Noted Pakistani author Ayesha Siddiqa, said : “Sad to lose another very lovely Khala the dynamic @fahmidaRiaz she was brave, daring and a great person – rest in peace Khala you will be missed in a land where people can no longer disagree and still live.”

Central committee member of CPI-M tweeted Renowned Pakistani Poet Fahmida Riaz passes away in Lahore. She had fled General Zia-ul Haq’s tyranny, sought refuge & spent 7 years in exile in India. Her warning to Indians on religious fundamentalists remains and will keep ringing forever.

Her works have been digitised by the Rekhta Foundation and available on their site: Fahmida authored of several books like Godaavari, Khatt-e Marmuz, Khana e Aab O Gil, Pathar ki Zaban, Dhoop, Badan Darida, Karachi, Adhoora Aadmi, Khule Dareeche Se, Qafle Parindon Ke, Gulabi Kabootar, etc. Apart from this she also translated the masnavi of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi from Persian to Urdu, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Shaikh Ayaz from Sindhi to Urdu and Rumi’s shayari into Urdu.

One of her famous poems presented here:
Woh ik Zan-e-Napaak Hai (She is a woman impure) which talks volumes about her courage
She is a woman impure
imprisoned by her flowing blood
in a cycle of months and years.
Consumed by her fiery lust,
in search of her own desire,
this mistress of the devil
followed his footsteps
into a destination obscure
unmarked, unmapped before,
that union of light and fire
impossible to find.
In the heat of her simmering passion
her breasts have ripped
By each thorn on the wayside
every membrane of her body ripped.
No veil of shame conceals her body
No trace it bears of sanctity
But, O Ruler of land and oceans,
who has seen this before?
Everywhere your command is supreme
Except over this woman impure
No prayer crosses her lips
No humility touches her brow.

Source: We Sinful women, contemporary Urdu feminist poetry by Ruksana Ahmad

(With inputs from IANS)

Courtesy: Two Circles

Part 1: Is Facebook in India Truly Independent of Political Influence? Not Really — It Has Backed Modi and BJP

November 23, 2018

Will the social media giant act in a neutral manner in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections? A series of five reports critically examines whether Facebook and WhatsApp have been complicit in promoting the interests of India’s ruling regime and Hindutva agenda.

Facebook, the biggest online social media group in the world, is under unprecedented attack following the publication on 14 November of a 5,000-word investigation by the New York Times alleging a host of questionable practices by the digital conglomerate, that includes WhatsApp and Instagram. The company’s share prices have come down and particular investors have called for the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg, the 34-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Facebook and his 49-year-old deputy, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. While the two have sought to refute certain specific allegations levelled against them, their leadership abilities and integrity are being questioned like never before. This is arguably the biggest crisis faced by Facebook which has 2.27 billion users across the world, including over 220 million in India – the largest in any country.

Even as allegations against the digital monopoly for allowing its platforms to be misused have intensified globally and calls have been made to break it up, we present an investigation into Facebook’s activities in India. This series of five long reports is based on interviews (quite a few of them off-the-record) with nearly 50 individuals that were conducted over a period of five months starting June 2018 as well as information that is available in the public domain.

While the international digital giant claims it provides an agnostic platform for all to use, there is evidence – some of it circumstantial – to indicate that senior employees of Facebook in India have in the past worked, and continue to work, very closely with the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi since 2011. Their uncomfortably-close proximity to the powers-that-be in the country raises a big question: Will Facebook act in a neutral manner in the run-up to the general elections scheduled for April-May 2019? This is the first in a series of five reports –– that critically examines whether Facebook and its companion platform WhatsApp have been complicit in promoting the interests of India’s ruling regime and its right-wing, Hindu nationalist agenda.

In the first article, we examine allegations relating to the complicity of Facebook and WhatsApp in spreading disinformation and hate speech that have led to mob lynching in different parts of the country. We also point out how critics of the Modi regime have felt marginalised by the social media platform and its associates. In the second article, we report how Facebook arrived at the dominant position it currently is in India with more than a little help from friends and supporters of Prime Minister Modi. In the third report in the series, we outline the role played by key individuals with close links with the BJP and Modi and how the social media was used in propagating his party’s agenda. In the fourth article, we look at the Congress party’s relations with Facebook, the questionable activities of Cambridge Analytica in India and, among other things, an allegation of possible conflict of interest pertaining to a senior employee of Facebook in India. In the fifth and final article, we outline the crisis confronting one of the world’s biggest internet conglomerates set up just over a decade ago. We also reproduce a detailed questionnaire that we sent Facebook and the social media platform’s predicable and somewhat fuzzy responses to 64 pointed questions we raised.

* * *

On 22 September, speaking at a public rally for social media volunteers of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Kota, Rajasthan, party president Amit Shah remarked: “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake.”

To place his remarks in context, Shah first said that before assembly elections were held in Uttar Pradesh in February-March 2017, BJP supporters had put together two huge groups of its supporters on WhatsApp together comprising a stupendous 3.2 million users. Every day at 8 am, messages would be sent to group members for them to “know the truth” about “false” information that had been published about the BJP in various publications and websites. One “smart” volunteer had put out a fabricated post claiming that Akhilesh Yadav, the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (belonging to the Samajwadi Party which is opposed to the BJP) had slapped his father Mulayam Singh Yadav. The message went viral and reached Shah.

The BJP president then said that this should not have been done. Nevertheless, a mahaul or an environment was created. As members in the audience smirked, Shah almost-lovingly chided them: “This is something worth doing but don’t do it! Do you understand what I am saying?”

He added: “We can do this because we have 32 lakh people in our WhatsApp groups. That is how we were able to make this go viral.”

The exact text of Shah’s speech in Hindi is available on many media websites. The numbers he cited are truly staggering. During a recent visit to India, the global head of WhatsApp Chris Daniels claimed in an interview with the Economic Times that while the “end-to-end encrypted” platform “enables” over 200 million individuals in the country: “People sometimes find it surprising that over 90% of the messages sent on WhatsApp are between two people and the majority of groups have less than ten people.”

Amit Shah and the BJP’s supporters, sympathisers and volunteers have evidently been far more successful than most others across the globe in using this social media platform, if Daniels’ figures are to be believed. There is no doubt that the BJP has been running the world’s biggest – and arguably most influential – online political campaign. At a time when Facebook, the largest social media platform and digital monopoly of its kind on the planet (which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram) has come under growing global scrutiny and strident criticism over its claims of neutrality and the misuse of its data by Cambridge Analytica and others, its operations in India are being increasingly questioned, and rightly so.

There have been allegations that supporters of Narendra Modi have frequently spread disinformation on online platforms, sometimes with the help of content marketing companies, legitimate news media organisations and journalists critical of the ruling regime are complaining that they have been deliberately marginalised and, at times, even “censored” by Facebook. Here are a few instances.

On 10 August, Caravan was not allowed to boost an article on Facebook which was critical of the BJP president. The magazine had claimed that Shah had “misrepresented” his assets and liabilities in his affidavit filed before the Election Commission of India. The publication wanted to boost this particular article on its website on Facebook. However, approval came eleven days later by which time the story had lost quite a bit of potential for traction as the news cycle had surged ahead.

This is what Vinod K Jose, Caravan’s executive editor stated in an email communication to the writers of this article: “It was very strange for us at the Caravan to see Facebook not boosting our exclusive report of August 10 on Amit Shah hiding his loan liabilities from his electoral affidavit, as Caravan has a verified account with Facebook and both organisations have partnered each other in the past in hosting public events.”

Jose added that his publication’s digital marketing team waited for days after initiating the review process, but got no reply from Facebook. “This made us more suspicious and we assigned a reporter to look into what was going on … (He) contacted the India head for communications at Facebook via email and although there was no reply, the block to the boost was removed eleven days after the story was published, which in the case of a hard-hitting news story makes no sense.”

Caravan received a reply from Facebook on August 21 which read: “We’ve reviewed your ad(vertisement) again and have determined (that) it complies with our policies. Your ad is now approved. Your ad is now active and will start delivering soon. You can track your results in Facebook Ads Manager.”

Jose wonders that if Facebook found nothing wrong on August 21, why did it block the boost for eleven days. Caravan reporter Tushar Dhara even escalated his communication to Facebook’s headquarters in the United States. His questions went unanswered for ten days.
“Facebook has to decide how it wants to go down in Indian history,” Jose remarked sarcastically. “As a channel (that believes in) free flow of information and (a) supporter of democracy or as a gatekeeper of information and blocker of democracy. In the US, Facebook has assigned 20 people just to monitor content around (America’s) mid-term elections, and in a democracy five times bigger, will Facebook India care to assign a team of 100 people in the coming crucial months of (the) Indian elections? Companies should not have two different standards for two different democracies.”

Within days of the Caravan article not being boosted by Facebook, there were complaints from other journalists that they were being “locked out” of their Facebook accounts for inexplicable reasons. The common factor among all these journalists was that they were writing against the ruling party and the Modi government. They included Rifat Jawaid of Janata Ka Reporter, Prema Negi and Ajay Prakash of Janjwar and several journalists with Caravan Daily (as distinct from Caravan) and Bolta Hindustan.

Jawaid, a former journalist with the British Broadcasting Corporation, was shut out on 27 September. He told the Kolkata-based Telegraph that the Facebook page of Janata Ka Reporter had been blocked in 2017 after the website broke news about the controversy relating to the Rafale fighter aircraft deal. The page was restored after he complained on the social media. On 27 September, “…minutes after I posted something on the Ayodhya verdict (by the Supreme Court), my account was disabled,” Jawaid told Pheroze L Vincent of the Telegraph, adding: “It was restored in a day after I wrote to the nodal officer.”

Portals like Caravan Daily and Janjwar that get most of their readers on Facebook were also impacted. On October 1, five reports published in Caravan Daily, including one on activist Gautam Navlakha being released on orders of the Delhi High Court was marked as “spam” by Facebook. “When we woke up on October 4, we found both our personal accounts blocked,” Negi and Prakash said, adding that they were asked for proof of their identification more than once to access their disabled accounts.

Five employees of Bolta Hindustan too found their Facebook accounts blocked. Vincent asked Facebook India’s communications head Amrit Ahuja to respond. Forty-eight hours were sought but no response came, the Telegraph journalist wrote in his article published on 8 October.

A source in NDTV India (speaking to one of the writers of this article on condition of anonymity) said he and his colleagues found it rather puzzling why the traction on Facebook that was received by Ravish Kumar’s popular television show, Prime Time, would inexplicably drop on particular nights when a programme that was especially critical of the government would be broadcast. One such programme on the rising prices of petroleum products had contrasted the government’s response with what Modi had said when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat. Said this source: “We were surprised when the numbers of views and shares on our Facebook page, after going up in an expected manner, suddenly stagnated. We are not sure if this was done deliberately but it was certainly out of the ordinary. We had an internal debate as to whether we should lodge a formal complaint with Facebook. We eventually decided against it because we were not sure we would be able to establish any hanky-panky.”

Facebook likes to claim that it is a politically agnostic website, but it talks little about its association with particular political parties. In an emailed statement to us on its work with political parties in India, the organisation’s spokesperson stated: “Facebook’s policy team is focused on helping a variety of people – educators, our community, NGOs (non-government organisations) and governments – understand our policies, programmes and products to help create positive and meaningful experiences for the people who use our services. We are globally invested in critical areas of internet governance and policy development– safety, small business growth, Internet access, and giving people a voice. This team works with all political parties, and we work with all of them who reach out to us for training.”

Between 2012 and 2018, supporters of the BJP have spread innumerable pieces of highly-problematic content on Facebook-owned platforms to promote Modi as a “saviour” or “messiah” of India’s Hindus and to suppress any criticism of him. Such content has created communal tension between Hindus and Muslims and led to incidents of mob lynching in different parts of India. Over the twelve-month period till October 2018, at least 30 individuals have been lynched by mobs – quite a few of these incidents took place after messages were spread on WhatsApp accusing them of killing cows, stealing cattle, kidnapping children or for having a relationship with a person subscribing to a different religious faith. An analysis of government data by the IndiaSpend website suggested a 28 per cent rise in incidents of communal violence in the country between 2014 and 2017. More than half these incidents took place in states where the BJP is in power, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand.

Much of this problem is related to the way the laws of the land are administered, or not. But can this be completely delinked from the facilities that social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp provide in the ease of disseminating of information, including disinformation or fake news? These are some of the questions we seek to address in this series of articles.

* * *
In recent months, Facebook’s chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has been asked by representatives of five government committees, from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, to personally appear and depose before an “international grand committee” on disinformation and fake news. In a number of countries of Europe, the US, the UK and Singapore, Facebook’s representatives have been subject to intense scrutiny and sharp criticism by lawmakers. They have been directed to become more responsible, accountable and act stringently against those misusing or abusing their platforms.

The government of India has time and again criticised Facebook for spreading disinformation. However, the government’s representatives have, by and large, demanded that Facebook fix the problems on its own and largely through “technological solutions.”

Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad (who also holds the Law portfolio in the Council of Ministers) first demanded that Facebook check the spread of fake news in September 2016. Since then he has repeated this demand many times over.

He said: “There is a need for bringing in traceability and accountability when a provocative/inflammatory message is detected and a request is made by law enforcement agencies. When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability. If they remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action.”

That month, for the first time, the Indian government demanded “traceability” of senders of messages from WhatsApp. Two notices were sent by the IT Ministry to the organisation in quick succession. Between May and July 2016, there had been at least three gruesome killings after fake messages were circulated on WhatsApp. A 26-year-old labourer from Rajasthan who was working in Bengaluru, the country’s “IT capital,” was lynched apparently after a fake video had been doing the rounds claiming that persons from outside Karnataka were “stealing” children. In Maharashtra’s Dhule district, five persons were lynched after fake videos were shared on WhatsApp groups claiming that a gang was “harvesting organs” of dead children – one video from 2013 depicted children who had died after a nerve-gas attack in Syria. Then, a 32-year-old Muslim software engineer was brutally lynched by a mob in Bidar, Karnataka, after fake videos about children being kidnapped had been distributed.

In June 2017, 55-year-old meat trader Alimuddin Ansari was lynched by a mob of vigilantes for allegedly transporting beef illegally in Ramgarh, Jharkhand. His helpless wife and son learnt about his killing almost in real time on WhatsApp. A year later, Harvard-educated Union Civil Aviation Minister Jayant Sinha garlanded some of those who had been accused of being part of the lynch mob and who were out of prison on bail at his home in Hazaribagh – he is member of the Lok Sabha from the same constituency – for which he later expressed regret.
More recently, in July 2018, he said that while the government of India does not want to read everyone’s messages on WhatsApp it was not rocket science for Facebook to use technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning to curb the mass circulation of false information. Prasad added that while social media platforms like WhatsApp can be commercially successful, it must at the same time be accountable, responsible and vigilant. He said the measures taken by WhatsApp on tackling circulation of fake news did not meet the government’s expectations on “traceability.”

A spokesperson of WhatsApp promptly responded and said the platform “cares deeply about people’s safety,” that it was working with Indian researchers to address the problem of proliferation of fake news and would run public safety campaigns. Soon thereafter, WhatsApp placed a forwarded tag to indicate that a message had been forwarded and restricted the number of individual users or groups to which a message could be forwarded at one go to five.

After WhatsApp’s global head Daniels met Prasad on 30 October – his second visit to India in as many months – a spokesperson of the organization stated: “We appreciate the opportunity to meet with government leaders, including Minister Prasad who confirmed his support for encryption and the privacy of our users. WhatsApp is deeply committed to serving the people of India and working closely with civil society and government leaders to help address abuse on our platform.”

An aside: Daniels is reportedly very upset with the government of India but for reasons that have nothing to do with fake news and hate speech on WhatsApp. A person who met him said on condition of anonymity: “He was livid that WhatsApp had not been granted permission to start its payments gateway although he claimed that his organisation had fulfilled all the conditions that PayTM and Google Pay had.”

In this context, he told the Economic Times that it was “critical that Indian leaders ensure a level playing-field.”

On issues of encryption and traceability, Daniels was categorical that WhatsApp should remain the way it was built as “a place for private conversations” – and that it could not provide information about the originator of content unless its systems were redesigned and its privacy standards revised to enable it to “indiscriminately track user data.” Daniels added that while “relying on law enforcement is not enough,” there was need for “broad education to explain how to stay safe” which, in turn, was the job of every stakeholder, technology companies, civil society and the government.

An independent observer like Mishi Chaudhary, legal director of the Software Freedom Law Centre and a digital rights activist who divides her time between New Delhi and New York, is of the view that Facebook can do much more to ensure that users are not made part of groups without their prior consent. Says she: “Like all technology companies, Facebook believes that every problem can be solved by more technology but things are not always that simple.”

Chaudhary says messages not only impact the conscious mind but the unconscious as well, especially in view of the highly-addictive nature of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “You keep spamming a falsehood and after a while, people start believing the untruth – it’s a classic ‘Goebellsian’ technique,” she said in a reference to Paul Joseph Goebells, a close associate of Adolf Hitler and propaganda minister in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.

Facebook’s critics say it only pays lip-service to tacking the spread of fake information. Its entire business model is predicated on posts becoming viral. The more a user interacts with the platform and gets hooked on to it, the better for Facebook. “The company is treating fake news as a public relations problem in India,” says a fact-checker who works with Facebook and who spoke off-the-record, adding: “There are many ways to deal with disinformation but that is not a priority for the bosses at Facebook. For them, it is at best a tick-box exercise response.”

It has been well documented by fact-checking websites like AltNews and Boomlive that supporters of Modi and the BJP have been serial offenders as far as propagating disinformation is concerned. One such right-wing website is Postcard News that has been co-founded by Mahesh Hegde. He was arrested by the Bengaluru police on 30 March for alleging that a Jain monk had been assaulted by a Muslim man whereas the monk had suffered minor injuries in an accident. Union Minister Anantkumar Hegde (no relation to Mahesh Hegde) called for his release and described his arrest as “politically motivated.” The website of Postcard News has in the past been accused of spreading disinformation about, among others, journalist Barkha Dutt and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. It is replete with pro-BJP propaganda.

Whereas Mahesh Hedge’s arrest was a rare instance of police action against a peddler of problematic information, what has caused considerable consternation is how large numbers of users of social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp who have been accused of spreading disinformation continue to be “followed” by Prime Minister and other ministers in the Union government.

When questioned by one of the writers of this report as to why Modi was not “unfollowing” or “unfriending” regular disseminators of disinformation at a conference in Jaipur on 11 October, Suresh Kochattil, adviser, Information Technology Cell of the BJP in Telangana, said it was not realistic to expect a person like the Prime Minister of India, who has millions of followers on the social media, to keep track about who is spreading fake news and who should not be followed or befriended. At the same conference, he had concluded his presentation on “political wars on social media” by remarking that “things are going to get worse” before the forthcoming general elections “before they get better.”

A Facebook page titled Jay Modiraj (or “hail Modi’s rule”) with 1.4 million followers and which has been running an advertising campaign to garner more “likes,” has been very active circulating manipulated images of the Prime Minister, trashing his political opponents and encouraging Islamophobia. One set of two pictures depicted Modi with yellow and red marks on his forehead next to Congress President Rahul Gandhi wearing a Muslim skullcap. The captions in Hindi read: “One fights for truth, the other advocates terrorism.”

The same website also circulated reports from a disinformation website called “BBCNewsHub” that stated that the Congress was the world’s fourth most corrupt party and that Sonia Gandhi was the world’s fourth richest woman. This Facebook page also posted manipulated pictures of Modi with world leaders, false quotes of Indian Army chief Bipin Rawat and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor calling Modi a scorpion and incorrect information about World Bank loans to India. On the Facebook page of Jay Modiraj, there is a picture from Thailand that was sought to be passed off as a military drill being conducted in India. It also circulated a manipulated image of Modi standing next to former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s body.

The fact-checking website Alt News investigated the individuals associated with the page – Sachin Patel, Rajesh Soni, Bhavin Patel Manoj Gilani and Neha Patel – and found that most of them had “display pictures” or DPs of themselves with Prime Minister Modi and some had attended a meeting organised for the Prime Minister tointeract with his party’s social media volunteers. One among the persons named (Bhavin Patel) described himself on Facebook as a member of the IT Cell of the BJP and the RSS.

The fact is that some trolls who claim to be supporters of the ruling party have become akin to Dr Frankenstein’s Monster and have ended up embarrassing the Modi government. In July, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was viciously trolled and abused on social media platforms in connection with the issuance of passports to an inter-faith couple in Lucknow. The filthy language used against her elicited an anguished response from her husband Swaraj Kaushal.

WhatsApp was reportedly “misused” for a different kind of “lynching” of a financial nature. The share prices of a publicly-listed company, Infibeam, collapsed by as much as 71 per cent on a single day (28 September 2018) following a WhatsApp message that had raised concerns about the e-commerce company’s allegedly dodgy accounting practices. The incident made headlines in the financial media.

Over the last five months, from June 2018 onwards, we spoke to nearly fifty persons, including current and former employees of Facebook India, before writing this series of articles. Many of them did not want to be quoted fearing repercussions. It became evident to us that key individuals involved with the organisation share an uncomfortably close relationship with the BJP and at least one of them was associated with Modi’s pre-election campaign in 2013 and 2014 and was associated with a website that spread pro-BJP news on Facebook. We also looked into what appeared to be an instance of “conflict of interest” involving a senior functionary of Facebook India. There’s much more to come in the following articles.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

Election Watch Chhattisgarh: This is how BJP is gaming the vote counts

November 22, 2018

If you are a voter in Chhattisgarh, the following games will be played by the ruling party on the day the votes are counted. If Congress, the election commission and the vote counters are aggressive and alert, they still have time to liberate the state from BJP.

Representation Image

Every BJP worker in Chhattisgarh knows that situations are dire for the party during this election. The officers who trust the management have planned something to win on the day votes will be counted. If you are a voter in Chhattisgarh, the following things will happen on that day. If Congress, the election commission and the vote counters are aggressive and alert, they still have time to liberate the state from BJP.

With the help of administrative officials, BJP will play its games in those seats in constituencies where there is a match between three different factions.
BJP also has eyes on those seats where Congress won in the last election with a less margin.
You must have noticed that many places had defunct and damaged EVM machines on the day of voting. The conspiracy was to damage the machines so that the people who came early morning to vote would not return to cast them. The party knows that the people are disappointed with the rule and how the party has conducted itself in the last five years. They would want to take revenge the first chance they get by voting as early as possible. It should be noted that most machines went defunct in the 8-11 am slot. Most damaged machines were found in the areas with a strong Congress hold. It was Congress who complained to the EC that EVMs were not functioning. Did BJP complain about anything? Remember that all the damaged machines were from Gujarat. The same region from where PM Modi shouts about Digital India.
On the day of voting, BJP tactfully and cleverly manipulated the machines by using time management.
In the early phases of vote counting, Congress will be ahead and then BJP will start soaring.
BJP will win in the seats which were being contested by three or four factions so that nobody suspects anything.
If there is a strong competition between parties and if Congress is in a position to win from a small margin, the returning officer can play BJP’s agent and announce the result in their favour. Once he gives the results, that’s the end of it. Then the case will keep dragging just like Mohammad Akbar’s case. Ramesh Bais lost the Lok Sabha election in the same way because of the returning officer of Raipur. After fighting the case in the court for many years, the order came in their favour.
The party and the agent’s objection during the counting process is of particular importance. If the agent or the party can not object on time, the game changes.
The agent who sits on the counting table is of special importance. The people of the ruling party make special purchases here.
If the receipt from the VV PAT and the number of votes cast in the machine are different, understand that the game has already been played. How many people cast their ballot in which booth, every agent has this knowledge. VV PAT receipts should be counted without mistake. Along with the information that which party received more slips and which ones saw a decline.
Be alert that the results for the seats which are being gamed by BJP will be delayed. Congress will have to show strength and resistance when the votes are counted.

(Note: The above article was shared by a senior journalist from Chhattisgarh. Due to critical reportage on the oppressive policies of the government, he was transferred to another state before the election.)

Eastern India needs to be represented in ‘Dilli Chalo’

November 22, 2018

P. Sainath urges citizens and farmers from eastern states like Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Eastern UP to join in the ‘Dilli Chalo movement,’ to hold a meeting in Patna on Nov 23.

Dilli Chalo is gaining momentum in the capital as farmers from across the country gather to march to the parliament to demand their rights. On November 29, farmers are scheduled to gather at four locations on the outskirts of Delhi, from where they will march into the capital city.

The march will be undertaken to demand a 21-day special session of Parliament besides passing two bills related to loan waivers and raising the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for farm produce. The Kisan Mukti March is organised and supported by 200 organisations that comprise the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC).

At the recently concluded Farmer’s rights convention in Mumbai, Hannan Mollah, Secretary, AIKS said, “We have invited the leadership of all political parties except the BJP, to come and speak on the 30th of November. Let them give us an assurance that they will keep our issues in their manifestos and will lend their support to the proposed parliament session.”

P Sainath, the founder of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) & former rural affairs editor of The Hindu, hopes to join the eastern part of India in the debate surrounding farm crisis. A meeting has been organised on Nov 23 to support over 210 farmers’ organisations, farmers and farm workers. The meeting is scheduled from 10 am to 1 pm at Gandhi Sangrahalaya, Patna.

Urging all citizens to join the march, P Sainath wrote a concept note about the crisis in the eastern part of India. “What are the concrete ways in which we can extend our support and solidarity to the lakhs who will march into Delhi on Nov. 29? How do we best meet this upcoming historic moment? We have before us the example of the Nashik-Mumbai march of March 06-12 2018,” he asked.

“While the crisis of farmers and agricultural workers in Western, Southern and Northern India has received some attention in the media and central legislature, the plight of those in the Eastern region of the country (Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Eastern UP) has remained on the margins. Eastern India was the most prosperous region in the country till the 1950s, maintaining a lead over the other regions with the highest foodgrain yield of 644 kg/ha. It lost its leading position with the advent of the Green Revolution. This revolution seems to have undermined farming, farmers and farm workers in this region,” he wrote.

He added that, “As a nation, fellow citizens cannot afford to remain mute spectators to the plight of farming, farmers and farm labourers when indebtedness related consequences compels them to end their life even as indebted commercial czars get bailed out or get protected or run with impunity paving the way for return of the money lenders who create yet another vicious circle of poor being poor because they are poor.”

Full text:

While crisis of farmers and agricultural workers in Western, Southern and Northern India has received some attention in the media and central legislature, the plight of those in the Eastern region of the country (Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Eastern UP) has remained on the margins. Eastern India was the most prosperous region in the country till the 1950s, maintaining a lead over the other regions with highest food grain yield of 644 kg/ha. It lost its leading position with the advent of the Green Revolution. This revolution seems to have undermined farming, farmers and farm workers in this region.

The Eastern region comprising of about 28% of the country’s geographical area and is inhabited by about 35% of the country’s population. In Bihar, 91 percent of all land holdings fall in the category of marginal holdings with farm size less than 1 hectare. High cost of diesel-based irrigation (70 %) has made agriculture difficult.

The credit availability per hectare in Bihar, water logging and drainage problems remain predominant concerns. Bihar possessed about 3% of the total cultivated area of the country and 8% of the country’s population. The fact remains problems of farmers and agricultural workers of Bihar and eastern India cannot be seen in isolation from the problems of being faced by farmers and agricultural workers all over the country.

Over 210 farmer and agricultural workers organisations of the country have given a call for a march to Parliament on 29-30 November 2018. They are demanding a special session of 21- days to deliberate on remedial measures for safeguarding the interest of farm, farmers and agricultural workers. The Eastern region merits special attention in the 21-day special session of the Parliament.

The special session of parliament is required to focus solely on the agrarian crisis & related issues and the honouring of the recommendations made in the Reports of the National Commission for Farmers, which have been lying for over 12 years in Parliament without a day’s serious discussion. It is one of their major demands. Meanwhile, agrarian and rural distress has been deepening daily accompanied by massive loss of livelihoods. While successive governments have failed and, indeed, consciously undermined the agrarian sector for two decades now, the past few years have taken the damage to unprecedented levels. The devastation of demonetisation and the assault on the cattle economy are just two examples of the new dimensions of distress.

What are the concrete ways in which we can extend our support and solidarity to the lakhs who will march into Delhi on Nov. 29? How do we best meet this upcoming historic moment? We have before us the example of the Nashik-Mumbai march of March 06-12 2018.

This context creates a logical compulsion on those who belong to the professional and other groups of the middle and lower-middle classes to support call of the farmers and farm labourers readying for their massive protest.

1.      In a situation where over three lakh farmers have committed suicide in our country in the last 20 years, agrarian crisis is no more about food security, farmers and farm labourers alone. It has now become a crisis of the society and civilization. It is these very farmers who saved the country from ship-to-mouth existence to feed Indians without waiting for ships to arrive.

2.      Now that it has officially been admitted that between 1991 and 2011, the number of farmers/cultivators declined by 1.5 crore as per census, it is quite clear that the wages and salary of all including legislators have increased but freezing of farm incomes has been marginalizing farming communities. Despite this 94 per cent of the farmers’ have been kept out of the purview of income security.

3.      As a nation, fellow citizens cannot afford to remain mute spectators to the plight of farming, farmers and farm labourers when indebtedness related consequences compels them to end their life even as indebted commercial czars get bailed out or get protected or run with impunity paving the way for return of the money lenders who create yet another vicious circle of poor being poor because they are poor. Shouldn’t indebted farmers need to be treated in the same way as beneficial owners of indebted companies? Credit policy of the banking system has adopted double standards. It waives off the defaulting amount of credit at the earliest opportunity arguing that it leads to economic growth. It restructures the loans of the beneficial owners of corporate sector but penalizes the farmers. In such a scenario, waiving of farm loan too can lead to such growth. If waiving loans is a moral hazard than it is so for both the corporate and farm sector.

4.      Land and water co-exist but their commodification, corporatization and acquisition is undermining farming as source of livelihood. The conversion of agricultural land into non-agricultural land across the country is happening without cumulative impact assessment in a business as usual scenario. Ongoing corporatization of water and promotion of cash crops have turned rivers and ground water aquifers into monetizing machines. Such an approach has prevented rivers and other water sources to perform their geological and ecological functions. One of the core natural functions of rivers is land building. Amidst shrinking of land under agriculture, anonymous donors of political parties, real estate operators and development fundamentalists have stopped the river from performing their natural work.

5.      Collapse of agriculture has created problems of unemployment, increased informalisation of workers, indebtedness and devastation of cattle economy has made agricultural mode of livelihood precarious. Amidst indefensible inequality and technological unemployment driven mass poverty, the well-being of fellow citizens cannot be divorced from the well-being of farmers and farm labourers.

6.      Given the fact that an unjust structural arrangement has ensured that market remains consistently against farmers, it has emerged that fall in the prices in the open market of farm produce despite there being a bountiful harvest is a bigger calamity than continuing drought, heavy rainfall or any other natural disaster. So much so that farming is no more about farming crops but it about cultivating losses. There are situations where milk becomes cheaper than the water.

7.      Rich countries are providing 190-billion-dollar product specific subsidy but are coercing India through anonymous donations to ruling political parties to cut the subsidy although investing in agriculture is at least five times more productive than infrastructure. In a demonstration of flawed priorities, previous government built nearly 2.5 lakh panchayat houses unmindful of the compelling need for rural godowns.

8.      Farmers and farm workers seem to have also been adversely affected by futures contracts unleashed by financial speculators and investors. Such contracts in agricultural commodity market entails formal obligation to sell or buy a given amount of commodity at a specified time and price. Although only a miniscule of such contracts actually result in the delivery of physical commodity as they are traded before their expiration date, it is clear that they are structurally inimical to the interest of farm, farmers and farm workers. In such arrangements neither the primary producer nor the consumers benefit from agricultural commodity future trading.

9.      One cannot remain callous towards the unprecedented suffering of farmers and farm workers due to law and policy driven dispossession, deprivation, misery and distress migration. Although agriculture is the biggest employer in the country and has the potential to rejuvenate country’s economy, existing policies and laws have given it least priority in comparison to corporate sector.

10. Taking lessons from the fellow citizens and residents of Mumbai who participated and extended support to the farmers and farm workers during the weeklong Padyatra of 40, 000 farmers and farm workers from Nashik to Mumbai in March 2018, there is a compelling reason for fellow citizens and residents of Bihar to participate in the long march of our farmers from all over the country during 29- 30 November 2018 to Parliament in Delhi demanding 21 day special session of parliament to deliberate and legislate on life-threatening concerns of the nation.

In order to dwell on possible actions to respond to these issues, you are cordially invited to come to a meeting on “Why are farmers & farm workers demanding 21-day special session of Parliament” co-organised by Nation for Farmers which is a collective formed by non-farmers to support over 210 farmers’ organisations, farmers and farm workers. It aims to amplify the voice of farmers & farm workers. Nation for Farmers is organizing this meeting in collaboration with its friends in Bihar’s non-farmer organizations like Tatpar Foundation, Sanmat, Indian Society for Cultural Co-operation & Friendship (ISCUF), National Alliance for People’s Movement (NAPM), Kedar Das Institute for Labour and Social Studies (KDILSS), Bihar Mahila Samaj & Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA). The meeting is scheduled from 10 am to 1 pm on November 23, 2018, at Gandhi Sangrahalaya, Patna.

P Sainath, founder of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) & former rural affairs editor of The Hindu will address the meeting.

Kindly join us to deliberate on how organisations representing workers, public & private sector employees, doctors, lawyers, journalists, artists, scientists, engineers, teachers, students, women, youth, and many, many others can form an alliance to help build support for the proposed Kisan Mukti March during November 29-30, 2018.

Organisers:

Nation for Farmers | Tatpar Foundation | Indian Society for Cultural Co-operation & Friendship (ISCUF) | Sanmat | Chintaharan Social Development Trust (CSDT) | National Alliance for People’s Movement (NAPM) | Kedar Das Institute for Labour and Social Studies (KDILSS) | Bihar MahilaSamaj | Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)

Longer queues ahead: Half of country’s ATM’s may shut down by March 2019

November 22, 2018

The industry body warned that this may result in long queues and chaos similar to what the country witnessed when ATMs were not dispensing cash in the aftermath of demonetization. Closure of the ATMs will impact thousands of jobs and also the financial inclusion efforts of the government.

Mumbai: Indians will have lesser cash to use come March 2019 and it could spell a doom equivalent to demonetization.

As many as 1.13 lakh automated teller machines (ATMs) across the country might shut down by March 2019 owing to the regulatory changes that make ATM operations unviable because of the huge costs involved, the Confederation of ATM Industry (CATMI) said.

The regulatory changes include those on hardware and software upgrades, coupled with mandates on cash management standards and the cassette-swap method of loading cash. “These numbers include approximately one lakh off-site ATMs and a little over 15,000 white-label ATMs, the apex body of the domestic ATM industry said in a statement.

As per the latest RBI figures, there are about 2.21 lakh installed ATMs in the country. Other estimates suggest there are 2.38 lakh ATMs in the country.

ATMs in non-urban areas will be the worst-affected.

Closure of the ATMs will impact thousands of jobs and also the financial inclusion efforts of the government, the industry body said in a statement.

“A large number of ATMs in non-urban locations may be shut down due to unviability of operations. If this happens, the financial inclusion programme would be severely impacted as millions of beneficiaries under the government’s Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) scheme who withdraw subsidies in form of cash through ATMs may find their neighbourhood ATM shut,” said CATMi in a statement.

The industry body warned that this may result in long queues and chaos similar to what the country witnessed when ATMs were not dispensing cash in the aftermath of demonetization.

CATMi said that its members, which include ATM managed service providers (MSPs), brown-label ATM deployers (BLAs) and white-label ATM operators (WLAOs), are already reeling under the financial impact caused by huge losses during and post-demonetisation as cash supply was impacted and remained inconsistent for months. The WLAOs have accumulated losses and the compliance costs can result in over 15,000 machines run by them shutting down, the industry body added.

“The situation has further deteriorated now due to the additional compliance requirements that call for a huge cost outlay. The service providers do not have the financial means to meet such massive costs and may be forced to shut down these ATMs, unless banks step in to bear the load of the additional cost of compliances,” said the industry body.

It added that revenues from providing ATMs as a service are not growing at all due to very low ATM interchange and ever-increasing costs.

“In April, the RBI had mandated a minimum net worth of ₹100 crore for service providers and their sub-contractors handling cash management logistics on behalf of banks. It also directed cash vans transporting money to have CCTVs, GPS connectivity, tubeless tyres, hooters and wireless communication systems. Approximately 100,000 off-site ATMs, and over 15,000 non-bank ATMs could shut down,” Livemint reported.

According to CATMI, an estimated outlay of about ₹3,500 crore is needed to comply with the new cash logistics and cassette swap method. “These requirements were never anticipated by the industry participants at the time of signing contracts with the banks. Many of these agreements were inked four to five years ago,” the statement said.

“The ATM industry in India has reached a “tipping point”, and unless ATM deployers are compensated by banks for making these investments, there is likely to be a scenario where contracts are surrendered, leading to the large-scale closure of ATMs, the statement said,” the report added.

Gender equality in Europe ‘advancing at snail’s pace’

November 22, 2018

Women’s rights debates take centre stage at this year’s World Forum for Democracy at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

World Forum for Democracy delegates. Image: Nandini Archer.

Gender equality in Europe is “advancing at a snail’s pace”, Thérèse Murphy of the European Institute for Gender Equality told delegates at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France.

Murphy and other speakers reviewed different measures of gender equality in a fact-based introduction to the Council of Europe’s annual event, which is this year focused on the theme: “Gender equality: whose battle?”

Over the last decade, there has been very little progress made on gender equality in Europe overall, she said, warning: “There can be no democracy without mainstreaming gender into every aspect of public life and public discourse”.

“The decisions that are being made about our future and our environment are not being made in a gender equal way”, Murphy added, of the stark underrepresentation of women in environment ministries amid climate change concerns.

Up to 2,000 people from more than 60 countries are expected to attend the three-day forum, which began on Monday and is dedicated to the Malta journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was murdered last year.

More than 100 speakers are presenting their work and perspectives, including in plenaries on women’s public, political and economic participation and addressing sexism, discrimination and violence against women.

Other sessions will explore topics including faith and feminism, safe spaces in cyberspace, and masculinity and showcase initiatives to tackle gender inequalities and violence against women from around the world.

Spain’s Minister of Justice Dolores Delgado, Polish activist Marta Lempart, and Canadian educator and sexual violence support worker Farrah Khan were among those who spoke during the events on Monday.

World Forum for Democracy speakers. Image: Nandini Archer.

Links between democracy and gender equality, political polarisation and feminism, the impact of sexism on the planet, and the role of the #MeToo movement in forcing conversations on sexual harassment were among the topics discussed.

Annika Silva-Leander at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance surveyed figures on women’s political participation in different regions and cited several ‘concerning’ trends.

For the first time in more than 40 years, she said, more countries are declining rather than advancing in their democratic performance, while civic space is diminishing.

“We are deeply concerned about this because we know it has severe consequences for gender equality”, she said, though increased women’s participation is not enough to achieve more democratic societies.

Laura Silver, of the Pew Research Center based in Washington DC, spoke about the state of public opinion towards gender equality in countries around the world.

While women are more likely than men to say that gender equality is “very important”, she said, in some places there seems to be an even more important “partisan gap” in people’s responses to such questions.

In the United States, Democratic party supporters are more than twice as likely to identify as feminists than Republicans, according to the center’s research.

From the audience, one delegate said that it was urgent to address the backlash in several countries against gender studies and feminism within education systems.

Another participant suggested that, amid concern over climate change, if women could “exercise more power that could prevent the destruction of humanity”.

On Twitter, another commented: “Reminder: the 50/50 conversation about gender equality erases non-binary folks and dismisses issues faced by trans communities”.

The Council of Europe is the region’s largest institution focused on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The World Forum for Democracy was first held in 2012.

Previous editions of the event have focused on youth and politics, connecting citizens and institutions in the digital age, and the rise of populism.

* 50.50 is reporting on this week’s events in Strasbourg as part of openDemocracy’s partnership with the 2018 World Forum for Democracy.

Nandini Archer is 50.50’s editorial and social media assistant. She is an active member of the feminist direct action group Sisters Uncut. She also works with the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion and Overseas Development Institute in London. Follow her on Twitter @nandi_naira.

Sophie Hemery is a writer and freelance journalist. She is a feminist investigative journalism fellow with openDemocracy’s 50.50. Follow her @Sophie Hemery

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/

Muslim man killed by BSF in 2009, widow still waiting for justice

November 22, 2018

The NHRC had ordered Rs. 5 lakh as compensation to the widow but the Government of India and West Bengal denied it. The State government did not allow any social welfare scheme to reach the family. Now, NHRC has closed the case. Where is the justice?

Kolkata: In 2009, 35-year-old Abdus Samad had just returned to Biswanathpur village in Murshidabad district. He had come home to help his wife Rimi Bewa as she had just delivered twin sons. He was sleeping when the Border Security Force that mans the India-Bangladesh border broke into their hut, beat Samad brutally and killed him on suspicion of smuggling heroin.

Nine years and enough evidence later, his widow has not received any compensation and is living in decrepit conditions trying to provide for their six children. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recently closed the case without serving any form of justice.

Kirity Roy, Secretary of Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM) and National Convenor of Programme Against Custodial Torture & Impunity (PACTI) wrote to the Chairman of NHRC noting that the closure of the case was a travesty of justice.

“In connection with the NHRC case no. 157/25/13/09-10-AD/UC, I received your communication through e-mail dated 22.10.2018, from where it is revealed that your good office has directed the wife of the deceased can approach the appropriate forum for implementation of Commission’s recommendation for payment of monetary compensation to her and concerned authorities to receive various government welfare schemes under the rule and thereby closed the case,” he wrote.

“It is to be mentioned that previously the fact that deceased Abdus Samad died as a result of torture at the hands of BSF personnel was proved and therefore the Commission recommended to the Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India to pay a sum of Rs. 5 lakhs as monetary compensation to the next of kin of the deceased,” he added.

Despite the direction, no payment of monetary compensation has been done till date. Bewa sent a written application to the District Magistrate of Murshidabad urging to pay her compensation on 05.09.2018 but nothing came of it either.

“By closing this particular case without final facilitation of financial compensation, the irresponsive attitude of the Commission is again revealed. An authority which supports the victim, speaks for the oppressed people, provides justice against violation of their rights, now withdraw its helping hands and make destitute the kin of the deceased. I think to close cases the NHRC wants to show a huge number of cases were disposed during the 25 years after constituting the Commission,” Roy wrote.

“Can the Commission take a humanitarian step against the conventional situation? Our organization is devoted to taking an adjuration, “not to withhold the victim’s hand in the rugged road to justice.” So far the predominant thrust of a poor family has been growing, expenditure for her family is unbearable, Punishment of the killer has not been done; even compensation money is not given to the widow,” he said.

“Therefore, it is my earnest request to your good authority not to close the matter and take adequate measures especially when Government of India and Government of West Bengal turned off their hands to save one widow with six kids,” he wrote.

A research report by Human Rights Watch titled ‘Trigger Happy: Excessive Use of Force by Indian Troops at the Bangladesh Border’ wrote about his murder in detail. The report was in partnership with Odhikaar and Masum.

The extracted story of Abdus Samad’s brutal murder:

Saying that they suspected 35-year-old Abdus Samad of smuggling, several BSF personnel, led by Commander P. Vodra, forcibly entered his mud hut in the village of Biswanathpur in Murshidabad district on May 5, 2009. Abdus Samad did not live in the village but worked as a day-labourer in Kolkata. However, he had come home after his wife delivered twin sons, to help take care of the family. Rimi Bewa, his wife, said that the BSF soldiers were harsh and abusive:

We were asleep when the BSF came at around 3 a.m. We have a broken door. We heard footsteps. They entered through the door. One of them kicked me and asked, ‘Where is your husband?’ They kicked me and used verbal abuses…. My husband woke up and immediately the BSF personnel started to beat him in front of our children with rifle butts, boots, and sticks. Then they tied his hands on his back and dragged him outside the house, still beating him… I was scared and ran after them pleading that they stop beating my husband, but they ignored me. Hearing me screaming, some neighbours came out of their house. They also asked those BSF personnel to stop. The men threatened them too with their guns. We saw him being dragged off. He was shouting. He was bleeding.

Abdus Samad’s body was later found in the field and was taken to the BSF camp. Next morning, Rimi, accompanied by her husband’s brother Abdul Hakim and a village council leader, went to the police to complain about the assault, abduction, and killing of Abdus Samad. The police initially refused to register a complaint against the BSF and only complied when village leaders intervened. Later, the police informed the family that the BSF had registered a complaint with the police, claiming that he was arrested for trafficking heroin, and had died in custody because he had suffered a heart attack.

The BSF apparently tried to persuade the local hospital authorities to support their claim of a heart attack. However, Dr. Goutam Ghosh, superintendent of the hospital told MASUM:

I had prepared myself to conduct the post-mortem but after observing few abnormalities, injuries on the body, I decided not to proceed with the post mortem.

He sent the body instead for autopsy by more senior doctors at the Behrampore New General Hospital. Mr. P. Vodra, the BSF Commander, who according to eyewitnesses was present when Abdus Samad was detained, later told MASUM:

Abdus Samad was arrested with heroin near the Indo-Bangladesh border by constables Prahlad Roy and Ran Riyauddin. He was transferred to the Ramnagar BSF Camp as their camp didn’t have adequate facilities in which to detain a person. However, Samad became ill in custody as was duly treated at the Ramnagar camp and referred to Bhagabangola Hospital. I don’t have any knowledge of how he died.

Rimi Bewa insists that the BSF is always abusive, and they had no reason to suspect her husband. “My husband did not even live in the village,” she said:

He worked as a migrant laborer… The BSF is like this. They come and always ask who does cattle smuggling. They abuse the women. People go to defecate in the fields. But in the evening, after 7 p.m. the BSF is patrolling and they stop us. They want shops to shut. They beat us up, and say, ‘we have the power to do so.’ This BSF abuse has ruined our peace of mind.

The interviews were conducted by MASUM and The Human Rights Watch in 2009 and 2010. The research report was published in December 2010.

Blamed For Their Parents’ Poverty, 80% Of Marginalised Indian Children Experience Corporal Punishment In School

November 22, 2018

Mumbai: A toxic combination of poverty, poorly-paid teachers with anti-migrant prejudice and a lack of training on nonviolent discipline in government schools means marginalised children are significantly more likely to experience corporal punishment, said a new study.
Corporal punishment is a form of violence against children and is illegal in India.

Yet 80% of marginalised children report being punished by teachers, while an average of 43% said they were regularly beaten, up to three times a week, according to a new report by Agrasar, an NGO. In some schools the number of regularly beaten students rose to 88%.
The abuse does not end along with the school day. The majority of these children also experienced beatings at home (74%), while a similar proportion of parents admitting to doling out beatings at home (71%).

These are the findings of a survey from a randomised sample of 521 children and 100 parents in Gurugram, an area which experienced a 29% increase in migrant arrivals between 2000 and 2011, largely from poorer states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh.

However, “given that the same mechanisms of economic deprivation and social exclusion are at work, the findings apply to disadvantaged children elsewhere in India”, the report said.

No positive outcomes of corporal punishment have been found, while it is established that physical and mental forms of abuse can have a detrimental effect on child health and wellbeing, including mental-health problems, behavioural issues and cognitive ability, according to the report.
The fear and stress associated with corporal punishment can create “school-phobia”, leading to increased dropouts, low-retention rates and poor academic scores, significantly impacting on education outcomes, the report said. Children who have experienced such abuse are also more likely to display criminal behaviour, commit violent crimes as adults and suffer from substance abuse.

In 1992, India became one of 128 countries to agree to the United Nations (UN) Convention of Rights of the Child 1989, which outlawed school corporal punishment and required the government under article 28(2) to ensure that “school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity”.

The Right to Education Act 2009 further enshrined child safety in schools, stating no child “shall be subjected to physical punishment or mental harassment”.

Yet, despite such legal protections, recent government studies have found the problem persists. Social structures enforcing the normalcy of corporal punishment remain pervasive in Indian society.

An estimated 65% of children are physically punished by teachers, according to a joint 2007 study by Childline and the Ministry of Women and Child Development. This figure rises to 99.9% of children experiencing corporal punishment at school when mental harassment is included, a 2009 study by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights found.

Beaten at school and at home: A daily occurrence
Teachers do not appear to discriminate on the basis of age when it comes to meting out corporal punishment. Both younger and older children alike experienced similarly severe forms of punishment and “almost on a daily basis”, the report found.

The only difference is that younger children are more likely to experience physical punishment, compared to older children who are more likely to suffer from verbal abuse.

“Physical punishments were given to us when we were young. Now we get mostly verbal punishments, for example we are being ridiculed for our mistakes in front of the class,” said one girl respondent in the 8th standard.

Marginalised children were found to experience corporal punishment more frequently, with 88% of those surveyed reporting they are regularly beaten at school, up to three times a week. This is “significantly higher than then average and does not even include verbal abuse”, the report said.

Many children reported verbal and physical abuse on a daily basis, with at least one child reporting he experienced physical punishment “two times a day minimum”.

As a result, many have become accustomed to such experiences as part of the school routine and fabric of their education experience–71% of children believed it’s okay to be beaten up “for a reason”, having been taught its for “their own good” and “necessary”.

The types of physical and mental punishment distributed by teachers vary in levels of pain, with slapping, ear-pulling, denial of bathroom use and forced periods of standing mentioned as “not so serious” punishment forms.

This can increase to more painful types, such as a teacher caning palms and calves, striking the knuckles with a duster or scales and beating backs and heads with their hands, all of which are the “most common forms of physical punishment”.

Many schools keep a dedicated stick to beat children, the report found.

Cases of brutal punishment, combined with “psychological torture”, were also narrated by the surveyed children.

Banging students’ heads against a wall was turned into “a game” by one teacher, with several children recounting that he would often pretend three or four times that he was going to bang the child’s head against the wall before actually doing it.

Mental abuse is even more frequently handed out, which for the children of migrant workers in Gurugram often consist of derogatory and racist slurs which many children do not even recognise “constitute a form of corporal punishment”.

Referencing their low socioeconomic status, these children are labelled as “Bihari” or “Bengali”–denigrating and catch-all terms for any non-locals, regardless of their actual state-of-origin.

These slurs are often followed up with insults such as “donkey”, “good for nothing”, “uneducated”, “illiterate” and comments that they had had “a bad upbringing”, which tend to affect older children the most.

Girl students are subjected to relatively more verbal harassment than boys, often framed in sexist language which instill “toxic gender stereotypes”. Teachers were found to often resort to comments about their looks, age and weight, “recommending” marriage instead of education and minimising their capabilities and skills compared to male peers.

Both male and female teachers were found to mete out corporal punishment in a “ritualised and uniform way”, with marginal differences in the severity and frequency of punishment they enforced.

While many teachers were found to slap or hit students, some punished students “with brutal and cruel violence that requires creativity and premeditation”.

Almost all parents (91%) approve of teachers using corporal punishment and use it at home themselves. However, this figure is likely to be higher, as parents tend to not consider “mild” forms of physical abuse and verbal harassment as a form of corporal punishment.

Trapped in abusive environments
“A complex mix of social and structural factors perpetuates corporal punishment in our classrooms,” the report found.

While wealthier, better-educated children are not immune to receiving, disadvantaged children are exposed to a number of influential risk factors which increase their likelihood of experiencing corporal punishment.

Low-income families, living in poor conditions and often with both illiterate parents working long hours in the informal sector, are unable to properly support their children’s education.

Absence during the day, followed by exhaustion in the evening, means parent’s “emotional resources” are largely consumed by their struggle for survival.

Children must manage their own homework and school activities themselves, often in a troubled environment “characterised by maltreatment and neglect” brought about by poverty and “existential” stress.

Even mothers who were “homemakers” in Gurugram were found to interact with their children “very little” over school matters. They assumed that the child would bring up any serious issues with her if there were any and relied on elder siblings plus the child’s “own motivation to pursue their studies and education”.

Failure to submit homework, poor test-performance and school absences are major reasons for receiving corporal punishment and which end up hurting children from low socioeconomic backgrounds the most.

Even if they desired, parents are often unable to move their child from the free local government school to another, lacking the financial means to entertain other options.

Migrant children often become the target of “disdain and contempt” by teachers who withhold empathy and support. Teachers punish children for their inability to articulate themselves as per the teacher’s “expectations”, as bad language (commonly used at home by both parents and children) and poor language skills enter the classroom.

Periods of absence as migrant children return to their native state for long stretches of time, or even accompany their parents to work, further antagonise teachers, the report said. Upon their return to school, children are unfairly punished for their parents’ decision to travel.
Such teacher attitudes are a result of sustained social stigma attached to the less-educated, migrant population, with discrimination against the “labour class” rubbing off onto their children.

Teachers feel it is not worthwhile to teach migrant children as “they will only be cleaning someone’s house later anyways”, the report found.

They believe the children are unable to perform well in school and think rationally, as teachers see poverty as “a genetic predisposition” which means the children are unworthy of education. They fail to understand that a lack of opportunity and access to resources is why they are struggling with formal education.

The social divide is also keeping parents and teachers from interacting and establishing a working relationship, further impeding the child’s education.

Poorly-paid, over-worked and under-resourced teachers operating in sub-par working conditions further adds to the problem, as teachers “vent out their anger and act aggressively towards students” and “rarely show awareness for professional conduct”.

Poor governance, such as a lack of Corporal Punishment Monitoring Cells–set up by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to ensure the ban on corporal punishment is enforced–means unethical teacher conduct is not always properly dealt with, the report said.
The danger is that a toxic combination of all the above-mentioned factors means children are arbitrarily subjected to forms of violence, with no repercussions for teachers already operating with minimal oversight.

Children were found to be punished for “normal childlike behaviours” like going to the bathroom, talking in class and during breaks, running around the school yard and fighting with other children.

The cost of corporal punishment
Around 53% of children surveyed never tell their parents if they have been punished at school, undermining a “trusted relationship” between parent and child. This also means many children are internalising potentially traumatic experiences, with severe consequences for their mental health and wellbeing, the report found.

Perceiving that learning and corporal punishment “go hand in hand”, children become desensitised to the violence they see everyday and even lose the ability to identify milder types of physical and mental harassment.

As violence goes unrecognised, resistance builds which in turn can lead to the severity of the violence increasing. Children who experience violence are also more likely to “become violent perpetrators themselves”.

There is a risk that through the prevalence of corporal punishment, schools are teaching children “on a large scale that violence is okay” and is contributing to levels of violence in Indian society at large, the report said.

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Pakistani feminist Urdu poet and writer Fahmida Riaz passes away

Election Watch Chhattisgarh: This is how BJP is gaming the vote counts

If you are a voter in Chhattisgarh, the following games will be played by the ruling party on the day the votes are counted. If Congress, the election commission and the vote counters are aggressive and alert, they still have time to liberate the state from BJP.

Eastern India needs to be represented in ‘Dilli Chalo’

P. Sainath urges citizens and farmers from eastern states like Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Eastern UP to join in the ‘Dilli Chalo movement,’ to hold a meeting in Patna on Nov 23.

Longer queues ahead: Half of country’s ATM’s may shut down by March 2019

The industry body warned that this may result in long queues and chaos similar to what the country witnessed when ATMs were not dispensing cash in the aftermath of demonetization. Closure of the ATMs will impact thousands of jobs and also the financial inclusion efforts of the government.

Gender equality in Europe ‘advancing at snail’s pace’

Women’s rights debates take centre stage at this year’s World Forum for Democracy at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

Muslim man killed by BSF in 2009, widow still waiting for justice

The NHRC had ordered Rs. 5 lakh as compensation to the widow but the Government of India and West Bengal denied it. The State government did not allow any social welfare scheme to reach the family. Now, NHRC has closed the case. Where is the justice?

The extracted story of Abdus Samad’s brutal murder:

Blamed For Their Parents’ Poverty, 80% Of Marginalised Indian Children Experience Corporal Punishment In School

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