Two Muslim cattle traders were lynched and hung by a tree in Jharkhand in 2016
A village mob chased the car of a group of cattle traders and lynched three of them near Jamshedpur in a hunt that stretched through Wednesday night and spilled over to Thursday afternoon, the Telegraph has reported.
Those killed were Sheikh Naim, 35, Sheikh Sajju, 25, and Sheikh Siraj, 26. The fate of a fourth, Sheikh Halim, 28, is remains unknown.
Claiming there was no communal angle to the incident, the police said the attack was likely the result of child kidnapping rumours that has been spreading through the region in Jharkhand.
Police said the three deceased along with Shaikh Halim were travelling in a car on Thursday night to purchase cattle which they apparently planned to sell at the Saturday cattle market in the area.
Police sources said a mob of over 100 tried to stop the car after it crossed Hessel village a little after midnight, but it sped way. The crowd chased the car and forced it to a halt in Daru village. The mob beat Naim mercilessly and torched the car while the other three escaped. Around 6.30am, the crowd reached the nearby village of Shobhapur, which has a large Muslim population, in search of the three.
Stopped by Rajnagar OC Tuleswar Khushwaha, who was with an assistant sub-inspector and a constable, the mob assaulted the three policemen and torched their jeep. Another police team took Naim from Daru to the Seraikela subdivisional hospital, where he died.
By 1pm, the mob had traced Sajju and Siraj, who had been given shelter by Sunil Mahto of Shosomauli village, 2km from Shobhapur, and lynched the duo.
"There is no communal aspect," deputy inspector-general of police Prabhat Kumar told the Telegraph.
How can visualising hate crimes in south Asia enhance understanding and serve as a basis for organising policy and public action?
Image credit: Information Guru
Like many places in the world, South Asia has seen a rise in violence and injustice against people who are minorities in terms of religion, ethnicity and gender, as well as political activists, academics and journalists. Provoked by state and non-state actors, these instances erode the space of dissent, free thought and human rights, pointing to a wider culture of rising intolerance and hate.Yet these incidents appear and disappear daily in our media-saturated imaginations.
Watching them play out in each national context, often in quick succession, leaves little time to absorb and make sense of them. Looking beyond the immediacy of mainstream and social media, how can we think about the relationships between incidents of hate and intolerance, understand overarching patterns and structures, or start to question their terrifying frequency? Spurred by an ambition to understand this landscape of intolerance, we turned to mapping it.
Tracking intolerance
About a year ago we launched a site called "Intolerance Tracker", in collaboration with Timescape, a map-based storytelling platform, to document cases of violence and hate across South Asia — in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Aggregating ongoing and recent incidents across national borders seemed to be one way of trying to draw connections between different types of hate crimes, local conditions, types of perpetrators and so on.
We categorised incidents according to victims, perpetrators, and the cleavages that motivate or ground these cases, such as gender, religion, caste, ethnicity, ideology, and sexual orientation. At the time of writing, the tracker has aggregated close to 400 incidents.
Maps can serve as powerful devices for constructing, unpacking or understanding different narratives. A system of stories presented on a map allows us to observe and understand the spatial, temporal, and social relationships that exist within that place.
Internet-based, real-time mapping provides a powerful tool to build awareness and engagement during social or political conflicts, as well as natural disasters and epidemics. Public contributions – from earthquakes or flood zones, and even refugee camps or conflict zones – can spur fuller comprehension of how dynamic situations evolve and inform responses to crises.
Local initiatives
In our own project we took inspiration from a number of other initiatives. Some are focused on a particular cause or phenomenon, such as "I Paid a Bribe", where members of the public can report cases of retail corruption in India, providing an insight into the relationship between the individual and the state, and the compulsions that encourage corrupt practices.
Similarly, “FemMap", another crowd mapping platform, highlights projects related to women and gender equality all around the world. In this approach, a camaraderie and community is built among people working across different social and regional contexts driven by similar motivations and ambitions.
The Environmental Justice Atlas uses mapping to document social conflict around environmental issues, foregrounding the struggles of local communities. The EJAtlas acts as a shared platform and database allowing environmental justice activists and other groups working on ecological and social issues to build paths towards corporate and state accountability.
In the United States, where violent hate crimes and incidents of intolerance have seen an alarming rise, the South Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map provides a powerful visual understanding of the geographies of fascist, racist, ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT groups, as a basis for organizing policy and public action.
Seeing together
Visual aggregation through maps allows stories that might be spatially and temporally distant to be seen together. It then becomes possible to identify underlying structures, trends and patterns that illustrate similarities and contrasts. South Asia’s shared history means that despite national borders, incidents between countries often share similar characteristics, and even forms of violence can find chilling echoes across borders (‘honour’ killings in India and Pakistan are one such example).
The existing data on the map already reveals some interesting and alarming trends. In more than a third of the cases, government actors (including the police) are themselves perpetrators of hate and intolerance and this is seen across all the countries where incidents are mapped.
Government actors (including the police) are themselves perpetrators of hate and intolerance.
People targeted on the basis of activism and ideology, a category that covers protesters, journalists, and those expressing dissent, also account for more than a third of the incidents mapped. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while the basis for government intolerance spans many categories (such as ideology, gender, ethnicity or religion), two-thirds of these are against actors who dissent or protest, often against the state itself. The alarming trend of the state’s role in stifling dissent points to the structural rather than incidental nature of this culture of intolerance.
Another category that is widely represented, accounting for more than one-fourth of all incidents reported on the map is that of religious intolerance, spread evenly across the subcontinent. As a visual medium, the ‘intolerance tracker’ allows us to make connections and identify dissonance between different categories in more engaging ways. This makes the platform a potential tool for research, to educate and generate awareness about intolerance. Finally, as it is supported by verifiable data which is well organised, it can also be a useful tool for advocacy, especially as its database grows.
Uneven geographies
Yet, maps and data visualizations come with their own baggage. Rather than conveying neutral truths or blunt facts about space and society, they are projections containing biases, aspirations and assumptions. As media scholars argue, the sources and means of gathering data, as well as the visual or algorithmic conventions used to visualize and present information, need to be critically approached.
In our case, being limited (for the time being) to reports from verifiable media outlets, we are keenly aware that the map represents not just a landscape of intolerance, but also a media landscape. The intolerance map is skewed towards a view that reinforces the mainstream attention towards certain issues, perhaps at the expense of others, and given the politicised and polarised nature of the problem, the map might reproduce some of these uneven geographies of information.
Our own implicit biases in collecting and posting stories are also no doubt embedded in its visualisation. Moving forward, we will continue to acknowledge these discrepancies, and hopefully move beyond some of them through partnerships with researchers, journalists, community organisations and NGOS, allowing for a more diverse range of sources and thus a thicker reading of the landscapes of intolerance.
In his seminal essay, “The Agency of Mapping”, James Corner discusses the ways in which we may engage maps not as neutral objects – representing some kind of truth about space – but as cultural agents actively participating in making and remaking the environment. Rather than a comprehensive or static account of reality or a domain of ‘experts’ – as cartographic endeavours often tend to be – we are interested in exploring a collaborative and grassroots ethic of mapping that can help foster social change, engender new communities and encourage interdisciplinary research.
We invite you to help us build the ‘intolerance tracker’ as a mode of inquiry into a changing and difficult phenomenon: a living archive as well as an instrument to meant to spark insights, debates and provocations.
About the authors
Siddharth Peter de Souza is a German Chancellor Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law in Heidelberg.
Vaibhav Bhawsar is the chief designer and co-founder of Timescape. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, TISCH and Srishti School of Design, India.
Nida Rehman is co-founder of Intolerance Tracker, and a doctoral candidate in urban geography at the University of Cambridge, looking at intersections of urban space, vector-borne diseases and public health.
Saba Sharma is co-founder of Intolerance Tracker, and a doctoral candidate at the department of geography at the University of Cambridge, looking at experiences of the state and ethnic conflict in Northeast India.
Research by the Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg seems to bear this out. Based on estimates from South African Police Service data, we found that between 1997 and 2013 there were an average of 900 community protests a year. In recent years the number has climbed to as high as 2,000 protests a year.
In a new book, my colleagues from the Centre for Social Change and I attempt to understand South Africa as part of the global protest wave.
On the face of it, protests in South Africa look quite different. They tend to be fragmented and happen mostly in black townships and informal settlements. The occupation of central public spaces in towns and cities, as we are seeing in Venezuela, happens seldom.
While there are important differences there are also commonalities. Whether protests focus around the “1%” as they did during the Occupy movement or around the lack of service provision in townships, protesters around the world are critiquing the failure of a representative democracy to provide socio-economic equality.
Broken promises
South Africa’s governing ANC came into power in 1994 on the promise of a “better life for all”. There have been important gains, such as increasing access to electricity from 51% of the population in 1994 to 85% in 2012, but inequality remains endemic. Recent data from the World Bank confirms that South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world.
As part of research by the Centre for Social Change we spoke to protesters all over the country. A new book from the centre highlights the extent to which protesters are raising not just concerns about the quality of service delivery but also about the quality of post-apartheid democracy. As Shirley Zwane, from Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, explains:
We don’t have democracy!… We [are] still struggling… you see if we are in democracy there’s no more shacks here… No more bucket system… we supposed to have roads, everything! A better education… There is a democracy?…. No, this is not a democracy! They have, these people in Constantia, Tableview, Parklands, they have a democracy, not for us!
For Shirley the quality of post-apartheid democracy is linked to the provision of basic services. She is not alone in this view. Research by Afrobarometer has found that compared to other countries in the region South Africans are much more likely to emphasise the realisation of socio-economic outcomes as crucial to democracy. That South Africans should view housing and services as central to post-apartheid democracy is unsurprising given that apartheid systemically denied the majority of people these rights.
Crisis of affordability
Community protests are fundamentally about the exclusion from democracy experienced by many black working class citizens since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Although the provision of services to the previously marginalised black majority has increased substantially, black working class households face an increasing crisis of affordability.
In sectors covered by a minimum wage, the real median wage increased by 7.5% between 2011 and 2015. But last year inflation on an average working class food basket was 15% and certain staple foods, such as maize meal, increased by as much as 32%. This has put a real squeeze on working class households especially when, due to high levels unemployment, each black South African wage earner supports four people.
Structural challenges
The crisis of affordability facing black working class households also compounds the structural crisis within local government.
In South Africa local governments are responsible for delivering services. Over the past 15 years local municipalities have increasingly had to find ways to fund these services through their own tax base. Many have resorted to cost recovery measures, for example by introducing prepaid meters. Their introduction has been behind many protests.
The financial difficulties for local and provincial governments looks set to get worse. In the country’s latest budget the National Treasury cut their funding as part of R25 billion budget cuts. In the case of Gauteng, the scene of the most recent protests, this amounted to a R2.9 billion rand cut over three years.
To fill the gap, municipalities and provinces are going to have to look increasingly to their own tax base to fund service provision. A difficult prospect when slightly more than half the population survives on R779 or less a person a month.
A global crisis
As Professor Michael Burawoy argues in our new book, the nature of the crisis varies from country to country. In South Africa the crisis represents the forcible exclusion of many black working class households from democratic institutions, largely because of their inability to afford socio-economic goods. For instance, while access to electricity has increased, access is increasingly mediated by prepaid meters, therefore the ability to access service is inextricably linked to the ability to afford them.
It’s this exclusion that leads many to say that democracy is only for the rich. Globally, people are beginning to search for new solutions to these problems with many being drawn to left-wing movements and political parties, such as Podemos in Spain. Whether such a comparable movement can emerge in South Africa remains to be seen.
The Muslim community has played a pivotal role in India’s Freedom Struggle and it is high time we Indians are made aware of these untold and hidden aspects of history.
It was Emperor Aurangzeb who first asked the East India Company to quit India in 1686 in Surat!
The first war against the British was fought almost 200 years before independence: the Battle of Plassey, wherein Nawab Sirajuddawla of Bengal was treacherously defeated by the British in 1757!
The first signs of victory against the British were seen in Mysore where Nawab Hyder Ali first waged war against the British in 1782. He was succeeded by his son, Tipu Sultan who again fought them in 1791 and was eventually treacherously defeated and martyred in 1799. Tipu Sultan was the first General to use missiles in warfare!
The Mujahid Movement was active during 1824 and 1831 under the leadership of Syed Ahmad Shaheed and his two disciples and they were successful in liberating the North-west province from British authority. Syed Ahmad Shaheed was nominated Khalifa, but the freedom was short lived and he was martyred in 1831!
The last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar was to lead the War of Independence in 1857. A country-wide war was to begin simultaneously on the 31st of May 1857, but the Indians among the British army revolted before that on the 10th of May 1857!
A startling 5,00,000 Muslims were martyred following the events of 1857, of which 5,000 were ulema (religious scholars). It is said that there was not a single tree on the Grand Trunk Road from Delhi to Calcutta but that an alim’s body was not found hanging on it for days together!
Indian ulema called for Jihad against the British and declared India as Darul Harb (Territory under Enemy control). This call found resonance all over the country with Muslims rising up against the British!
To liberate the countrymen from the cultural and educational bondages of the colonial empire, towering centers of learning like the Aligarh Muslim University were established in the late 19th Century, which are still counted amongst the leading Indian seminaries!
The ‘Reshmi Rumaal’ Tehreeq (Movement) was launched in 1905 by Shaikhul Islam, Maulana Mehmood Hasan and Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi to unite all the Indian states against the British. Maulana Mehmood was imprisoned in Malta and Kalapani for the same where he breathed his last!
The Indian National Congress, from the time of its inception to independence has seen 9 Presidents who were Muslims!
Barrister MK Gandhi served in a law firm in South Africa owned by a Muslim, who on his own expenses brought Gandhiji to India in 1916. Here, he started his agitation under the Ali Biradran (Ali Brothers)!
The Mopla movement saw 3,000 Muslims being martyred in a single battle!
The Non-cooperation Movement and the Swadeshi Movement saw overwhelming Muslim participation. Janab Sabusiddiq who was the sugar-king of that time gave up his business as a form of boycott. The Khoja and Memon communities owned the biggest business houses of that time and they parted with their treasured industries to support the boycott!
The 1942 Quit India movement was actually planned by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He was imprisoned on the 8th of August and sent to Ahmednagar, because of which Gandhiji had to lead the movement on the 9th of August!
Jyotiba Phule was sponsored by his neighbour, Usman Bagban in his educational activities, so much so that the school in which he taught was owned by Mr. Usman. His daughter, Fatima was the first girl student there and joined as a teacher thereafter!
Muslim leaders always supported the Dalit cause. In the Round Table Conference held in London, Maulana Muhammad Ali Johar was lured into abandoning the Dalit cause in lieu of accepting all the other demands of the Muslims. But Maulana Johar refused to forsake the Dalits!
When Dr. BR Ambedkar could not win the 1946 Central Elections, the Bengal Muslim League vacated one of its own seats and offered it to Dr. Ambedkar, who won it in the bypoll. This gesture by the Muslim League paved the way for his entry into the Constituent Assembly and the rest as they say, is history!
Muslim freedom fighters were active in the field of journalism as well. Maulana Azad used his pen against the British despite being prevented by the colonial powers a number of times. In fact, the first journalist to be martyred in the cause of India’s Freedom Struggle was also a Muslim – Maulana Baqar Ali.
So why have these points, and many many such similar ones, been relegated to the dustbin by our historians? Why are these events of history not taught in our history classes? Why are our children’s text books bereft of these historical facts? Why this prejudice?
This is a deliberate attempt to discredit the Muslim leadership and indeed the Muslim masses, in order to spread in the Muslim community a sense of inferiority complex and to push them on a defensive stand.
What have you done for this nation to deserve the benefits of its independence, we are asked! The Muslim community has played a pivotal role in India’s Freedom Struggle and it is high time we Indians are made aware of these untold and hidden aspects of history.
India is again being enslaved by our politicians. It is time to liberate her again from domestic and international neo-colonialism.
The Muslim Personal Law Board claims that wives can protect themselves from triple talaq through their nikahnamas, but does this ideal work on the ground?
PTI/Shashank
On Tuesday, during a week of intense judicial examination of the validity of triple talaq, the NGO All India Muslim Personal Law Board made a statement that left several Muslim women and women’s rights activists rolling their eyes.
Marriage, the Board told the Supreme Court, is essentially a contract according to Islam, and a Muslim woman can choose to insert specific clauses and conditions in her nikahnama (marriage contract) to safeguard her own interests – including the rejection of instantaneous triple talaq that Muslim men can pronounce to divorce their wives.
Technically, this is all true. The Islamic nikah is the only religious marriage in India that sees marriage as a contract between husband and wife rather than a holy sacrament. And in an ideal, gender-sensitive nikah, both the bride and the groom would have the right to mutually negotiate the terms of their contractual union. A Muslim woman could, in this ideal case, ensure that her nikahnama mentions a high mehr, the amount that a groom pays the bride for her financial security in case of a divorce. She could also claim the right to pronounce triple talaq herself, or prohibit her husband from pronouncing this form of instantaneous divorce. But how often does this ideal situation actually play out in the lives of Muslim women on the ground?
Almost never, say the women themselves. In a patriarchal society where women barely have the right to choose their own spouses, the bride and her family have little or no say in wedding-related decisions. Nikahnamas are typically drawn up by qazis or priests, many of them affiliated to the Muslim Personal Law Board itself. And according to women’s rights activists, the majority of Sunni qazis have no inclination to make brides aware of their right to negotiate the terms of marriage.
Brides with no say
“Most Muslim wives have no idea what is written in their nikahnama, forget having a say deciding the terms of the contract,” said Noorjehan Safia Niaz, a co-founder of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, one of the organisations that has petitioned the Supreme Court against triple talaq. “In fact, in a survey we did of Muslim women, we found that 50% of wives don’t even know where the nikahnama is kept in their marital homes.”
This is evident in the case of Gausiya Ahmed, a 28-year-old Unani doctor from the Maharashtrian town of Bhiwandi. When Gausiya had an arranged marriage in 2014, neither she nor her family had a chance to even read her nikahnama before it was placed in her hands for a quick signature on the wedding day.
“My parents and I were not involved in anything. The qazi wrote the nikahnama and decided on a wedding date and mehr amount with my husband’s family. I was simply told to sign the paper,” said Gausiya, who claims she was never even given the bride’s copy of the wedding contract. “This is how it has been with all my friends and relatives who got married – the bride’s family is not in a position to have a say.”
After a year of suffering extreme domestic violence at the hands of her in-laws, Gausiya received a written notice of triple talaq from her husband, for giving birth to a daughter instead of a son. She has refused to accept the validity of the divorce, but the ordeal led to her finally getting a copy of her nikahnama. “It doesn’t say anything about talaq,” said Gausiya. “The qazis are the ones who control weddings, and they will never let the woman get any divorce rights in the nikahnama. Because obviously, which woman would agree to a marriage that allows the husband triple talaq?”
‘Taboo to mention divorce’
Even if the bride is aware of her right to negotiate aspects of the nikahnama, societal pressures often make it impossible for her to exercise this right.
“In our culture the bride’s family often has a huge inferiority complex with respect to the groom’s family, so they don’t feel comfortable asking for a large mehr amount in the contract,” said Noorjehan Niaz. “And mentioning divorce in a nikahnama is considered inauspicious.”
On this matter, even the clerics seem to agree. Maulana Mehmood Daryabadi, the general secretary of the All India Ulema Council, admitted that including any kind of divorce clauses in a wedding contract is viewed as a taboo, particularly by the bride’s family.
After all, said Daryabadi, “no one likes to talk about death at the time of a wedding”. Death? Did he mean divorce? “Well, it’s the same thing,” he said. “These are not things people like to bring up during a happy occasion.” Most nikahnamas, then, simply contain the names of the bride, groom and witnesses, and mention the mehr amount.
A model nikahnama
On Wednesday, while hearing arguments for and against triple talaq, the Supreme Court asked the All India Muslim Personal Law Board if it could issue a “modern and model nikahnama” that provides wives the right to decline triple talaq.
The concept of a model nikahnama of this kind is not new, but examples of such progressive marriage contracts in India are few and far between. One example is the model nikahnama issued by the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board, an organisation founded in 2005 as a counter to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board’s male-centric world view. First published in 2008, this model nikahnama includes several clauses safeguarding a woman’s rights in marriage.
The nikahnama rejects all forms of unilateral, instantaneous triple talaq, and specifically mentions that “talaq” uttered over the phone, internet, text messages or other media would be invalid. It also does not recognise divorce pronounced in a fit of anger or intoxication. To divorce their wives, the model nikahnama allows for non-instantaneous Islamic talaq, uttered three times over a period of several months, with a three-month gap between each utterance to allow both spouses to rethink the divorce and revoke it if necessary. This nikahnama specifically provides for khula, a practice that allows a woman to release herself from the marriage by returning her mehr to the husband.
The success of the women’s board’s nikahnama has been limited so far. “We printed 1,000 copies of our model nikahnama in 2008, in Hindi and Urdu, and last year they all got used up,” said Shaista Ambar, the founder-president of the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board. Ambar is now bringing out a new edition, with English included as a language, to cater to a growing demand from emigrant Indians.
The All India Shia Personal Law Board issued a similar model nikahnama last year. And occasionally, there have been rare cases of Muslim women using the Islamic provision of talaq-e-tafweez to secure divorce rights in their nikahnamas. Under talaq-e-tafweez, the husband delegates the authority of pronouncing a divorce to his wife, under specific conditions agreed upon in the contract.
For instance, in the case of Mohd Khan versus Shahmali in 1971, the wife had stipulated in her prenuptial agreement that her husband would live in her parents’ home after marriage. When he didn’t, she sought a divorce that was upheld by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court.
So far, however, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board that claims to represent the majority of Indian Muslims has not included provisions like talaq-e-tafweez in any of the nikahnamas it has issued over the years.
“In 25 years, we have spoken to so many clerics about making nikahnamas more modern, but they just don’t want it,” said Hasina Khan, founder of Bebaak Collective, one of the women’s groups petitioning against triple talaq. “So even if in theory the Board says that the bride and groom can make their own nikahnama, in practice it is always the word of the qazi that controls marriages.”
The Modi led BJP government has fast tracked the process of privatisation. It is determined to dismantle the entire public sector in the country, conceived to achieve ‘commanding heights’ of our economy.
The Modi led BJP government has fast tracked the process of privatisation. It is determined to dismantle the entire public sector in the country, conceived to achieve ‘commanding heights’ of our economy. Public sector today is the repository of huge national assets including land and minerals, vital infrastructure and huge productive forces. It is the wealth of the nation. The decision of the BJP led government to allow 100% Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in such strategic sectors of our economy like defence, railways, telecom, civil aviation, satellites, power, petroleum, mining, coal etc is nothing but anti national in character. This will not only adversely impact the functioning of the PSUs in the concerned sector but also compromise our national interests including national security. Can anything be more ‘anti national’ than handing over our precious national resources and wealth to the corporates, national or foreign?
• Dismantling the public sector became a part of the government agenda since 1991 with the official advent of neoliberal policies under the Congress government. The concepts of self reliant economy, economic sovereignty, balanced regional development, social justice etc were sought to be given a go by. The Modi government has intensified these policies.
• Soon after coming to power in 2014, the Modi led BJP government wound up the Planning Commission and replaced it with the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Ayog. NITI Ayog was entrusted with the task of identifying central public sector undertakings (CPSUs) that are to be disinvested and sold off. It has already identified 74 (CPSUs) – including 26 for downright closure and 10 for strategic disinvestment. (Disinvestment means the government would retain management, strategic sale means that majority shares will be sold and management would be handed over to the private party). The government has given ‘in principle’ approval to the recommendations of NITI Ayog.
• The government has appointed Reliance Mutual Fund Managers to provide consultancy and execute its project of quick selling 10 CPSUs strategic to our national economy, including ONGC, GAIL, Oil India Limited, Indian Oil Corporation, Coal India Limited, BHEL, Bharat Electronics Limited etc through the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). This is like asking the robber to guard the house! Reliance’s mother company is itself interested in sale of PSUs at throwaway prices!
• Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML), one of the nine defence public sector units engaged in defence production, Salem, Durgapur and Bhadravati plants of Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), Bridge and Roof Company, a premier mini ratna PSU, Dredging Corporation of India, Hindustan Flurocarbons etc are among those identified for strategic sale. The Defence Ministry has also ordered to immediately list other Defence PSUs viz., BDL and MIDHANI in the stock market to facilitate disinvestment of at least 25% shares.
• 25% shares in all the five public sector general insurance companies will be sold to private companies, both Indian and foreign.
• Public sector makes huge contribution to the national exchequer. It not only scrupulously pays its taxes but also dividends, special dividends etc in addition to keeping the national economy afloat with regular capital investments of not less than Rs 1.5 lakh crore every year. In 2014-15 the PSUs contributed more than Rs 2 lakh crore to the public exchequer.
• In contrast there are innumerable instances of tax evasion, manipulation of accounts etc by the private sector establishments, including the big corporates, both national and multinational. Government figures themselves inform that every year, the national exchequer is robbed of not less than Rs 5 lakh crore through such manipulations. In 2015-16 alone, direct tax evasion amounted to Rs 6.59 lakh crore.
• The BJP government is taking calculated measures to weaken the well functioning public sector units and make them sick to pave the way for privatisation. The surpluses generated by the public sector units, meant for modernisation and continuous updating are being drained. Many PSUs are forced to pay dividends to the government much above the statutory level, sometimes as high as 50% or more. This is a well articulated design to make them sick and create ground for handing them over at cheap rates to their favoured domestic and foreign buyers.
• The government has decided to close Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Limited (IDPL) and Rajasthan Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Limited (RDPL). It has decided to privatise Hindustan Antibiotics Limited (HAL) and Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceuticals Limited (BCPL) if buyers are available; otherwise to close them. Even today, these can be made profitable by infusing the necessary capital and utilising their huge assets for this purpose. But the government is not willing to do that, making a mockery of its own slogan of ‘Make in India’.
• Public sector in our country was an instrument to attain self reliant economy, create the industrial base of the country. It played an important role in developing balanced regional growth. It was the public sector which built the major infrastructure of the country like power, transport including railways, roads, ports etc when the private sector did not have the capacity or was not ready to take the risk of investing huge amounts of capital in these sectors, which do not provide immediate profits. Thermal, hydro and nuclear power projects, transport and communication, production of steel, defence equipment, ship building, oil, coal etc were set up in the public sector. The Research and Development taken up by the PSUs had a huge contribution in our technological and industrial advance.
• The public sector research institutes immensely helped the farmers by providing new techniques to improve agricultural productivity in our country.
• The LIC has been contributing for infrastructure development, drinking water projects etc. The role of our public sector financial institutions in protecting our economy during the 2008 global financial meltdown is now well acknowledged. In fact, the private general and life insurance companies and the banks were nationalised to protect the interests as well as savings of the people from the loot of private companies and utilise them for the benefit of the people including the poor in the remote rural areas.
• The public sector had basic contribution in establishing the right to organise and collective bargaining of the workers which is sought to be denied in the private sector. The struggles of the public sector workers to attain better working and living conditions inspired the workers in other sectors in their struggle for trade union rights and other benefits.
• The townships constructed in the areas where the PSUs were located, many in remote undeveloped rural areas, not only provided housing and other facilities for the workers like schools, hospitals, dispensaries, community centres, shopping complexes etc but also led to overall development of the entire area. Thousands of the people in the surrounding villages benefited indirectly by getting employment and income opportunities through providing different services to the people in these townships.
• By implementing the reservations for SC/ ST sections, PSUs provided employment and opportunities for their development thus contributing to social justice.
• Dismantling public sector means subjugating our national economic interests, our economic independence and sovereignty to the interests of international finance capital, to imperialist interests. It means handing over our national assets, our national wealth to the corporates in a silver platter. And it means facilitating ferocious exploitation of our workers by the profit hungry employers; imposing slavery on them. It means robbing the SC/ST of their statutory right to reservation. This will ultimately lead to the crushing of democratic structures and social institutions as a whole.
• The entire country must oppose such privatisation and disinvestment and strategic sale of public sector enterprises. It should not be left to the public sector workers alone.
Hunger strikers against the authoritarian regime want their jobs back.
Nuriye Gulman and Semih-Esra Ozakca, on a hunger strike to protest Turkish purges. Photo Credit: Screenshot / Twitter
The mood in Turkey is low, and not just among those who oppose President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Even some of his supporters are disoriented by developments in the country. In the aftermath of the failed coup of July 15, 2016, Erdoğan orchestrated the dismissal of tens of thousands of government employees. The figuresfrom the ongoing Turkish purges are startling. The day after the failed coup, Erdoğan’s government fired 2,745 judges, a third of the Turkish judges. Not long after that, over 100,000 civil servants, teachers and journalists lost their jobs. The tally is now astoundingly high: 138,147 civil servants, teachers and academics fired; 50,987 arrested. It is as if the Turkish government—to quote Donald Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon—is "deconstructing the administrative state."
The human cost of the purge is stark. At least 37 of those fired have taken their lives. This number comes from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), whose report was prepared by its Deputy Chair Veli Ağbaba. Seventeen of those who killed themselves were police officers, four of them soldiers and two of them prison guards. The humiliation and the fear took its toll.
Hours after the coup of 2016 failed, President Erdoğan called it a "gift from God." The coup has allowed him to go after anyone he deems an adversary, ranging from those who were once allied with him to those who have always been his opponents. The most striking attack by Erdoğan came against the movement led by the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in Pennsylvania. Erdogan and Gülen were close allies as the AKP sought to take charge of the institutions of the Turkish state and society. In earlier slow motion purges, the Erdoğan government displaced secular professionals for the adherents of Gülen with the belief that these Islamists would be more sympathetic to the agenda of the AKP. Now, Erdoğan has little use for the Gülen movement. He would like the institutions to be run by loyalists to him not to a broad Islamist ideology. This is the hallmark of an authoritarian system.
Erdoğan will be in Washington, DC this week to meet President Donald Trump. It is unlikely that Trump will offer even a mute criticism of the purges. Erdoğan is expected to ask for the extradition of Gülen as well as for the US to stop sending heavy weapons to the Syrian Kurdish armed forces. All indications suggest that Trump will neither release Gülen nor stop the flow of arms to the Syrian Kurds. However, if Trump does at least allow Gülen to be interrogated by US authorities and stop Gülen’s webcasts to his supporters in Turkey, then Erdoğan will return to Ankara emboldened.
Victory Belongs to Those Who Resist
Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça are, respectively, a literature professor and a primary school teacher. Both were fired by the Erdoğan-led purges. Each day they gather with supporters at Ankara’s Yuksel Street near a statue to commemorate human rights. These two intellectuals have been on hunger strike for almost 70 days. They are kept alive by lemon and saltwater. Gülmen has lost 18 pounds and Özakça has lost 37 pounds. Both are in perilous health. Onur Karahanli of the Chamber of Doctors of Ankara, said, "They are now in a very critical period, where their nervous and cardiovascular systems are being damaged after two months of hunger." Outside Turkey there is little news coverage of their vigil.
Their slogan, "I want my job back," is elegant. It has raised the hopes of thousands of others like themselves. Across Turkey, other teachers and academics have joined in sympathy hunger strikes. Architect Arife Şahin (Duzce), teacher Nazife Onay (Istanbul) and others form this new phalanx of resistance. Groups of academics went on solidarity strike for 24 hours in Istanbul as did faculty and students from the Middle East Technical University. Silently, in fear, others admire Gülmen and Özakça.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s public institutions suffer from the lack of qualified people. The philosopher Halis Yildirim, who has been very public with his criticism of the Erdogan purges, says that "good, dedicated and experienced teachers" are being replaced by lesser qualified government-appointed people. For now, he says, the primary education system is not in crisis because of a large "reserve army" of university graduates who had not been able to find work over the past decade. They are being hired to work in the schools. The universities, however, face a serious problem. Seminars and classes are being canceled, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, which the government does not take seriously anyway. These purges, Yildirim tells me, will produce a "lost generation." A professor who signed the petition against the Turkish government’s war on the Kurds says the government seeks to shift primary education from the government schools to the religious schools (imam-hatips). In 2004, a mere 65,000 children studied in these religious schools; today, the number exceeds a million children. Islam and Erdoğan have become the new heroes in the curriculum, replacing Mustafa Kemal. Another academic tells me that references to evolution have been scrubbed in the middle and high school textbooks.
Curfew Against the Kurds
In Seyit Riza Square in Dersim, in the heart of Anatolia, Kemal Gün, age 70, has been on hunger strike for almost 80 days. He sits in the square, often by himself, with a dog lying nearby, surrounded by signs asking for the government to return the body of his son, Murat Gün. Kemal Gün’s two sons had entered the revolutionary left movement, which has its roots in the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. Murat was with the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKC), 11 of whose members, including Murat, were killed by Turkish government airstrikes in November 2016. Murat’s brother was killed in Geyiksuyu in April of the same year. Kemal Gün is on hunger strike to retrieve Murat’s body.
The situation in Turkey’s southeast is miserable. Curfews have closed down towns and cities, while troops of the Turkish state act with impunity. A United Nations report from March 2017 urges Turkey to cease its "serious" abuses. Thirty towns have been affected by the government operations, with half a million people displaced from the region. There are chilling stories in the report. A man tells of his sister killed in Cizre in 2016, "My family was summoned by the public prosecutor. We were given three small charred pieces of what he claimed was my beloved ablam’s (sister’s) body." The government did not explain why she was killed or who killed her.
Part of the crackdown on the Kurds was directed at the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is a broad alliance of left and Kurdish political organizations. The government arrested 11 party officials, including its co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ. They even banned the publication of a poem, "Contagious Courage," that Demirtaş wrote while in custody. The point seems to be to break the spirit of the organizational forces arrayed against Erdoğan.
#HayirDahaBitmedi
After the referendum, which Erdoğan narrowly won, the hashtag circulating on Turkish social media read "It is not over yet." A journalist tells me she has never seen Turkey so divided. "We’ve lost the mortar that holds us together," she says. An academic tells me that "the mood amongst the public is varied depending upon one’s political affiliation." The secular left is alarmed by the purges and the destruction of reason. The pro-Erdoğan section is "very insensitive to these firings. Some may even think that this was a worthwhile elimination of subversive elements."
Yildirim, the philosopher, says Erdoğan will not tolerate anyone of merit near him. Turkey is being run by those who are obedient to Erdoğan. Critical thinking has virtually been banned.
Meanwhile the hunger strikes continue. They are a way to refuse to submit. Submission is the end of the human spirit. That is the sensibility of Demirtaş’ poem. Here it is, translated by Burcu Gündogan:
They’ll say ‘silence’! And, they’ll say ‘no colors’! You will have been rising up in joy, But they’ll say ‘no roses can blossom.’ Then, let’s laugh so that your revolt does not get orphaned. And, if that’s a crime; then, let it be… May the smile of people remain fadeless. They’ll say ‘the sun cannot rise’! And, they’ll pull a gun on hope. But you will have been rising up in speed. They’ll put the blame on you. Then, let’s run so that your revolt does not get lonely! And, if that’s a crime, then, let it be… Don’t drive people crazy!
The last line is directed at the government. The purge is driving people crazy. It is breaking Turkish society apart. But the human spirit is infinite. On the 69th day of their hunger strike, Nuriye Gülmen, weakened but not defeated, declared a day of solidarity with the hunger strike of the Palestinian political prisoners. Her body consumes itself, but she does not turn inward; her gaze goes south to Palestine. People like Nyriye Gülmen are emblems of human dignity, precisely the attribute denied by the government of Erdoğan.
Jeremy Corbyn launches the Labour manifesto. Owen Humphreys/PA Wire/PA Images
It cannot be an accident that Jeremy Corbyn launched what may be his one and only general election manifesto in the city of Bradford. One of the forerunners of today’s Corbyn-ledLabour Party was the Independent Labour Party (ILP). It was a full-blooded left wing party, founded in 1893 in Bradford. And, KeirHardie, the ILP’s first leader and founder of the Labour Party, has frequently been cited by Corbynas one of his inspirations.
Both Hardie and the ILP were very strong advocates of workers’ rights, having emerged from the then nascent union movement. Corbyn, a former full-time officer of one of the forerunner’s of the biggest union in Britain, UNISON, is equally a very strong advocate of workers’ rights. This shows up in the publication today of Labour’s general election manifesto.
All workers equal rights from day one, whether part-time or full-time
Banning zero hours contracts so that every worker gets a guaranteed number of hours each week
Ending the use of overseas labour to undercut domestic wages and conditions
Repealing the Trade Union Act 2016 and rolling out collective bargaining by sector
Guaranteeing unions a right to access workplaces to represent members
Raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage
Ending the public sector pay cap
Instituting a maximum pay ratio of 20:1 in the public sector and companies bidding for public contracts
Banning unpaid internships
Abolishing employment tribunal fees
Giving self-employed workers the status of workers
Setting up a commission to modernise the law around employment status
Creating a Ministry of Labour with the resources to enforce workers’ rights
These pledges are essentially a replication of A Manifesto for Labour Law by the Institute of Employment Rights in June 2016, devised in conjunction with labour law academics to promote healthy policy for workers.
Labour’s worker problem
The socialist left has often argued that Labour has failed to inspire the loyalty of workers, and union members especially, by being insufficiently radical. Consequently, the argument goes, there was less than a compelling reason to vote for Labour. Along with pledges to bring the water industry, railways, Royal Mail and some energy companies back into public ownership (which should reduce pressure on workers’ wages and conditions), this cannot be said to be the case this time round.
Some have criticised Corbyn’s Labour for giving into the allegedly vested and backward interest of unions. As Martin Kettle of the Guardian argued, “union power is not the same as workers’ rights”.
At one level, this is a valid point. With only around a quarter of workers now holding union membership, workers cannot rely on unions any time soon to be able to effectively defend their rights and interests.
But when one recognises that the implementation of workers’ rights has always needed the help of unions because they are the only sizeable independent organisations with the resources to do so, this point loses its force. Unions inform workers of their rights and help them apply them. Plus, unions have always helped more than just their members because employers apply the gains of union negotiated deals to all employees.
Wider significance
But focusing on the union aspect blinds critics to the actual significance of Labour’s manifesto. This is that, compared to what the Tories are proposing, Labour prioritises collective rights over individual rights so that workers can act together to advance their interests. Labour’s manifesto recognises that the workers are stronger together, echoing a fundamental belief of Karl Marx that the condition of the freedom of the individual is the condition of the freedom of all.
Indeed, without collective rights in law, especially with regard to the right to strike, any collective bargaining can easily end up being merely collective begging.
Collective action is stronger than individual action. Matt Alexander/PA Archive/PA Images
The most obvious case in point concerns the right to sectoral collective bargaining, which Labour has emphasised in its manifesto. In Britain, companies in the same sector compete primarily against each other on the basis of their labour costs. Hence, there is a competitive advantage to cut wages and conditions as the principle route to profitability.
But by providing a statutory basis to sectoral collective bargaining, all companies in a sector would be compelled to furnish workers with the same minimum terms and conditions. No longer would they compete on labour costs in a “race to the bottom”. And, their attention would turn to improving productivity through investment in technology and training.
With stronger collective rights, applied and enforced with the help of unions, both unions and workers’ rights would be immeasurably strengthened. Time will shortly tell whether Labour’s manifesto will help it regain the support of working class voters. Or whether Theresa May’s pitch to be the workers’ friend will gain sufficient traction.
If Corbyn is successful, it will be a fitting tribute to the heritage of Bradford. It was here that an almighty 19-week strike at the city’s Manningham Mills textile factory by some 5,000 workers over wage cuts in 1891 gave a big spur to the founding of the ILP. It will also have been fitting that Labour launched the manifesto at the University of Bradford given that it started out life in 1832 as the Bradford Mechanics Institute, an organisation designed to help working class people gain the necessary skills for the ever changing world of work.
