About Us Contact Us
Home Blog Page 2622

Ambedkar against Hindu Rashtra

By
-
0


 
Until 1992, December 6 was remembered as ‘Parinirvan Divas’ of Dr BR Ambedkar, legendary son of the oppressed who had clearly recognised the true meaning of Hindutva and warned his followers about the dangers of Hindu Rashtra. Post 1992, December 6 has an added meaning and it relates to the demolition of Babri Mosque undertaken by the very forces hastily trying to appropriate him.

Apart from the fact that this event led to the biggest communal conflagration at the national level post-independence, repercussions of which are still being felt and whose perpetrators are still roaming free, we should not forget that it was the first attack of this scale on the principles of secularism and democracy, which has been a core value of the Constitution drafted under the chairmanship of Dr Ambedkar.

“If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country. No matter what the Hindus say, Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. On that account it is incompatible with democracy. Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost.”
 – Ambedkar, Pakistan or Partition of India, p.358
 
“Indians today are governed by two ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity whereas their social ideal embedded in their religion denies it to them.”
– Ambedkar
 
This is the first Ambedkar memorial lecture which is being organised, as the invite tells us, saluting ‘the contribution of the great visionary leader who not only fought for political revolution but also argued for social revolution’.

You have made this beginning at an opportune moment in our country’s history when we are witnessing a concerted attempt from the powers that be to water down Ambedkar’s legacy, project him as someone who sanctioned the illiberal times we live in today, communicate to the masses that he was friends with the leading bigots of his time and finally appropriate his name to peddle an agenda which essentially hinges around political and social reaction.

Wishing you the best for starting this conversation among students, who yearn to become a vehicle for social change in the days to come. I would like to share some of my ideas around the theme.

Yes, we definitely need to understand Ambedkar’s role as a chairman of the drafting committee of independent India’s Constitution and the skilful manner in which he ‘piloted the draft’ in the Constituent Assembly. But that is not enough. We also know how during his more than three-decade long political career he put forward a “variety of political and social ideas that fertilised Indian thinking” as in the words of the late Indian president KR Narayanan, which contributed to the rulers of the newly independent nation, India’s decision to adopt the parliamentary form of democracy. Perhaps more important for the ensuing discussion would be his differentiation between what he called ‘political democracy’ – which he defined as ‘one man one vote’ and ‘social democracy’ – which according to him was ‘one man with one value’ – and his caution that political democracy built on the divisions, asymmetries, inequalities and exclusions of traditional Indian society would be akin to ‘a palace built on cow dung’.

We also need to take a look at the unfolding scenario in the country today and also see for oneself whether there is a growing dissonance or resonance between how Dr Ambedkar envisaged democracy and the actual situation on the ground. Through this prism we should assess our role in confronting the challenges that lie before us.

While we remember and take stock as it were, this great colossal that Ambedkar was, not for a moment can we forget the mammoth task undertaken by other ‘founding fathers’ – which included leading stalwarts of the Independence movement – of the nascent republic. It was this collective that together introduced the right to vote to every adult citizen to a country reeling under abject poverty and mass illiteracy. This right to vote came to many countries of the West through struggles decades later. But our Constitution and fundamental rights were born overshadowed by the bloody partition riots.
Does the image and memory of Ambedkar, brought to us through textbooks and popularised by the ever expanding media match his actual contributions as a leader, scholar and renaissance thinker?

Try to imagine what sort of image(s) comes to mind when somebody mentions his name. I can mention a few: leader of the Dalits, chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution’, a man who ‘fought for the rights of scheduled castes’, ‘embraced Buddhism with lakhs of followers’. With some exceptions, the image of Ambedkar in the public mind does not transcend this.

The imagery excludes, somehow, the historic Mahad Satyagrah which was organised under his leadership way back in 1927. In Marathi this revolutionary moment has been captured euphemistically thus, ‘when water caught fire’, when it took place at the Chawdar Talab (lake). Nor does this public imagery stretch to include the burning of the Manusmriti in its second phase, which was compared to the French revolution by Ambedkar in his own speeches. The imagery cleverly excludes any details of the first political party formed under his leadership called the Independent Labour Party, the role of many non-Dalits or even upper castes in the movement led by him or the historic march to Bombay assembly against the ‘Khot pratha’ where communists had participated in equal strength. His historic speech to the railway workers in Manmad when Ambedkar asked them to fight the twin enemies of ‘brahmnanism’ and ‘capitalism’ (late thirties) or his struggle to ensure enactment of the Hindu Code Bill, which ultimately became the reason for his resignation from the Nehru cabinet. All these vivid and critical parts of his stormy life and varied contributions escape popular imagery. There are many others that do not fit in with the overpowering one of a ‘Dalit messiah’.

Is it really surprising that most Indians know so little of him, not the case with other great leaders who emerged during the anti-colonial movement?

This selective amnesia about Ambedkar is in large measure due to the way in which the more privileged sections, dominated by the upper caste elite, shaped a limiting image, albeit in a very surreptitious manner. Others involved in the work of a broader social transformation, which also included organisations claiming to be his legatees, also cannot escape blame for the critical silences around his image. These organisations and movements either remained oblivious to the designs of the varna (caste) elite or were not conscious/careful enough to comprehend their game-plan.
Any student of politics of the oppressed would know and vouch for the fact that this is the fate of most leaders of the exploited and oppressed, the world over. When they cannot any more be ignored completely, the image that is shaped needs careful scrutiny.

A similar process which unfolded itself in the United States where a very sanitised image of Martin Luther King, has been popularised. Instead of the MLK who opposed the Vietnam war, looked at capitalism as the source of all evil, who equally struggled for workers’ rights as black rights, we have before us an image of a uni-dimensional King.

As we celebrate Ambedkar’s life, and further discuss his ideas on democracy and their relevance today, this historic task beckons us: we need to fight with all our strength against the ‘reduction’ of his image and what a scholar describes as a deliberate process of ‘mythologising the man and marginalising his meaning’.
 
Ambedkar’s idea of democracy
The future of Indian democracy depends to a great deal upon revival of Ambedkar’s visionary conception of democracy with modern modifications.

But it would be opportune to know from Ambedkar himself how he looked at the idea of democracy. His speech on the ‘Voice of America’ radio (May 20, 1956) which he gave few months before his death could best summarise his ideas,

‘The roots of democracy lie not in the form of Government, Parliamentary or otherwise. A democracy is more than a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living. The roots of democracy are to be searched in the social relationship, in the terms of associated life between the people who form a society.’

Next he comes to define the word ‘society’ itself. For him a society is conceived ‘as one by its very nature’ and ‘[T]he qualities which accompany this unity are praiseworthy community of purpose and desire for welfare, loyalty to public ends and mutuality of sympathy and co-operation.’
Interrogating Indian society further he questions whether ‘these ideals are found in Indian society?’ And elaborating on the Indian society which is nothing but ‘an innumerable collection of castes which are exclusive in their life and have no common experience to share and have no bond of sympathy’ he concludes that

‘The existence of the Caste System is a standing denial of the existence of those ideals of society and therefore of democracy.’

Then he further discusses how ‘Indian Society is so embedded in the caste system that everything is organized on the basis of caste’ and shares examples from daily life of individuals revolving around the twin concepts of purity and pollution and moves to socio-political arena and wryly concludes that ‘[t]here is no room for the downtrodden and the outcastes in politics, in industry, in commerce, and in education.’

During his more than three-decade long political career he put forward a “variety of political and social ideas that fertilised Indian thinking” in the words of the late Indian president KR Narayanan, which contributed to the rulers of the newly independent nation, India’s decision to adopt the parliamentary form of democracy.

Further he discusses other special features of the caste system which ‘[h]ave their evil effects and which militate against democracy’ and he focuses on what is called ‘graded inequality’ where ‘castes is not equal in their status’ but rather ‘[a]re standing one above another’ and form ‘an ascending scale of hatred and descending scale of contempt’ which has the most pernicious consequences as ‘[i]t destroys willing and helpful co-operation.’

Then discussing the difference between caste and class, he takes up the second evil effect in the caste system accompanied by inequality which is ‘complete isolation’ which manifests itself in the difference between stimulus and response between two castes which is only ‘one-sided’ and which ‘educates some into masters, educate others into slaves’ and this separation thus ‘prevents social endosmosis’.

Later taking up the manner in which one caste is bound to one occupation which ‘cuts at the very roots of democracy’ he tells how this arrangement which denies the right to ‘open a way to use all the capacities of the individual’ leads to stratification which is ‘is stunting of the growth of the individual and deliberate stunting is a deliberate denial of democracy.’

In the concluding part of his speech he discusses obstacles in the way to end the caste system and he points out the ‘system of graded inequality which is the soul of the caste system’ and also how ‘Indian society is disabled by unity in action by not being able to know what is its common good’ where ‘the mind of the Indians is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives’ and ends his speech by emphasising that mere education cannot destroy caste system rather education to those ‘[w]ho want to keep up the caste system is not to improve the prospect of democracy in India but to put our democracy in India in greater jeopardy.’

One can also further add that as opposed to the conservative notion which promotes it as an idea which is an instrument to stop bad people from seizing power Ambedkar’s conception is geared to social transformation and human progress and he defines it as ‘a form and a method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and social life of the people are brought about without bloodshed.’

Elucidating the conditions to make it possible it can be inferred that
“(1) there should not be glaring inequalities in society, that is, privilege for one class; (2) the existence of an opposition; (3) equality in law and administration; (4) observance of constitutional morality; (5) no tyranny of the majority; (6) moral order of society: and (7)public conscience.” [1]
In his speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949 he also expressed three cautions and believed that paying heed to them was critical to ensure our democratic institutions did not get subverted : (i) constitutional methods: (ii) not to lay liberties at the feet of a great man: (iii) make a political democracy a social democracy.”

Looking at the fact that India happens to be a multi-denominational society where the common denominator could be secularism which is understood as one of the pillars on which the superstructure of our democracy rests and is a unifying force of our associated life, he emphasised:
“The conception of a secular state is derived from the liberal democratic tradition of the West. No institution which is maintained wholly out of state funds shall be used for the purpose of religious instruction irrespective of the question whether the religious instruction is given by the state or by any other body.”

In a debate in Parliament, he also underlined:
“It (secular state) does not mean that we shall not take into consideration the religious sentiments of the people. All that a secular state means that this Parliament shall not be competent to impose any particular religion upon the rest of the people. That is the only limitation that the Constitution recognises.”

Taking into consideration the possibility that a minority can become a victim of the tyranny of majority, he suggested enough safeguards for their protection:
“The State should guarantee to its citizens the liberty of conscience and the free exercise of his religion including the right to profess, to preach and to convert within limits compatible with public order and morality.”

Prof Jean Dreze[2] brings forth an important point in his article wherein he underlines how ‘Ambedkar’s passion for democracy was closely related to his commitment to rationality and the scientific outlook.’ In this connection he quotes one of his last speeches “Buddha or Karl Marx”, wherein summarising the essential teachings of Buddha he elaborates:
“Everyone has a right to learn. Learning is as necessary for man to live as food is… Nothing is infallible. Nothing is binding forever. Everything is subject to inquiry and examination.”

This selective amnesia about Ambedkar is in large measure due to the way in which the more privileged sections, dominated by the upper caste elite, shaped a limiting image, albeit in a very surreptitious manner.

According to him it was important to bring this up looking at the ‘[r]ecent threats to Indian democracy (which) often involve a concerted attack on rationality and the scientific spirit.’ Perhaps one can go on elaborating further on the nuances of Ambedkar’s understanding of democracy but that is not the only aim of this intervention. As promised in the beginning we also need to take a look at the unfolding situation.

What is a sine qua non of democracy?
It is the understanding that minority voices will be allowed to flourish and they will not be bulldozed.

At the apparent level majoritarianism (rule by majority) sounds very similar to democracy but it essentially stands democracy on its head. For real democracy to thrive, it is essential that ideas and principles of secularism are at its core. The idea that there will be a clear separation between state and religion and there won’t be any discrimination on the basis of religion has to be its guiding principle.

Majoritarianism thus clearly defeats democracy in idea as well as practice.
While democracy’s metamorphosis into majoritarianism is a real danger, under rule of capital – especially its present phase of neo-liberalism – another lurking danger is its evolution into what can be called as plutocracy – government by the rich.

Recently two interesting books have come out discussing 21st century capitalism. The one by Thomas Picketty ‘Capitalism in the 21st Century’ , which demonstrates convincingly that the twentieth century exhibited a secular tendency toward continuous and widening inequality, has been received well in India too. It discusses increasingly disproportionate concentration of income at the top, and the widening inequality that goes along with it, is integral to the system and a consequence of  “the central contradiction of capitalism,” (Capital, 571). Piketty’s core theoretical concept is expressed in the formula ‘r>g’, where ‘r’ represents the return on capital/INVESTMENT, and ‘g’ the rate of growth of the economy.

Much like Piketty’s contribution, a major study of democracy in America has also received almost as much attention in the West. It confirms our suspicions that oligarchy has replaced democracy.

The authors found that “policies supported by economic elites and business interest groups were far more likely to become law than those they opposed…. [T]he preferences of the middle class made essentially no difference to a bill’s fate”. The study “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” by Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) – which entirely undermine the notion that America is a democracy – and carries wider significance has not received attention here[3]. “Majority rule” accounts, construed numerically or by any “median voter” criterion, are found to be a “nearly total failure.” Controlling for the preferences of economic elites and business-oriented interest groups, the preferences of the average citizen have a “near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The preferences of economic elites have “far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.” This does not mean that ordinary citizens never get what they want by way of policy. Sometimes they do, but only when their preferences are the same as those of the economic elite…

“[M]ajorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts… [I]f policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”[4]
According to the authors their results are ‘troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy.’ “When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose… even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”

In such an unfolding situation, where we are faced with the dangers of democracy metamorphosing into majoritarianism and democracy becoming oligarchy with the highly undemocratic, violent Indian society – which glorifies violence against the oppressed and legitimises, sanctifies inequality in many ways acting as a backdrop, the question of what needs to be done arises?

Jean Dreze, in the same article suggests a course of action which merits attention
“[t]he best course of action may be to revive the Directive Principles of the Constitution, and to reassert that these principles are “fundamental in the governance of the country” (Article 37)

Indeed, in spite of much official hostility to these principles today, there are unprecedented opportunities for asserting the economic and social rights discussed in the Constitution – the right to education, the right to information, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to equality, among others. Dr. Ambedkar’s advice to ‘educate, organise and agitate’ is more relevant than ever.
 
(This is an edited version of the presentation made by the author at the Department of Social Work, Delhi University, during their programme centred around the first Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, in April 2015)

A man of the people is no more

By
-
0


Dr Brahma Dutt Sharma
 
Saathi tere sapno ko manzil tak pahunchayenge ! Zindabaad !
Medha Partkar, Narmada Bachao Andolan 
 
Dr Brahma Dutt Sharma (known to many in the movement just as docsahab), passed away on December 6, 2015 in Gwalior. Ailing for a while, he was with his son and daughter-in-law, at the time of his demise. Integral part of many movements committed to the struggle for human rights and a life of dignity, he was the heart and soul of Andolan Biradari . The Narmada Bachao Andolan and NAPM have in expressed heartfelt condolences to the family and to the Andolan Biradari, at this loss.

He was part of, and led several struggles to attain the Constitutional rights of adivasis, dalits, workers and farmers, over the five decades of his active working life beginning with the trouble-filled days in Bastar (1968). He was the the last commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes between 1986-1991. He also served as the vice chancellor of NEHU, central university and in numerous committees of Planning Commission and National Advisory Council (NAC).

He was a bureaucrat with a deep commitment to the Constitutional rights of the Indian people, a contemporary of late S R Sankaran, B N Yugandhar and others who stood for the people, just a way government servant should. As SC/ST Commissioner, he not only authored seminal reports on empowerment of SC/STs but also played a key role in authorship of the Bhuria Committee report, enactment of the PESA and the Forest Rights Act. As secretary in the ministry of tribal affairs, he initiated the idea of the Tribal Sub Plan.

Until as late as 2014, he continued to collaborate and help Government in its various initiatives with the tribals and adivasis, but also challenged them on every front, for their continued betrayal and non-implementation of various plans and governance failure in the scheduled areas. Extremely disturbed by the violence and war like situation in the tribal areas, and in a letter, dated May 17, 2010 to the President of India, he had written:
 

 I am constrained to state at this critical phase of the history of tribal people that the Union Government is guilty of abdicating its Constitutional responsibility by allowing the situation to degenerate from that of stray revolts in 1960s to ‘warlike situation' at the moment. It has remained unconcerned with the simmering discontent from day one with the adoption of the Constitution. It has not issued a single direction to any State in 60 long years. You as head of the nation, at a critical time must ensure that the Union Government accepts unequivocally its Constitutional responsibility with due apologies for the decimated, shattered and disinherited tribal communities whose irretrievable loss- physical, economical and emotional – is an un-washable blot on the fair face of our nation that still stands by equity and justice.  “

He stood for the rights of the people, for implementation of the self rule in the gram sabhas as mandated by the Constitution and championed the cause of the Hamare Gaon mein Hamara Raaj. Even while serving as the SC/ST Commmsioner, he filed the first case in the Supreme Court (SC), demanding the implementation of the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal (NWDT) award. The court ordered the implementation of the NWDT award by the governments, which paved the way for allotment of land for land to thousands of the project affected families.

You as head of the nation, at a critical time must ensure that the Union Government accepts unequivocally its Constitutional responsibility with due apologies for the decimated, shattered and disinherited tribal communities whose irretrievable loss- physical, economical and emotional – is an un-washable blot on the fair face of our nation that still stands by equity and justice

Today, in blatant violation of the Supreme Court order as also the order of numerous tribunals and commissions and in the face of continued struggle of Narmada Bachao Andolan and other organisations, the NDA II government is pushing ahead with the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, leading to submergence of nearly 2 lakh plus people in the Narmada Valley.

Dr Sharma was a visionary and was troubled by the growing inequity in the society in the wake of neo liberal reforms pushed by the government. He worked tirelessly to implement the laws, policies, programmes and schemes of the government using all the means available to him, but he knew the real swaraj will come only if people themselves organised and fought control over their own lives, their means of livelihood, control over natural resources, had a say in the development plan and became a beneficiary in the process of development. He founded the Bharat Jan Andolan and lent his voice and support to Narmada Bachao Andolan, National Alliance of People’s Movements, Kisani Pratishtha Manch, Campaign for Survival and Dignity and many more people’s struggles and movements.

He travelled throughout the country and propagated his views and solutions to the farmers and workers distress, advocated for their rights and kept stressing the fact that we are headed towards a agrarian crisis and something which stemmed from the fact that farmers and workers were not getting their due. They were not being compensated for their efforts and hard work. He would often ask at the gatherings, bata mere yaar, meri mehnat kaa mool hai kya ?

 He wrote extensively and also published for which he set up his publishing unit, Sahyog Kutir Prakashan. He lived frugally and minimally, travelled across the country as a simpleton, wearing his dhoti kurta and remained accessible to everyone. Even though unwell, he joined the NAPM at the completion of 20 years of NAPM at its biennial convention in Pune, last year.  

He will be missed for his courage of conviction and the dedication to the cause of the marginalized. In his death we all have lost a great teacher and a comrade, who stood by us in times of deep crisis and in struggle.
 

Has India betrayed its indigenous peoples, the Adivasis?

By
-
0


Soni Sori      Courtesy: feministsindia.com

On November 26, 1949, the Constitution Council signed and passed the Constitution of India. Sixty-six years after we gave ourselves the Indian Constitution, the right to life and dignity of India’s indigenous peoples, the Adivasis are being threatened not just by militarisation and state violence but also by a failure of the nation to enforce the Constitutional Scheme contained in its Fifth and Sixth Schedules. Sudha Bharadwaj makes a strong plea to recall the Constitutional mandate
 
Of late, an interesting phenomenon is occurring in Bastar. Thousands of villagers are gathering at police stations to protest against illegal arrests, detentions and tortures – at Kookanar, Kuakonda and Tongpal. In many of these peaceful mass demonstrations, Soni Sori, who herself suffered custodial sexual violence and long incarceration on false charges, and today dons an AAP topi is the organizer. In the past few months she has exposed the fake encounter of Nuppo Bhima at Revali, of Podia Hemla at Nahadi and of Bhima Mandavi at Nilvaya. An irate IG (Naxal Operations) Kalluri has addressed a press conference urging people to socially boycott her. Recently he had also been embarrassed by her press conference, which revealed that out of the 300 Naxal surrenders boasted by the police, 80% turned out to be unarmed villagers.
 
Democratic voices in Chhattisgarh have been repeatedly demanding that the way to de-escalate violence in the Bastar region would be to rehabilitate people in their villages, allow them to rebuild their ravaged agrarian and forest based economies, restore the civil administration and whole heartedly comply with the Forest Rights Act and PESA Act to give the adivasis of the area substantial rights. Rights to land, livelihood and life. Decisions to carry out large scale mining and set up industries in that area can only be effective if carried out after a genuine consultation with the people. It is only this, that can reduce the polarization between security forces on the one hand and the adivasi people at large on the other, and can prevent imminent genocide in the name of counterinsurgency.
 
It is time, then, to recall the Constitution of India.
 
Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution
It was the prolonged and fierce resistance of the tribal peoples in large tracts of British India that had forced the British administration to accept that the areas dominated by tribal populations must be treated as “excluded” or “partially excluded” areas (that is areas excluded from the general laws); and also to bring in special laws – the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, the Godavari Agencies or Ganjam and Vishakhapatnam Act, the SanthalParganas Tenancy Act or special provisions in existing Acts such as in the Bombay Land Revenue Code.

The intent was this: in these areas, through such provisions, the tribals (adivasis) were protected from exploitation by money lenders; their rights and title to enjoy the lands in their occupation were to be assured, and their culture and methods of self-governance to be preserved. The infiltration of non-tribal people, and the purchase of lands by them, except with the prior sanction of an officer appointed by the government on its behalf, was prohibited.

All this was not done borne out of any generosity of the imperial masters. These protective provisions stemmed from a realisation that nothing else was sustainable.

Post-independence, the “partially excluded” and “excluded” areas were more or less incorporated into the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution. While the tribal areas of the North East were covered by the Sixth Schedule which provided for autonomous district councils, the Fifth Schedule was conceived of as an area governed directly by the Union through the Governor who, in consultation with the Tribes Advisory Council, had powers of a quasi-legislative nature to repeal or modify, in the interests of peace and governance of the Scheduled area, any legislation of the State Assembly or the Parliament. Most of the tribes recognized by the British administration were listed as the Scheduled Tribes in various different states. (Of course there were tribes left out of the schedule, and areas left out of the scheduled areas and those communities are struggling to assert their identity and autonomy even today.)

A very large proportion of Chhattisgarh’s geographical area – 60.57% – is covered under the Fifth Schedule. Districts which are fully under Schedule are – Surajpur, Balrampur, Sarguja, Koriya, Jashpur, Gariyaband, Kanker, Bastar, Kondagaon, Sukma, Dantewada, Narayanpur and Beejapur. With the passage of the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 the Constitutional principle recognizing the special way of life, customary governance and autonomy of tribal people was implemented in statutory law. This constitutional guarantee became statutorily enforceable only forty-nine years after we attained independence.

 The terse Act establishes the centrality and powers of the Gram Sabha. It empowers the Gram Sabha to safeguard community resources, approve development plans and projects, enforce prohibition or regulation of sale of intoxicants, and restore unlawfully alienated land. Consultation with the Gram Sabha is required prior to acquisition or resettling of project affected persons, and its consent is mandatory for mining minor minerals.

Most importantly the Gram Sabha can exercise powers over institutions and functionaries in the social sector, and the Panchayati Raj institutions at higher levels are forbidden from usurping its powers. Acts inconsistent with PESA were to have been appropriately amended or repealed within a year – by 24th December 1997. In other words the PESA Act provided a template to exercise a substantial measure of grass-root democracy and autonomy and could have been the mechanism by which the tribal people could have engaged on their own terms with the juggernaut of ‘development’ – the mining and corporate land acquisitions that were to follow.

Of  late, an interesting phenomenon is occurring in Bastar.. Thousands of villagers are gathering at police stations to protest against illegal arrests, detentions and tortures – at Kookanar, Kuakonda, Tongpal. In many of these peaceful mass demonstrations, SoniSori, who herself suffered custodial sexual violence and long incarceration on false charges, and today dons an AAP topi is the organizer. In the past few months she has exposed the fake encounter of NuppoBhima at Revali, of Podia Hemla at Nahadi and of BhimaMandavi at Nilvaya.

Tragically that was not to be. As laid out, powerfully and simply, by Dr. BD Sharma in his work “Unbroken History of Broken Promises”, the laws for the scheduled areas were never effectively implemented. Governors failed to exercise their legislative powers. Even though they were not bound to act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers, they continued to act as if they were.

The Tribes Advisory Council has been rendered a formality in Chhattisgarh. It is headed by the (non-tribal) Chief Minister. Many Governors did not submit their annual reports regularly, and those who did, hardly conveyed the growing crisis in these areas. In Madhya Pradesh (and therefore in Chhattisgarh) despite a specific notification dated 31.01.2000 laying out in detail the manner in which the Gram Sabha is to be consulted prior to land acquisition, the interpretation that “consultation” is not “consent” have rendered the Gram Sabha powerless in even modifying, let alone nullifying developmental projects. (It is quite another matter that while interpreting “consultation” in the appointment of judges, the Supreme Court has been quite clear that consultation is indeed consent!).

It was the historic ‘Samatha’ judgment – that held that private companies being “non-tribal” could not be permitted to mine in the Scheduled Areas, rather only government companies or co-operatives of the adivasi people could do so – that had provided an opportunity to organise adivasi co-operatives and support engagement of the tribal people with the developmental process on a level playing field. However the “Samatha Committee” formed in Chhattisgarh does not appear to have interfered at all, not even at one place, in the grant of mining leases to private companies, in order to assert tribal rights.  While the Samatha judgment has not been modified/ overturned by a larger bench of the Supreme Court, disparaging remarks have been made by co-ordinate benches of the Court, not dealing specifically with the issues raised therein, thus eroding its credibility without a direct challenge.

The Preamble to the Forest Rights Act, 2006 proclaims that it was passed to correct a historic injustice and to provide rights – both individual and communal – to tribal people and other traditional forest dwellers to live in, cultivate in, gather forest produce in and maintain nistari rights in forests – which since the British era had in the legal framework become “State property” and in which framework, the adivasis, who had lived in and co-existed with the forests for centuries, had become “encroachers”. While the critics of the Act rightly point out that the Act tries to limit and to privatize/ individualise ownership of forest lands, there is no doubt precious rights have been sought to be recognized by this Act.


Courtesy: nandinisundar.blogspot.in
 
Chhattisgarh claims to be the “No. 1” State in FRA (Forest Rights Acts) implementation, however the ground reality reveals something else altogether, in fact yet more injustice, namely:-
 
1.  More than 50% of all claims filed have been rejected and the total land for which pattas have been granted are less than estimates made of forest encroachments in the erstwhile State of Madhya Pradesh 20 years ago. Clearly the pattas granted have been of very small parcels of land, sometimes, like for the baiga primitive tribe, just homestead land, on which they cannot survive.

2.  Very few applications for community rights over forests have been accepted or processed, and if granted, often contain unacceptable provisions making such rights subject to plans of the forest department. In fact even the special application forms for rights on communal resources were not made available in most blocks in Chhattisgarh, and deadlines were repeatedly quoted for not accepting forms, despite clarifications from the Tribal Welfare Ministry.

3.  The centrality of the Gram Sabha in the process of granting of forest rights; and the fact that, in the Act, the Gram Sabha is the investigating and certifying authority with regard to whether a forest dweller has been settled on a certain parcel of land, the acceptability of evidence necessary for establishing this, and the period and extent of such settlement; has been completely disregarded. As a result it is the Forest Department that has de facto been the verifying or certifying authority, leaving the adivasi at its mercy yet once more.

4.  The provisions in the Forest Rights Act that explicitly lay down that the determination of the rights must be carried out prior to any displacement even when a Forest is declared a Reserve Forest/ Eco-sensitive Area, is also being violated with impunity. Even otherwise, the explicit provisions prohibiting eviction of forest dwelling communities during the process of determination of Forest Rights have been ignored in a large number of cases, where “dabang” (powerful) communities have evicted primitive tribal groups and dalits with the tacit support of the authorities.
 
 
Which way – Indigenous Rights or Genocide?
In the Bastar division, a proposed ultra-mega steel plant in Dilmili is facing mass protests, even as Tata waves goodbye to the land at Lohandiguda acquired through coercive Gram Sabhas more than 5 years back. Recently the people of 25 villages blockaded the roads to the NMDC Bailadila Iron Ore Complex (district Dantewada) to protest its proposed expansion. They were angered by the fact that so few local adivasi youth had been employed, even though the Shankini and Dankini rivers have been running red with iron ore fines for the past few decades.
 
The Polavaram dam, which threatens to inundate scores of villages of Chhattisgarh- Odisha- Andhra, is being constructed without Gram Sabha consultation, proper survey or rehabilitation of the project affected, as the padayatra of the Adivasi Mahasabha (affiliated with the CPI) has exposed. Approximately 7443 hectares of land in Kanker, Narayanpur and Dantewada alone have been given out in prospecting leases to various private companies as per the Government website, yet in villages falling within the proposed Rowghat iron ore mines in Kanker district, when villagers and community workers mark their community forest boundaries with GPS machines, they are illegally detained by the Border Security Force.  The Government, that is forever exhorting the tribals of Bastar to shun extremism and join the mainstream, refuses to engage with these peaceful mass movements, raising eminently legal issues, and only responds by treating all dissent as Naxalism.
 
The Government of Chhattisgarh admits that after Salwa Judum in the year 2005, 644 villages of the then Dantewada district, whose overwhelmingly adivasi population was about 350000, had been emptied out. While a lakh of people might have fled to Andhra Pradesh/ Telangana, a large proportion of this population has gone deeper into the forests.

With the withdrawal of educational and health services of the State as well as ration shops from these so-called “Naxal” stronghold areas, a situation has arisen in which several lakh adivasis have been automatically “outlawed”. This population is being deprived of basic needs. Anti Naxal operations in such an area could result in a virtual genocide and killings of unarmed civilians and non-combatants on a large scale. Additionally, the State program of bringing adivasi children to study in roadside porta-cabins and ashrams (where incidentally cases of food poisoning, medical negligence and sexual violence are being reported regularly) and separating them from their families is repeating the “historical mistakes” committed by the Australian government on its indigenous peoples, for which the Australian Prime Minister recently rendered a public apology.

The Indian state claims that Naxalism is the “greatest internal security threat” and is justifying levels of militarization akin to occupation and war. On the other hand, it has refused to accept the situation, as defined in international human rights law, as one of “internal armed conflict” since that would mean permitting international observers such as the UN Special Rapporteurs, the International Red Cross, Amnesty International or Medicines Sans Frontiers to visit and ensure that all parties to the conflict abide by the Geneva Protocol. It would also mean ensuring the safety and welfare of non-combatant civilians caught up in the conflict. India is a signatory to the Covenant on Indigenous Rights that does not permit military occupation without consultation.

Historically, worldwide, capitalism has come in to societies riding on the back of indigenous genocides. But a recent meeting in Bolivia, where indigenous people from all over Latin America gathered, and where they resolved to save Mother Earth, is perhaps the new direction the world needs to move towards, in order to survive.

Not free to love

By
-
0


 
His story
 
He starts his testimony with a video showing a young woman of about 20 to 24 years, singing a popular bollywood song. She was clearly enjoying herself as she sang, aware that she is being recorded on a phone camera. He stands there letting the video play for a good 2 minutes until someone helpfully suggests that he should turn the clip off and speak now.

I was aware that the young man about to speak, was going to tell his own experience of the price he and his wife paid for their audacity to fall in love and marry each other despite belonging to different castes, two particularly hostile groups in Rajasthan.

I hoped against hope that he wouldn’t say that this young, vivacious woman, singing for -most likely – his camera phone was now dead. She was. She died of electrocution a few months back at her father’s home. An accident, the young man was informed.

They fell in love when they were in ninth standard at school. They broke up because the woman’s family had come to know about their relationship. They met again after many years and found themselves in love again. There were difficulties again when the woman’s family came to know. She feared that her father was going to take her away to another town and get her married to someone else. They were left with no choice but to elope and get married. They stayed away, sheltered by an organisation that promised to keep them safe for a few months. They were struggling to find a safe place after that until the young man’s mother convinced him to come back home and bring his wife along. She would stay safe and with them, she promised. The young woman was apprehensive but he assured her that they could count on his mother to be on their side.

Who would have I trusted, if not my own mother, he asks the audience.

What kind of an arrangement is it that denies the most ordinary of choices to a young couple and allows the most sickening, extraordinary acts of cruelty to be passed off as an unfortunate but ordinary incidence.

At the railway station, the two families waited for the couple to arrive. The young woman was taken away by her father. He recalls the phone calls she could make to him, thanks to a sympathetic sister. She would tell him of her ill-treatment, the abuse and shame heaped upon her for ruining the family’s honour. He went to meet the father. He begged and pleaded, offered to change his caste officially, anything, that would convince him to let them live together. He was advised to be patient until the young woman’s older sister’s approaching wedding was done. They will then resolve this issue, he was told. His wife told him that she had reasons to fear for her life but was certain that she won’t be harmed until the wedding. The two of them decided that they will find a way to get her out after that. She told him to wait for her call on a certain date.

He waited. He waited the next day too but when the promised call didn’t come, he called her home in desperation. The father picked the phone and informed him that she was dead. In disbelief, he set out to find for himself. The girl had already been cremated, he learned. From bits and pieces of information he could get from neighbours, he has reasons to believe that she was electrocuted in a water tank that had current running through it. Yes, an accident, the family informed him.

This happened about three months ago, we learn. She left a long electronic trail but the justice system hasn’t moved. He has compiled every single document he could and has been running from pillar to post to get some semblance of justice, a closure. He finds little help. Those who sympathise tell him to accept the fate; it was unfortunate but nothing will bring her back, he is advised. Only this group stood by me, he says pointing to the activists who have been helping him since they found out about the case. Tell me what to do, he implores the audience, as if someone would be able to give an answer that could make things alright. His bewildered helplessness was for all to see and most of us present there, perhaps, felt it ourselves.

We learn later that he continues to interact with her on facebook. Writes to himself from her facebook account and then responds from his. Both of them declare their love for each other in their interactions. After his testimony, he sits with a bowed head staring at his hands and I catch him counting something on his fingers, once. 

How ordinary their story could have been. Two young people fall in love, decide to spend their lives together and go through the joys and tribulations of relationships, of life. But they did not have the good fortune to experience the ordinary. A young woman’s life was snuffed out of her for being audacious enough to want to live. And a young man was left broken; left to play the part of both his beloved and himself in his desire to continue living a few moments of the normal, the ordinary. 

What kind of an arrangement is it that denies the most ordinary of choices to a young couple and allows the most sickening, extraordinary acts of cruelty to be passed off as an unfortunate but ordinary incidence?

How often have we heard people saying, beti toh ghar ki izzat hoti hai*?

She is not!

She is a human being, damn it!
 
*For a family, a daughter is their honour.

(A survivor's testimony at a recent conference in Jaipur as recounted by Zeba Imam who was present there. Zeba Imam is assistant professor, centre for women’s studies, Tata Institute for Social Sciences)
 

Understanding the Beast

By
-
0


Delhi 1984        Courtesy: Ram Rahman
 
Communal Violence in independent India

 
Painful yet proud birth
India won her political independence in 1947 amidst a cataclysm of bloodshed and violence which targeted men, women and children only because of their religious identities, and left a million people dead and ten million people permanently displaced from their homelands. This ancient country, traumatically reborn after two centuries of colonial bondage as a secular democratic republic, laid great store therefore in its Constitution on the equal citizenship, security and rights of its religious minorities. 

However, beginning with a communal conflagration in 1961 in Jabalpur, 14 years after independence, many parts of India have witnessed sporadic episodes of communal violence through most years since. There has been no year of complete nation-wide communal peace. There have, on the other hand, been periods during which this violence has spiked, especially since the 1980s, targeting Bengali Muslims in Assam, Sikhs in Delhi after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and Muslims in many parts of India during the Babri Masjid movement which gathered steam in the late 1980s, setting off the massacre in Bhagalpur in 1989 and peaking in the carnage in Gujarat in 2002. The selective mass migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1989, after brutal calls to violence from Islamist groups,  also rendered thousands of this community wrenched from their homeland.

These recurring episodes of post-independence communal riots are marked by disproportionate loss of life and property among religious minorities. The targets were, in large part, mostly Muslims, but in 1984 the violence was against Sikhs, and the last two decades in particular have witnessed growing attacks against Christians. These episodes typically constitute targeted hate killings, gangrapes, arson, large-scale looting and destruction and desecration of places of worship.

Universal Impunity
Two other features are common to all these episodes. The first is almost universal impunity, by which we mean the failure of the criminal justice system to punish – and often even bring to trial –those who commit these communal hate crimes. If at all, it is the foot-soldiers who committed these crimeswho have been charged, but the law almost never catches up with those who instigate and organise these mass attacks. These include senior members of the police, civil administration and political leadership who deliberately fail to prevent, enable through inaction, encourage and sometimes actively participate in these acts of mass violence. The second feature of all episodes of communal violence in independent India is the failure of the state to extend reparations to survivors of the violence at levels which enable them to rebuild their lives, livelihoods, habitats and social relations.

In extensive research undertaken in the Centre for Equity Studies on major episodes of communal violence, we find remarkably common trends of failure of legal justice, failure of reparation and failure to hold public officials accountable.Despite the fact that the episodes under study were widely separated by time and geography, and on occasion by the religious minority which is targeted by the violence, we find similar trends and strategies which systematically deny justice to minorities. We therefore can only conclude that the denial of justice and protection to India’s minorities are not simply random institutional failures, but reflect endemic, widely prevalent and deep-rooted institutional bias against minorities in all arms of the criminal justice system. These denials of justice are not the arbitrary result of chance but are systematic and planned. We also find consistent evidence of the state’s failures to help extend reparations and support to survivors of communal violence, extending their suffering for long after the violence has ended, even across generations.

In South Asia, episodes of violence in which persons are attacked because they belong to a particular religious identity are commonly described as communal riots. The word ‘communal’ in other parts of the world has quite different and often positive connotations, viewed as a source of integration and social solidarity, and its breakdown a major sourceof violence and strife.In South Asia on the other hand, the word has a specific negatively charged meaning of social and political mobilisation of persons based on their religious identity, usually in opposition (sometimes violently) to persons of other religious identities. Prof. Ashutosh Varshney, in Ethnic violence and civic life, 2002 suggests that ‘whenever conflicting groups from two different religions, which are self–conscious communities, clash, it results in a communal riot. An event is identified as a communal riot if (a) there is violence, and (b) two or more communally identified groups confront each other or members of the other group at some point during the violence‘.
 
It is commonplace to use the word ‘riot’ to describe communal violence, in popular usage, reportage and scholarship. But we have grave reservations with this usage, especially if the word riot is understood in its literal sense, which suggests implicitly that people of two communities battle each other, usually spontaneously.But this may not actually be the case, for instance if the communal violence is one-sided, or engineered by dedicated social and political groups, and as we shall see, this indeed is very often the case. For instance, it is an obvious travesty to describe the violence against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 as anti-Sikh riots, because it was exclusively the Sikhs who were the victims of violence in almost all the attacks. The same is the case with many other episodes of communal violence.

This ancient country, traumatically reborn after two centuries of colonial bondage as a secular democratic republic, laid great store therefore in its Constitution on the equal citizenship, security and rights of its religious minorities.

The use in reportage as well as survivors’ own testimonies of other terms,including metaphors such as ‘like a storm’, etc are now more popular. The Gujarat survivors we speak to widely describe the mass violence in 2002 asa ‘toofan’,or storm – but this alternate terminology is more evocative than analytical. The suddenness of monumental disruption and destruction suggested by the metaphor of the storm is what catches the imagination, but analytically this doesn’t sufficiently reflect the planned, intentional violence that we will argue characterise most ‘riots’. Other terms like carnage, slaughter, massacre or bloodbath, are more apt descriptionsevoking the actual character of such violence.

The pertinent analytically rigorous terminology for this phenomenon could be hate communal violence or targeted communal violence, and these terms are mainly what we use here. Even so, we still sometimes describe episodes as riots, because this is how these have been described in judicial reports and scholarly studies. However although sometimes we do use the term riots, it is not to suggest anywhere that these are spontaneous clashes between people of diverse religious communities.

It is also important to recognise that hate and targeted violence can be directed at people not only because of their religious identity, but also because of their caste (as in anti-Dalit atrocities), ethnicity (attacks on north-eastern Indians in Delhi and other cities), gender, region (attacks in Mumbai by the Shiv Sena on South Indians and later from UP and Bihar), language (riots against Hindi in Tamil Nadu), sexuality (attacks against homosexual men and transgendered persons), and occasionally stigmatised ailments (attacks on people living with leprosy or HIV/AIDS). These groups of victimised people can also be conceptualised as communities, just as self-conscious religious groups have been. However, because of the peculiar history of India’s bloody partition on religious grounds and the continued fractures created across South Asia by religious identity, when we speak of communal violence we are concerned conventionally with a specific kind of hate violence which targets people for their religious identity.

The word ‘communal’ is also closely tied up with the idea of communalism, or social and political ideologies and mobilisation of people on the basis of their religious identities. In Prof. Bipin Chandra’s view in Communalism in modern India, 1984, communalism as an ideology comprised of these three basic elements or stages; each element functions as an assumption upon which the next is based. The three also form a continuum, feeding into each other. The intensity of hostility against other religious groups increases as people move from one stage to the next. The first stage of beliefs in this continuum is that people belonging to a religious group (rather than a socio-economic – class, caste, occupational – or gender, linguistic, regional, age, disability or other cultural or political categories) have common secular interests.  The belief is that people can act politically and protect collective interests only as self-conscious members of these communities. Religious leaders for each community become the only people who can protect the groups’ interests.
 
The next level of communal beliefs is that secular interests – economic, cultural, social and political – interests of followers of one religion diverge from those of others. ‘Liberal’ or ‘moderate’ communalism, as Chandra terms it, is when an individual could publicly profess that (often) conflicting  identities and interests are capable of existing in harmony and can be accommodated simultaneously, while holding on to essentially communalist views which privilege religious identities over all others and homogenise people following a particular faith. During India’s freedom struggle, Madan Mohan Malviya, Lajpat Rai and Jinnah, according to Chandra, in India’s struggle for independence (1857-1947), which he co-authored in 1989,functioned under liberal communal frameworks. The third stage and final stage of ‘extreme communalism’ is reached when interests of followers of different religion-based communities are seen to be incompatible, antagonistic and mutually exclusive. Extreme communalists use the language and instruments of hate and violence against people, cultures and beliefs of the antagonist ‘other’ religious community. It is this third phase which spawns communal violence, although the grounds for its emergence is paved by the first two stages. Chandra goes on to argue that communalism is not specific to India, comparing it to movements such as fascism and anti-Semitism in other countries, which he suggests were produced by similar belief systems.

We also find consistent evidence of the state’s failures to help extend reparations and support to survivors of communal violence, extending their suffering for long after the violence has ended, even across generations.

A few more points are in order in the language of scholars and lay observers regarding communal violence. One relates to the prefixing of the word ‘mass’ to communal violence. When does a communal targeted hate attack become a mass attack? Is it merely a question of numbers? Is communal killing of one person not mass violence, whereas if three are killed is it mass violence?But this demarcation is in the end subjective. Also it can render invisible seemingly discrete small acts of communal violence, each not ‘mass’ in character when seen individually, but which actually are part of a larger orchestrated plan. Finally, there is the question of what constitutes violence as distinct from discrimination or segregation. There is a great deal of discrimination to which religious minorities are commonly subjected. These include a number of disabilities in accessing housing, jobs, credit, entry into educational institutions, access to basic services in their habitations such as drinking water. These were well documented in the Prime Minister’s High Level Committee set up the UPA government in 2006, presided over by Justice Sachar (link: http://www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sachar), on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India.These can also be seen analytically as forms of passive violence. Even more pertinently, there can be communally charged taunts and insults – in classrooms, workplaces, and places of community gathering.The Centre for Equity Studies’ India Exclusion Report describes many instances of communally charged taunts against Muslims in classrooms, by both teachers and peers; Sikhs children were also routinely subjected to this in the 1980s. There can be active hate propaganda, such as in the literature of communal organisations like the RSS and the Jamaat-e-Islami, or the speeches and writing of Bal Thackerey during the communal carnage in Bombay in 1992-93.  And then there is active physical targeted and hate violence, involving attacks on the body and property on persons of the designated ‘other’ religion, involving culpable heinous offences such as murder, injury, arson, and looting.

It is important also to focus on the particularly gendered nature of hate violence targeted against women.  Women are regarded within patriarchy as the property of the men of that community, and sexual violence is the ultimate humiliation of the community and its men. The social and legal impunity for sexual violence is so deep rooted that until recently, sexual violence in the aftermath of targeted violence was in the large majority of cases not investigated, recorded or punished. Often it was not even acknowledged, because victims were openly or subtly coerced by social shame to obliterate these histories. It is entirely due to the intellectual and political struggles of women in social movements in this country that sexual violence is now better acknowledgedand understood, and the layers of impunity that covered it are being peeled away. As a result, India’s rape law hasbeen re-examined and amended.  During targeted mass violence, sexual violence is used as a double edged weapon – while women bear the torture of rape, it culturally emasculates the men who embody the guilt of not being able to ‘live up’ to gender expectations: ‘I couldn’t protect my wife…,’  a masculine lament we often hear from survivors.   

Which of these various forms should one include in a discussion of communal violence? Usually scholars separate questions of discrimination from active physical hate violence including sexual violence, and hate propaganda stands in a somewhat twilit zone in between. Many recognise that hate propaganda incites violence, and therefore regard it to be criminally culpable violence, even if it is not active violence in itself, because it still instigates such violence. But there are those who are much more fundamentally convinced of the absolute value of free speech and expression, and would not like legal bars and state monitoring of hate propaganda, because this is subject to official interpretation, and can be used equally against people who oppose hate propaganda.

Scholars of communal violence construct diverse and often adversarial interpretations of what the roots of communal violenceare, but remarkably most are united in one view: they regard communalism to be a product of modernity, arising out of conditions existing in colonial India and the enterprise of nation-building.  In Bipin Chandra’s viewin India’s struggle for independence(1857-1947), ‘communalism is not a vestige of the past; it might use ideas that have roots in medieval/ancient times, but it’s a modern technology and political trend that expresses urges and serves political needs of particular social groups. Its social roots, economic, social and political objectives lie in the modern period of Indian history.’ Nehru too had noted, ‘One must never forget that communalism is a latter-day phenomenon that has grown up before our eyes.’
 
Many had hoped that Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination for his courageous and principled espousal, against enormous odds and opposition, of the equal rights of minorities, would stun the nation into a settled undisputed acceptance of the secular idea of India after freedom. But India’s continuing history of both communal violence and mobilisation, peaking at various moments such as the current time of writing in 2015, are reminders that communal violence today has evolved into a cynical but powerful ploy of political mobilisation through social division, and constitutes modern India’s democracy greatest threat.
 
 
References:

  1. Who is to Blame, Communalism Combat, March 1998 (https://www.sabrangindia.in/sabrangthemes/who-is-to-blame)
  2. Srikrishna Commission Report,  http://www.sabrang.com/srikrish/sri%20main.htm
  3. Concerned Citizens Tribunal Report, Gujarat 2002, http://www.sabrang.com/tribunal/

India’s Top bureaucrats speakout

By
-
0

“It is an unfortunate fact that in successive communal riots in independent India, justice has not been done to the victims. In many cases the guilty have gone unpunished. There have also been allegations of biased handling by our police. These factors only increase alienation. Let’s not forget our peculiar circumstances – we have a neighbour whose intelligence wing is waiting to manipulate such alienation. It is potentially a very dangerous situation. The state and every section of civil society must urgently look into it

B.G.Deshmukh
Former cabinet secretary
 

“We put justice as the first principal of our Constitution, but how many of us believe in it today ? We will pay a heavy price for relegating justice to the far corner. Why cannot we see that impartial justice is meant to prevent individuals or groups from taking the law into their own hands to secure it? Why does communal rioting continue in the land ? Why did the Coimbatore bomb blast shatter and kill?

KF Rustomji
Former DGP, BSF Padma Vibhushan
 

Archived from Communalism Combat, March  1998, Year 5  No. 41, Cover Story

 

Policemen speak out

By
-
0


Julio Ribeiro
Former commissioner of police,Bombay and DGP, Punjab

““We must remember that fundamentalism of the majority, by sheer virtue of the numbers involved, is much more dangerous than the fundamentalism of the minority. It therefore needs to be singled out and targeted first because it is through this fundamentalism of the majority that the politics of hate gets exacerbated. What were the two major incidents of bomb blasts at Bombay and Coimbatore but a terrorist response. And what is terrorism but violent actions, in retaliation, that target innocents? Terrorism doesn’t pick and choose its targets. It’s a man-eating tiger, that’s why it is so dangerous. Terrorism is the response of those who cannot really fight . This was the message from Bombay and Coimbatore: ‘We cannot fight you so there’…..It is about time that the state sat up and took notice.

The experience of the minority during riots , which is to a great extent based on real-life, true experiences has resulted in a complete loss of faith in the law and order machinery. Unless the police shows through attitude and action that they are impartial, this faith cannot be restored.


Satish Sahney
Former commissioner of police, Bombay

“Muslims must really experience that they have a stake in this system that wants them here and is there to protect them. Or else, we will be creating more disgruntled youngsters like the young Jalees Ansari . Ansari , in his affidavit before the Justice Srikrishna Commission enquiring into the Bombay riots and the bomb blasts, has shown how a youngster, if he feels that he is denied rights of free and fair existence, drifts towards fundamentalist outfits. The biography of this youngster also reveals how from making crude explosives, his training grew into making more and more sophisticated explosives.

We are all aware that Pakistan’s ISI does have a one-point programme of causing eruptions here since it believes that this is an effective proxy war to conduct against its neighbour. But what was the spark that ignited the young Ansari into doing what he did? The feeling that as a Muslim, he and his religion are not safe and free from attack, so he had to learn to protect himself. This is a potentially very dangerous situation.

It is vital from the point of view of both justice and national security that we begin to take cognisance of this dangerous reality.”


Vibhuti N.Rai
Inspector General Border Security Force

“ “In Bombay during the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots (December 1992 and January 1993 ), it was quite evident that state failed to provide security to the minorities. Many hundred Muslims were killed, the whole community was left at the mercy of Hindu communal goondas.

In Coimbatore, also, after the assassination of a traffic constable, Selvaraj, about two dozen Muslims were killed in a manner which puts into very serious question the neutrality and professionalism of the Tamil Nadu police. The failure of the state in providing protection to the minorities will always lead disgruntled elements to become instruments in the hands of agencies such as ISI who will be only too happy to utilise them in blasts like Bombay and Coimbatore.

We should not forget that the failure of the state in the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi provided thousands of volunteers to the separatist movement launched by Sikh militants. The sooner we learn lessons from the Coimbatore blasts the better.”

We have now been witnessing not riots but tendencies towards ‘ethnic cleansing’

Shankar Sen
Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission, former IPS officer

“The manner in which members of the minority community are branded ‘anti-national’ is wrong and incorrect. The other regrettable fact is that in very few cases are the perpetrators of crimes during communal riots ever punished. Scores of cases are withdrawn under the guise of ‘preserving communal amity’.

The broadening of the composition of the police force is a must. This need not be through reservations but in a situation where there is an abysmally low representation of minorities in the police force, through affirmative action. We must urgently strive to have a more mixed and representative police force in the country. We have now been witnessing not riots but events that are marked in their tendencies towards an “ethnic cleansing.” Such a situation reflects not only a gross failure of the state’s law and order machinery but lays the country and sections of our populace vulnerable to take recourse to unlawful acts in retaliation.”

The question of alienation (in mino-rities) must be addressed’

Padma Rosha
Former Director General of Police

“In Bombay during the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots (December 1992 and January 1993 ), it was quite evident that state failed to provide security to the minorities. Many hundred Muslims were killed, the whole community was left at the mercy of Hindu communal goondas.

In Coimbatore, also, after the assassination of a traffic constable, Selvaraj, about two dozen Muslims were killed in a manner which puts into very serious question the neutrality and professionalism of the Tamil Nadu police. The failure of the state in providing protection to the minorities will always lead disgruntled elements to become instruments in the hands of agencies such as ISI who will be only too happy to utilise them in blasts like Bombay and Coimbatore.

We should not forget that the failure of the state in the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi provided thousands of volunteers to the separatist movement launched by Sikh militants. The sooner we learn lessons from the Coimbatore blasts the better.”

Archived from Communalism Combat, March  1998, Year 5  No. 41, Cover Story,

 

Demanding justice, 31 years later

By
-
0


Courtesy: AP

31st Anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Leak, December 2, 2015
In the words of the victims and defenders

 
The tragedy, what actually happened ?
The escape of about 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) – a highly toxic chemical – from a storage tank on the premises of the pesticide plant of Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) in Bhopal – the capital of Madhya Pradesh – on the night of December 2/3, 1984 resulted in disaster of mammoth proportions. Due to culpable criminal negligence manifest in an absence on the part of the plant management in taking adequate safety precautions, water and other impurities – that cause MIC to react violently – entered one of the MIC storage tanks resulting in exothermic reactions and forcing MIC and its reaction products to escape in the form of froth and lethal gases. The escaping poisonous gases, which were heavier than air, spread across 40 square kilometres of the area of Bhopal, covering about 36 of the 56 municipal wards, leaving in its wake more than 20,000 dead (over several years) and inflicting injuries in varying degree on about 550,000 others. About 900,000 persons had inhabited Bhopal then. The pernicious impact on the flora and fauna in the affected area was equally grave. UCIL was then under the control of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) – a U.S. multi-national company, which is currently wholly owned by the Dow Chemical Company (DOW), USA. 

The struggle for justice and accountability by, with and for the survivors has encompassed issues of medical relief, rehabilitation, compensation, environmental remediation and justice. Over three decades, consecutive governments, state and central have simply rejected legitimate demands for a comprehensive assessment of the ramifications of the disaster to enable just remedial measures. The limited settlement of February 14/15, 1989 was rejected by survivors and rights groups representing them as paltry and a sham. Each gas-victim today, has been finally awarded less than one-fifth of the sum allotted even as per that settlement.

Year 2015 brought little progress during 2015 on the most pressing issues concerning the Bhopal gas-victims. This remains a matter of serious concern. The current status of issues such as health care, enhancement of compensation, rehabilitation, prosecution of the accused, remediation of the environment, etc., may be briefly recounted as follows:         
                                                                                                               
Basic right to health denied
The gross indifference on the part of both the state and central governments to the health needs of the gas-victims continues to be as grim as ever. Apart from the fact that a fairly large health-infrastructure has been built in terms of buildings and number of hospital beds due to the pressure exerted over the years by organizations supporting the cause of the Bhopal gas victims, the quality of health care in terms of investigation, diagnosis,  treatment, research and record-keeping continues to be abysmal. The persistent apathy of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the government of Madhya Pradesh in monitoring the health status of the Bhopal gas victims has been shocking.

Bhopal gas disaster survivors do not have the simple benefit of proper medical records (of each person) and even a health-booklet each to enable monitoring and treatment. Despite the showcase hospital infrastructure, clinics with computerization this simple and organised basic right remains unfulfilled.

The limited settlement of February 14/15, 1989 was rejected by survivors and rights groups representing them as paltry and a sham. Each gas-victim today, has been finally awarded less than one-fifth of the sum allotted even as per that settlement.

No proper protocol for treatment of each gas-related ailment has been evolved even 31 years after the disaster reflecting the chronic callousness and apathy of concerned authorities. Mere symptomatic treatment, over-medication due to lack of proper monitoring, and dispensing of sub-standard and spurious drugs has resulted in increasing number of renal failures among the gas-victims. Bhopal-disaster-related medical research, which the ICMR had thoughtlessly discontinued in 1994 and which the ICMR was compelled to revive in 2010, is yet to be pursued with the necessary vigour. The fact is that neither the ICMR nor the state government has any idea of the number of gas-victims suffering under each category of disease arising from respiratory, ophthalmic, gastro-intestinal, neurological, psychiatric, and other problems.

What is equally shocking is that even 31 years after the disaster, most of the gas-victims seeking treatment continue to be classed as suffering from ‘temporary injury’ in order to deny them compensation for permanent injury.    
         
Legal Accountability
It was because of this utter insensitivity on the part of the union of India and the state of Madhya Pradesh that BGPMUS, the Bhopal Group for Information & Action (BGIA) and BGPSSS (as petitioners numbers one, two and three) had filed a writ petition (number 50 of 1998) before the Supreme Court on January 14, 1998. The petitioners pleaded for restarting of disaster-related medical research, monitoring & recording the health status of each gas-victim, improvement in health care facilities, appropriate protocol for treatment of each disaster-related ailment, etc. Fourteen years after the onset of the litigation, and after several interim directions, the Supreme Court finally issued a comprehensive directive on August 9, 2012 acceding to the above prayers of the petitioners. Necessary directions were issued to the union of India, the state of MP and to other concerned institutions in this regard. The petitioners were further directed to pursue the matter before the high court of Madhya Pradesh (MP) – writ petition number 15658 of 2012– a task that BGPMUS & BGPSSS are actively engaged in at present.

Governments defy SC directives
Shockingly, even 39 months after the Supreme Court had passed the said order dated August 9, 2012, neither the central nor the state government(s) has taken the necessary steps to comply fully with all the directions of the Court. What is most appalling and disheartening is that even 31 years after the disaster, proper health records of the gas-victims are not being maintained and, although claims are being made to the contrary, the fact is that gas-victims do not have a hard copy of his/her complete medical record in his/her possession.

It is because of this failure of the respondents to comply with the said order of the Supreme Court dated August 9, 2012, BGPMUS & BGPSSS were compelled to file a contempt petition (No.832 of 2015) on May 15,2015 against the concerned officials of the government of India and Madhya Pradesh and allied institutions such as ICMR, NIREH and BMHRC.

Chronology of the contempt petition
May 15,2015     contempt petition against concerned officials of the government of India and Madhya Pradesh and allied institutions such as ICMR, NIREH and BMHRC filed by BGPMUS & BGPSSS

October 27, 2015      contempt petition admitted, notice issued, petitioners asked to filed rejoinder

September 16, 2015   the chief secretary, government of MP, and the secretary, Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief & Rehabilitation Department (BGTRRD), who are respondent numbers 3 & 4, had already filed their reply

November 30, 2015 since, the responses in the Reply filed by the said Respondents were mostly false and misleading, petitioner no.2; BGIA filed an application under article 266 of the Constitution urging the high court to take suo motu action against respondent nos.3 & 4 under sections 191 and 193 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for committing perjury. The application has been admitted. The next date for hearing is January 12, 2016

The persistent apathy of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the government of Madhya Pradesh in monitoring the health status of the Bhopal gas victims has been shocking.
 
Illegal Drug Trials
In 2008, a shocking discovery came to light. The illegal manner in which secret drug trials were being conducted on gas-victims at BMHRC in the period between 2004-2008. Following the exposure, authorities at BMHRC have been making every effort to shield the culprits. BGPMUS & BGPSSS have sought a detailed inquiry into this unsavory incident of using the gas-victims as guinea pigs and have demanded stringent action against the guilty. To legally pursue the matter, BGPMUS & BGPSSS have become interveners in writ petition (C) No.33 of 2012, which was filed to oppose unregulated drug trials in the country, especially by multinational drug companies, and it is currently pending before the Supreme Court.  

Compensation
Twenty-one years after the unjust Bhopal Settlement of February 14/15 1989, the union of India had decided to file a curative petition [curative petition (civil) number 345-347 of 2010] before the Supreme Court on December 3, 2010. This followed a huge public campaign and public outcry (even by the electronic media that has been fairly silent since). This petition challenged the terms of the settlement on grounds that it underestimated figures of both the dead and injured. The UOI has sought enhancement of compensation by an additional Rs.7728 crores over the 1989 settlement amount that was merely about Rs.705 crores. The petition has been admitted but has not yet been taken up for hearing, five years down.

There are significant points of difference in the two interventions. The BGPMUS and BGPSSS do support the UOI’s curative petition especially with regards the total casualty figure (i.e., 5,73,586 victims, including dead and injured) and on the modalities for enhancing compensation (i.e., that it should be based on the dollar-rupee exchange rate that prevailed at the time of the settlement). However, BGPMUS and BGPSSS have serious differences with the central government’s stand on the number of dead (just 5295 according to the curative petition) and the seriously injured (only 4944). The two survivors and human rights organizations also oppose the centre’s paltry claims for relief and rehabilitation and for environmental remediation.

Well documented figures by these organizations (BGPMUS and BGPSSS) put the dead at 20,000+ and seriously injured at 150,000+. These are also the figures (explained in detail) in the special leave petition (SLP No.12893 of 2010) currently pending and which will be heard only after the disposal of UOI’s Curative Petition.  It is to remedy the attempts at dilution of the tragedy both in terms of numbers dead and gravity of the fallout that the organizations concerned have on October 24, 2013 filed an interlocutory application in the centre’s curative petition pointing out the serious inadequacies.

The centre’s conduct, when examined in detail, gets more and more murky. No attempts were made to place the relevant ICMR reports before the claim courts to enable them to fairly assess the types and gravity of injuries suffered by the Bhopal gas victims. In the absence of proper health booklets, which the ICMR and the state government had failed to provide to each gas-victim, circumstantial evidence would have been very valuable in determining the likely degree of injury suffered by a gas-victim.

On all these serious issues, this 31st anniversary of the tragedy, the organizations and Survivors make a collective plea that the curative petition, pending before the Supreme Court for the last five years, should be heard without delay. Before this, the health booklet with his/ her complete medical record should be issued to each gas-victim. Without this, the victim survivors would not be able to access fair compensation that is awarded in terms of the category and degree of injury that can be seen from the individual health record. Today the victims simply do not have the empirical means to prove the extent of injury and the category it falls under.

Hence, the computerisation of health records and coordination between the records contained in various hospitals and clinics treating gas-victims before providing each gas-victim with his/her complete medical records is an immediate need.

Environmental Remediation
Toxic waste that was generated during UCIL’s operation from 1969 to 1984 was dumped in and around the plant leading to severe soil and water contamination. A comprehensive study to estimate the extent and gravity of the damage has not yet been carried out by either the centre or the state government, though thirty one years have passed. Instead, the magnitude of the problem has been grossly underestimated by making it appear that the total toxic waste that needs to be safely disposed of is only about 345 tonnes that is stored at the plant site.

This issue has also been agitated before the Supreme Court both independently in the SLP as also in the intervention in the curative petition.

Survivor organizations have argued that the current proposal to incinerate/bury the toxic waste near Indore is wholly misconceived and it would only result in shifting the problem from Bhopal to Indore. On the contrary, in a preliminary study that was jointly carried out by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur, and the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), Hyderabad, during 2009-2010, it was estimated that “the total quantum of contaminated soil requiring remediation amounts to 11,00,000 MT [metric tonnes]”(p.68). Since the Government of India has submitted that the private incinerator at Pitampur (Indore) has been suitably upgraded to prevent any toxic emission, the Supreme Court has permitted test-incineration of toxic waste currently stored at the Bhopal plant. The results of the tests are awaited.

Bhopal gas disaster survivors do not have the simple benefit of proper medical records (of each person) and even a health-booklet each to enable monitoring and treatment.

Based on the “Polluter Pays Principle”, it is the duty and responsibility of the Dow Chemical Company, USA, which currently owns UCC, to meet the cost of remediating comprehensively the affected environment in and around the UCIL plant with the latest available remediation technology. Similarly, the cost of providing safe-drinking water to the affected population residing in and around the former UCIL plant too has to be borne by DOW. However, the responsibility for providing safe drinking water to the affected population is entirely that of the state government. However, the state government is yet to fulfill that responsibility since supply of safe-drinking water to the affected areas is still very erratic. Moreover, the victims of contaminated water have still not been made eligible for free medical treatment.         
                                                   
Remediation of the estimated 11,00,000 MT of contaminated soil is a far more difficult task. At the initiative of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi, a preliminary attempt was made in April 2013 to bring together on a common platform the various stakeholders (including BGPMUS & BGPSSS) and experts to prepare an Action Plan to remediate the degraded environment. While a draft Action Plan has been worked out, it requires further refinement as well as inputs from other experts and stakeholders, including the government of Madhya Pradesh. The stoic indifference of the state government to this daunting task is alarming. In situ decontamination of the toxic waste (including the contaminated soil & groundwater) using closed-loop remediation technologies is a possibility. With inputs and technical help from UN Environment Programme, cleaning up of the contaminated site in Bhopal is quite feasible. However, the entire costs for the cleanup should be ultimately borne by Dow Chemicals.

Relief and rehabilitation                                                                                       
The State Government has failed to address adequately and with sensitivity a host of socio-economic problems that confronts the chronically sick, the elderly, the differently abled, the widowed, and other vulnerable sections among the gas-victims. The pittance, which was disbursed as compensation in most instances to these sections was never enough to take care of their daily needs. Finding gainful employment in accordance with the reduced capacity to work and to lead a dignified life has been a serious challenge. The state government needs to give far more attention and provide far larger support to the most vulnerable sections of gas-victims than in the past. 

On the 31st anniversary of this man-made-disaster, the Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sanghathan (BGPMUS) and the Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahayog Samiti (BGPSSS) pay their homage to the deceased victims and reiterate their determination to continue to uphold the cause of the survivors and to seek justice for the hapless victims.

 (This article has been prepared based on the detailed press release by Abdul Jabbar and ND Jayaprakash of the BGPMUS and BGPSSS respectively. They can be contacted at jabbar.bhopal@gmail.com / jaypdsf@gmail.com)

1...2,6212,6222,623...2,697Page 2,622 of 2,697

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

Join our mailing list to get the latest human rights news that matters, straight to your mailbox.

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

Join our mailing list to get the latest human rights news that matters, straight to your mailbox.

Important Links

Other Links

CONNECT

Email: sabrangind@gmail.com

© Sabrang | All Rights Reserved