There are facts, damn lies, and then there is Times Now. Amongst all the programmes by news channels on the government’s controversial move to introduce a bill criminalizing Muslim men who divorce their wives through triple talaq, this channel’s discussions stands out.

The bill was tabled by around noon on December 29 in the Lok Sabha and passed by the evening, with either guarded acceptance or opposition from opposition parties including the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Trinamool Congress, and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.  

The paucity of informed debate over the bill was underlined by the speed with which the bill was formulated, tabled and passed, the lack of consultation on its provisions and the fact that the drafts were hardly widely circulated. Public opinion on the implications of criminalising triple talaq tilted towards the government’s stand that it was following the judgment of the Supreme Court to make the practice unconstitutional.

But what happens to the few dissenting voices? To those who rejected it in toto? Or to those who accepted it with reservations or sought amendments to the bill? How do they get treated by the media? The following programme on Times Now is instructive.
 

 
On December 25, three days before the bill was introduced in Parliament,  ‘#Teen Talaq Blockade’ on the opposition by women’s organizations to the bill was broadcast on prime time. The panel comprised Nupur Sharma, BJP spokesperson, Shehzaad Poonawala for the Congress, advocates Sanjay Hegde and Mahmood Paracha, and activist Hasina Khan from a Muslim women’s rights network called the Bebaak Collective.

The Bebaak Collective was also involved in the Supreme Court case which resulted in the judgment that called triple talaq unconstitutional. The Bebaak Collective had also mounted a critique of the bill, stating that any move to criminalise men who practiced instant triple talaq would ultimately backfire on women.
On the surface, the panel appeared to reflect a gamut of public opinion: those in favour, those who accepted the bill albeit with reservations, those who rejected it outright, and those who rejected with some reservations. But the manner in which the debate was conducted quickly showed that this was not going to be  scholarly scrutiny of the bill.  

The montage shrieked: ‘Plot to kill Teen Talaq Bill, plan hatched at secret meeting, Cong MP hosts secret meeting, Teesta NGO lends muscle.’

The anchor and Times Now editor-in-chief, Rahul Shivshankar, announced in a high-pitched tone that political parties were plotting to sabotage the bill. K Rehman Khan, who was a minority affairs minister in the UPA, had hosted a meeting with opposition MPs to ‘ambush’ the bill. The anchor brought in the Times Now correspondent, Madhavdas Gopalakrishnan, who informed viewers of the secret meeting and the ‘hard fact’ that the meeting was attended by members of the Bebaak Collective, described as an organization that was part of ‘Teesta Setalvad’s NGO’, the Sabrang Trust.

Shivshankar added that the Bebaak Collective was providing a legal perspective and that its link to Setalvad’s NGO ‘raised alarm bells’ as “Teesta Setalvad is a known Modi baiter.”

Gopalakrishnan agreed at the outset that this was a democratic country and MPs were free to meet whoever they wanted but, in the very next breath, said the meeting seemed to be ‘political’ in nature! As further evidence of the link between the Bebaak Collective and Teesta Setalvad, he said that a Google search of the Bebaak Collective takes one to the Sabrang Trust’s website.  

Shivshakar intoned: “‘Why did parliamentarians not approach other legal or religious scholars instead of this NGO?”

When given a chance to speak, Hasina Khan tried to clarify that the Bebaak Collective was an independent collective of Muslim women’s organisations across India. It had approached all MPs and even BJP ministers like Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj to argue that the bill was a disastrous idea.

Asked why the Bebaak Collective’s statements appeared on the Sabrang Trust website, Khan tried in vain to explain that its press conference and statements have been covered by several magazines and sites, including Outlook, Frontline and the Guardian. “We can’t stop anyone from using our statements but that does not mean we are linked to anyone”, she said. When she tried to explain the Collective’s stand further, her mike was muted.

While Sharma got a fair bit of time to speak, Poonawala and Hegde were given their space while Paracha got a brief chance to make his intervention. The ‘debate’continued on the channel’s primetime show The Newshour, with the hashtag #TeenTalaqBlockade and flashing headlines which said ‘Plan to ambush ‘equality’ and ‘Why pander to patriarchy?’.
 
Then the volte face….
Now here’s where things get interesting. All of the above occurred on Times Now on December 25. On December 28, the day the bill was passed in the Lok Sabha, the video was taken down from the Times Now site. For much of the day, the site displayed a 404 error with the legend: ‘looks like this is the wrong url or this page has been taken down’.
 

 
By night, the video was uploaded again, this time with a write-up entitled ‘Why pander to patriarchy?’ While the audio was pretty much the same, the montage was markedly different. The text boxes with the screaming headlines and captions (Plot to kill Teen Talaq Bill, plan hatched at secret meeting, Cong MP hosts secret meeting, Teesta NGO lends muscle) had disappeared, leaving a much more visually sober programme.

There’s no explanation from the channel as to why this programme was temporarily taken down and edited, just the cursory ‘updated’ beside the dateline of December 25. For all practical purposes, it gives the impression of being a fresh programme, with a new title.

After the programme was aired on December 25, the Bebaak Collective filed a complaint with Times Now and with the News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) against the way in which the programme misrepresented its work. Khan told The Hoot that the NBSA has acknowledged its complaint and forwarded it to Times Now to seek its response within seven days.

The complaint stated:
‘Bebaak Collective, exercising a democratic right, had made attempts to contact all representatives of all political parties and leaders including Ministers like Mr Arun Jaitley, Ms Sushma Swaraj, Mr Rajnath Singh, Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad and Mr Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi  to explain our apprehensions about why we do not support such a bill. On 10th October of this year, we had met Mr Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Minister of Minority Affairs, the Chairperson of National Minority Commission. We met chairperson of Maharashtra Women Commission and also on 20th November, we met PA to Maneka Gandhi in her Parliament office while she was absent.
While promptness on part of the government should not eschew the role of women’s groups who have struggled for decades to fight against patriarchy, we primarily demand from the government that women’s groups be consulted before bringing any Bill in the Parliament.

We believe the media plays an important role in shaping public opinion. However, these attempts to distort and misrepresent our point of view are highly regrettable and reprehensible. We strongly demand an acknowledgement of this statement in the TV channel as well as an apology for sheer distortion of our work.’
In its press conference and statements circulated to the media, the Bebaak Collective had said it was against criminalization since penal action would not help get justice for women who may instead be deprived of the matrimonial home; that civil redressal measures should be used instead of punitive action to deal with the breakdown of a marriage which is essentially a civil contract between two adults; and that the bill failed to even look at the economic and social security of women, or of other pernicious practices like polygamy or halala.

Despite the more sober look and feel of the programme as it now is online, it is puzzling why Times Now imputed motives to activists who were lobbying with parliamentarians as well as members of the government about their stand on the bill.

“All that we have asked for is a broader consultation on these issues. Is that not democratic? Why did they attack us?’’ asked a mystified Khan.
 
Geeta Seshu is based in Mumbai and is a contributing editor at The Hoot.

This article was first publihed on Hoot.org
 

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Over the last month, the diabolical killing of Gauri Lankesh has galvanized both civil society and journalists towards raising a collective voice against violence and the suppression of free speech. The importance of this unified protest cannot be sufficiently stressed but are we seeing the emergence of any real bond between the two? And, more to the point, what will it take to strengthen this bond?
 
As we came together to observe a month after the killing of Gauri Lankesh, a month when there seems little or no progress in the investigation into her death, these questions are important. Journalists have participated in the ‘From Gandhi to Gauri’ protests called by journalists press clubs and associations all over India on Oct 2. Some of them have also joined the ‘We are Gauri’ protests called primarily by civil society individuals and groups on Oct 5.
 
Gauri Lankesh, who was both a journalist as well as a social activist, would have been heartened at the unified protests against the killings, even if they were held on different days and in different venues across the country.
 
Of course, in some places, both journalists and civil society activists held joint protests. Perhaps the further journalists and civil society activists are from the political and business power centres of Delhi and Mumbai, the easier this is possible. The formal divide between the practicing journalist and the civil society activist is less sharp, the spillover of the life of the journalist and the civil society activist is more diffused, more fluid.
 
For civil society to protest the killing of a journalist is not unusual. After all, journalists are seen as messengers of information and opinion and also as a voice for civil society. The large amorphous mass that goes in the name of ‘civil society’ – activists from social movements, members of NGOs, trade unions, human rights groups, academia, literature, film and art – have been in the forefront of a range of struggles against the devastating impact of policies, laws and programs on the lives of people. They are conscious of the potentially chilling effect of both these policies as well as the violence that has increasingly been meeting its dissent.
 
But do journalists and journalists’ associations and press clubs and unions join the protests over the killing of a social activist? Do they join protests over other important events that shake up society? Or, do they distance themselves from these protests on grounds of objectivity and professionalism (while some prefer to stay away from the protests, preferring to let their work do the talking)? Will their grief and anger over the senseless killing of Gauri Lankesh even bridge the hitherto invisible chasm between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ media?
 
More questions, clearly.

 
The ‘activist’ journalist
 
When journalists are killed, as they have been with such alarming regularity over the last few years (31 since 2010 when the media watch site, The Hoot, began monitoring free speech attacks), several questions are raised about their identity – whether they were journalists at all and whether they were killed for their journalism. Often, it is the police – the first line of investigators – who raise these doubts. These are then picked up and amplified by the media reporting the killings.
 
In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Gauri Lankesh, there was such murmurs too. In the course of her work, Gauri Lankesh had opposed the rise of Hindutva terror. She had received multiple threats and it was clear she was targeted and silenced for her views as well as her work. But while doubts were raised over the motives for killing her, there was also considerablediscussion over the ‘activist’ nature of her journalism.  Those from the ‘mainstream’ media questioned whether she was a journalist at all, as if her journalism was not the ‘real’, non-partisan or objectivity based journalism of mainstream media. 
 
Gauri Lankesh belonged to what is referred to as ‘activist’ media. Writing in The Hoot, Prof B P Sanjaya traces her brand of journalism to her father P Lankesh, who was part of ‘a new brand of writers believing in “Bandaya” (revolt/resistance/protest) literature. Terms such as insurgent journalism and counter hegemonic journalism have been used to describe the journal and its practices.
 
What tends to get obfuscated in these semantics is the fact that her media was also an ‘alternative’ media. It positioned itself clearly on social and political issues and either as an alternative or in opposition to the views predominant in ‘mainstream’ media. While Gauri Lankesh brought out the ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’ in Kannada and, in the last few years, also wrote extensively in English for news websites. Gauri Lankesh Patrike was independent and free of sponsorship and advertising.
 
In this peculiar argument that seeks to privilege ‘mainstream’ media as more authentic, many structural flaws of the mainstream are blithely erased. Advertising drives mainstream media. But its also the business and political ownership that seek to maintain a stranglehold over the media’s spheres of influence in society. Media houses increasingly operate as professional corporate brands that lend theirmedia platforms to all manner of event-based advocacy – from literary festivals and cultural events, saving rivers to swacch bharat to aman across the borders to marathons and runs for womens’ safety and whatnot.
 
Ironically, while they enhance their brand values, they refuse to pay fair and legal wages to their employees. The mainstream media is united in faulty or non-implementation of wage board wages for permanent employees, arm-twisting them to take contractual employment. Layoffs and large-scale retrenchments have been the norm over the last few years.
 
For those of us who may shrug and say that’s just the way the news-business runs and is hardly pertinent to a discussion on the killing of Gauri Lankesh, let’s look at another issue: newsgathering. Journalists have rued the shrinking budget for newsgathering on the ground. How much do media houses that support rallies for rivers for instance, actually spend on legwork that reporters need to do to report on the state of our rivers or the real reasons for water pollution along rivers, the environmental degradation or the extensive sand mining that destroys river beds or even track the policies and programs of governments at the state and centre on such issues. Of course, while it would be instructive to look at the budgets for these and compare them with the amount spent for advocacy related events, it is important to examine the thrust of the advocacy itself (but that’s another ballgame).
 
Many of the journalists who were attacked or killed followed such stories. These freelancers and contractual employees were in a position of extreme vulnerability, compounded by the fact that the media houses that used their stories simply ‘played dead’ when these journalists were killed. They either denied they ever worked for them even in the face of evidence like press cards or emails giving them assignments barely a week before their deaths!
 
In only one instance – the killing of Mid-Day journalist J Dey in Mumbai in 2011, was an English language journalist felled. While in three other instances of journalists killed in 2017, journalistic motives are still to be established, in all other instances, journalists who were killed operated in regional media, were stringers or contracted by bigger non-english language media houses, or, like Jagendra Singh who died of immolation, had eschewed print media for digital media, publishing on social media networks like Facebook.
 
Unlike Gauri Lankesh, they operated as lone rangers, often operating on the fringes of or were part of mainstream media. They did not build media institutions. They may have participated in or even set up social organisations with others but their spheres of influence were much more localized and investigations into those who killed them, more often than not, pointed towards local businesspeople or corrupt politicians or mafias controlling illegal mining or smuggling.
 
Gauri Lankesh also wrote of all such nefarious activities in her publication ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’ but she was a social activist too.  And her opposition to hindutva politics and anathema towards the BJP, which her friends and supporters believe had led to her death, is well documented.
 
Gauri Lankesh saw the connections between the large scale localized and national corruption, the patently unequal policies and programmes of the government and the ideological framework of hindutva that sought to damage and alter the social and political fabric of the country. She used journalism to speak out and did not merely write about issues but stepped out of the confines of her medium to actively push for the change she wrote about. She ‘mainstreamed’ issues that needed to be spoken about and written about.
 
It is this kind of journalism which was sought to be silenced.
 

The post It’s the Activist Journalist, who Gauri Lankesh Epitomised, that is Silenced appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Her lawyer B T Venkatesh is clear that the killing was a sinister and pre-planned act by ‘Hindu terror units’, and not linked to the defamation cases against her.Exactly two years and five days after the fatal shooting of writer M M Kalburgi, the dastardly killing of journalist and editor Gauri Lankesh yesterday is being seen as a clear indication that Hindutva forces are still at work, chillingly picking out the targets on their list of intellectuals and writers inimical to them.

While a number of theories have sprung up on the motives for the killing, including her conviction in a defamation case filed by Dharwad’s BJP MP, Prahlaad Joshi and a BJP leader Umesh Dushi in November 2016, her lawyer B T Venkatesh is clear that the killing was a sinister and pre-planned act by ‘Hindu terror units’.

“Let us say it loud and clear. Hindu terror units killed Gauri Lankesh. She opposed the RSS, the BJP and these hindutva forces and this killing is the silencing of that voice against hate politics. It had nothing to do with all the defamation cases filed against her”, said Adv Venkatesh.

Talking to The Hoot a day after the killing, he said Lankesh had umpteen number of cases across the state. “I have been defending her in a number of these cases. This case was a small one in Hubbali and we appealed within 30 days and the sentence was suspended”, he said.

This was a very systematically organized and planned assassination that was carried out in an identical manner to the killing of Prof Kalburgi, he said, adding that hindutva terror units had recruited people and organized sleeper cells to carry out their killings. “Even Prof Kalburgi had something like 20 defamation cases against him before he was killed”
 
“They knew her routine – that she would put the paper to bed on Tuesday and on Wednesday, she would go to her farm. Yes, she did get threats but she has been getting threats since 2004, when she took up the Idgah Maidan case and opposed the withdrawal of Uma Bharti from the case (relating to violence in Hubli over the hoisting of the national flag in Idgah Maidan in 1994).
Adv Venkatesh added that conviction was also pretty common in a great many defamation cases and felt that it was inconsequential. “Anyone who tries to focus on the defamation cases as a possible motive for her killing must be joking. As a journalist, you should know that defamation cases are so common,” he said.

In fact, even Prof Kalburgi had something like 20 defamation cases against him and before he was killed, he had a conversation with Adv Venkatesh about how difficult it was to travel across the state to defend himself.

“Hindutva forces use every ploy, including the courts. They know that fighting multiple cases can be exhausting, with time taken away from other work to handle these cases. They have lawyers everywhere, at least five lawyers in every taluka who work for free. Whereas we don’t even have lawyers to fight our cases. They (right-wing forces) follow simple rules and have a one-point programme of hatred. But we are anarchic and have multiple discussions, we don’t have a common discourse and disagree on how to fight these forces,” he said.

Gauri Lankesh, who travelled across the length and breadth of Karnataka for her cases, turned the resultant harassment of court proceedings into an opportunity. “Every hearing used to be a chance for her to hold a meeting outside the court. She used it to the hilt, stating her views loud and clear. She wrote strongly and she spoke forcefully in English, in Kannada. Wherever there was communal violence against Muslims, against dalits or hatred being spread, she would go there.

Concurring with Venkatesh’s opinion, her friend and colleague Shiv Sundar told The Hoot that Gauri had at least 15 defamation cases going on.  This killing was part of the targeted violence that right-wing forces had unleashed all over Karnataka, especially in coastal Karnataka, he felt.
 

 
While Gauri Lankesh had been facing threats for her outspoken views for several years now, the immediate trigger for the killing was definitely the racheting up of an already communally vitiated atmosphere after the visit of BJP President Amit Shah in Karnataka last month, he felt. On Sept 5, the BJP persisted with holding a Mangaluru Chalo rally despite the state government’s refusal of permission to it.

Gauri Lankesh had been a strident critic of the bike rally, fearing an escalation in violence in the coastal areas of the state. As it is, the BJP is preparing for elections in Karnataka and the instances of communal violence had seen a marked increased over the last two years. Her newspaper had documented the killings.

Another possible trigger was that she spoke and wrote extensively on the Basavanna tradition of anti-casteism, rationality and secularism. She was critical when prominent members of the community had shifted allegiance to the BJP. She faced threats but she was impetuous and would not be cowed down, Shivsundar said, adding that close friends had asked her to be cautious and mute her views but that was simply not in her nature.

Asked if her work on the surrender and rehabilitation of Maoists and whether there was a ‘naxalite’ angle to the killing, as alleged by a prominent English language television channel, Adv Venkatesh felt that such conjectures only served to destabilize the investigation. We need to state this loud and clear: it is the work of hindutva terror units. Gauri knew this. She never spoke any other language,” he reiterated.
 
Hindutva terror in Karnataka
In 2015, after the killing of Prof Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh spoke to this writer about the ‘hit list’ of those rationalists who were seen as a threat by hindutva forces. She said:
“We’ve made a list based on how many times the Hindutva groups spew venom on us and how strongly”, she says. First on the list is writer and rationalist K.S. Bhagwan, then writer Yogesh Master who has been attacked for his fictional work, and then another writer, Banjagere Jayaprakash.

Gauri Lankesh had then said that she was fourth on the list.

While Hndutva terror groups operate in every part of the country, they have managed to grow strong roots in Karnataka, especially coastal Karnataka. Gauri Lankesh travelled extensively in Mangalore,  infamous as Hindutva’s laboratory. The anti-communal front she had formed along with others, the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedikehad grown into a major force, Venkatesh said, adding that Gauri Lankesh was an institution by herself. “Otherwise, they would not have targeted her.” She went on the offensive, was very vocal and could reach people. She spoke and wrote in Kannada and English and she had the legacy of her father, one of the finest journalists of Karnataka, he said. 

She received a lot of hate mail and had been threatened a number of times, said Adv Venkatesh, adding that the statement of Bengaluru’s police commissioner T Suneel Kumar was not entirely correct. She did not seek police protection, that was not her nature, Adv Venkatesh said. She firmly believed that she lived in a free country and that she had a Constitutional right to speak freely and a Constitutional guarantee that her life was precious and would be protected.

It is this confidence she had in a Constitutional pledge for all citizens of India that the State is today called upon to uphold.
 
Geeta Seshu is a independent journalist based in Mumbai and contributing editor of The Hoot. 

Courtesy: The Hoot

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Source: shanidev.com Police on Tuesday, January 26, 2016, foiled the women march toward Shani Shingnapur temple and detained many activists including Bhumata …

Six busloads of members of the Pune-based, Bhumata Brigade who sought entry into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar in Maharashtra, to secure for themselves a right enshrined in the Indian Constitution – that there shall be no discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth were arrested this Republic Day. Trupti Desai, a leader of the brigade had announced that, if they were refused entry, they would persist with their programme, albeit unconventionally, in a helicopter descent. But the police also thwarted this. Earlier, the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS) had issued a call for the mobilisation of Hindu men to ‘protect’ religious tradition.
 
The Bhumata Brigade, which came into being in 2007, has taken up a number of other issues. News reports detail its support for the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement, farmers’ agitations on crop-loans, the Ajit Bank's multi-crore scam, etc. On January 11, rattled by its announcement to take on the temple, the Shani Shingnapur Temple Trust appointed a woman, Anita Shetye, as its chairperson, and another woman, Shalini Lande, on its board of trustees. 
 
The storm the Bhumata Brigade has kicked up over the entry of women to this temple is matched, perhaps in a more muted fashion in the legal arena, with discussions of the right of women to two other places of worship – the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala and the Haji Ali dargah in Mumbai. In all these places, women of these faiths are demanding the Constitutional right to practice their faith and worship alongside men, without any discrimination.
 
Last year, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan filed a writ petition before the Bombay High Court to demand the right to enter the mazaar of the Haji Ali dargah and the Indian Young Lawyers' Association (IYLA) filed a writ petition to seek the entry of pre-menopausal women and post-puberty girls into the Sabarimala temple in Kerala.
 
In both petitions, significant aspects of constitutional rights are at stake, though the trustees of these places of worship have proffered different reasons for restricting or banning the entry of women. While Article 15 of the Constitution of India prohibits any discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, the IYLA petition has challenged the ban under Art 14 (equality before law) and Arts 25 and 26 (freedom of religion) of the Constitution. The ban on the (Sabarimala) temple itself is enforced under rule 3 (b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965.

There has been much debate on the myths and the reasoning behind the restrictions (including the arduous trek to the shrine through forests that used to be populated by wild animals) but the Travancore Devaswom Board, which manages the Samarimala Temple, maintains that the restriction is necessary because the presence of women of reproductive age would disturb the celibate god. (See https://sabrangindia.in/article/unholy-and-unconstitutional-ban-women-sabarimala)

The Shani temple does not specify any clear reason why women are not allowed into what is called the ‘foundation’ – the raised granite wall which encloses the idol. Pictures and information of the Shani idol on the website of the temple (a tri-lingual one – available in English, Marathi and Hindi) clear show the foundation was added later on the donation of a local trader. Interestingly, the HJS site says that prohibitions on women is a matter of ‘spiritual science’ and quotes the Sanatan Prabhat to say that a movement must be started to protect religious traditions!

The Haji Ali DargahTrust proffers more prosaic administrative reasons. Here, women were allowed till as recently as 2012, when a decision was taken to prohibit the entry of women on grounds of their safety and security!

While the hearings on the Sabarimala temple entry are on, the Bombay High Court has decided to wait for the Supreme Court’s decision before giving its verdict on the BMMA’s petition on entry into the Haji Ali dargah.

      
 
For several years now, women have been trying to push the ossified frameworks that govern religious practice. There are instances of daughters of the Hindu faith who performed the funeral rites of their parents (the latest being Mallika Sarabai who lit the funeral pyre of her mother and celebrated danseuse Mrinalini Sarabai just last week). There are less publicised instances of Hindu widows who participate in the weddings of their children. Hindu women have chanted the Vedas and other Sanskrit shlokas and some of them also conduct religious ceremonies.
 
Hitherto, these attempts to push the envelope were seen as private acts that impacted family or friends and the immediate community. Even when women worshippers tried to enter the Sabarimala shrine or the Shani Shingnapur temple, they were seen as stray rebels or worshippers who entered the forbidden area by mistake and elaborate purification rituals were undertaken to ‘restore’ the sanctity of the shrines.
 
But now, it is clear these efforts have entered the more public realm of organised religion, especially with trusts that command a lot of influence and manage substantial funds. The trusts are accountable to the laws of the land and do have state and political patronage, either in the form of long leases on the land they occupy or in the composition of and appointment of the trustees and administration.
 
Granted, the struggle to seek their rightful place before their gods is a fundamental expression of the faith of these women. But the edifice of religious practice is not merely a question of faith. When women confront these structures, as they have done and are continuing to do in matters of personal law, matrimony, maintenance, child custody, property and inheritance rights, they have had to wage protracted battles to secure the most minimal of rights. The restrictions on the entry of women into places of worship are only one manifestation of the patriarchy and misogyny that marks much of organized religion. Much more than mere tradition is at stake here.
 
 (This writer is a senior and independent journalist)
 

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2015 will go down in history as the year institutional sanction for censorship quick-marched along with vigilante censorship on the streets. Step for step, an increasingly saffronised censorship has permeated the world of the arts, theatre, films, book publishing, educational curriculum and has claimed the lives of writers, disrupted film and theatre screenings, pulped books and mandated the use of text- books that distort history.

The dastardly killing of 82-year old CPI leader Govind Pansare in Kolhapur on February 20, 2015 and 77-year old Kannada writer Professor MM Kalburghi in Dharwad on August 30, 2015 was a chilling indication of the lengths fundamentalist groups will go to plan these assassinations. These eminent rationalists have been writing and speaking out over the saffronisation of society and the killings sought to silence them.

Ironically, the very lumpenisation of these saffron brigades that Dabholkar and Kalburgi spoke out against claimed the life of an ordinary farm-worker, Mohammed Akhlaq, who was brutally lynched in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh on September 28, 2015 by villagers and neighbours over the suspicion that he had beef in his fridge. Instigated by rumours spread by so-called religious leaders, the villagers fell prey to incitement by leaders of a number of saffron organisations – called the Rashtravadi Pratap Sena, the Samadhan Sena and the Ram Sena – that had sprung up in the village, according to the report of a fact-finding committee of academics and civil society members.

Apart from these killings, there are numerous manifestations of saffron censorship, forced by political parties and vigilante groups who made full use of institutional support to assert their brand of religio-cultural nationalism and morality. Here are some instances:
 

• Tamil writer Perumal Murugan announced his ‘death’ as a writer on his Facebook page, a day after being forced to sign an apology and enter into an agreement with caste and Hindu groups in the presence of the District Revenue Officer (DRO) V R Subbulaxmi on January 13 that he would not write anything that offended them![1] Since December 2014, the Hindu Munnani, BJP and RSS leaders joined with caste groups to hound him. [2]
• The Brahman Ekta Seva Samstha filed a police complaint against comedy group All India Bakchod for a roast which they said was vulgar and denigrated Hindu values.[3]
• Mathrubhumi newspaper’s literary critic M M Basheer was forced to terminate his series on the Ramayana after Hindu groups called the newspaper office to complain about a Muslim writing on the Ramayana! [4]
• The Shiv Sena forced the cancellation of performances by Pakistani ghazal singer Ghulam Ali in Mumbai[5] and Pakistani sufi group Mekaal Hasan Band in Ahmedabad[6] and blackened the face of Observer Research Foundation director Sudheendra Kulkarni for organizing the launch of a book by former Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri in Mumbai.[7]
• Tamil writer ‘Puliyur’ Murugesan was beaten up by caste based Hindu groups for his short stories that allegedly showed women in a bad light.[8]
• FTII students went on a 139-day strike to protest the saffronisation of the institution’s governing council by the appointment of persons who had little or no knowledge of cinema but who were close to the ruling BJP. Their protest fell on deaf ears.[9]
• CBFC chairperson Leela Samson resigned to protest political interference[10] and was quickly replaced by Hindi film-maker Pahlaj Nihalani.[11] The latter immediately decided to ban swear words, sexually explicit scenes and drag his feet on the award of a certificate for the documentary ‘En Dino Muzaffarnagar’ by the late Shubradeep Chakravorty and Meera Chaudhary. [12]
• Hindi writer Uday Prakash and Nayantara Sehgal returned their Sahitya Akademi awards to protest the killing of MM Kalburghi and the Dadri lynching, sparking off a major spontaneous movement of more than 70 writers, film-makers and artists who returned their awards in protest. [13]
• Right-wing activists threatened performers of ‘tiatr’, the Goan satire theatre form[14]

 
And how did this government respond to the concerns of the writers and members of the film fraternity?

By debunking or belittling them. While Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the writers who returned the awards were a ‘manufactured revolt’[15], the clamour over his silence on the Dadri lynching forced Prime Minister Narendra Modi to say that Hindus and Muslims must fight poverty, not one another.
What is clear is the sense of entitlement that the Hindutva groups have got from a government that is fraternal, that either silently looks on or makes these incredible and unconvincing statements to cover up its lapses.
The censorship has only continued the pattern set in 2014. Take a quick look:

• Penguin India was forced to sign an agreement with Hindutva organization Shiksha Bachao Andolan to withdraw and pulp all remaining copies of Wendy Doniger’s book ‘The Hindus: an alternative history’.[16]
• Members of Hindutva groups targeted organisers of the VIBGYOR film festival for the screening of documentary film ‘Ocean of Tears’[17]
• Orient Blackswan decided to withdraw 'Communalism and Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad since 1969' by Dr Megha Kumar.[18]
• The Globus theatre in Mumbai refused to screen the documentary 'The Gujarat Promise' for fear of a BJP backlash[19]

•  Hindu group demanded a ban on the film Ragini MMS 2 and the deportation of porn star Sunny Leone[20]
•  There were attempts to stall Rang Rasiya, the film on Raja Ravi Varma[21]
•  The Shiv Sena in Mumbai forced a ban on the performance of Pakistani artists in a concert in Mumbai[22]
•  ABVP groups tried to stop a poetry and music perfomance by Dalit group Kabir Kala Manch in Bangalore[23]
• The VHP halted the staging of a play in Chandigarh[24]
•  The Kalaghoda festival in Mumbai stopped the staging of a play ‘Ali J’ after Hindu groups call it 'anti-national', police advised organisers of the Evam theatre group not to stage the play in Chennai[25]
• The Hindu Janjagurti Samiti demanded that MTV stop the show Splitsvilla.[26]

 
Of course, the Hindutva groups aren’t the only ones to adopt unconstitutional and illegal methods to enforce their diktats. A fringe Christian group, Catholic Secular Forum, decided to protest the staging of a play ‘Agnes of God’, in Mumbai, because it was allegedly anti-catholic. But the play was staged amidst police protection.[27]

And the protests and complaints by sections of Urdu media and cultural groups against the Urdu editor Shirin Dalvi for making use of a cover of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is another example of offence-taking by Muslim groups.[28]
 
Last year, in Nagaland, the Ao Senden, the apex body of the Ao tribe in Nagaland, used social boycott as a weapon against Naga journalist Monalisa Changkija, author of ‘Cogitating for a better deal’. Like the majoritarian Hindutva groups, these social groups assert their own brand of majoritarian beliefs and sentiments, with violence if necessary.[29]

Free speech is seriously in peril when those who speak or sing of the dark times are attacked and silenced.

(Geeta Seshu is a senior journalist and Consulting Editor of the mediawatchsite The Hoot. She has been coordinating The Hoot’s free speech project since 2010)

The post Quick March of State and Vigilante Censorship appeared first on SabrangIndia.

For those of us who rely on our Facebook friends and Twitter accounts on social media for our news, the only information of police brutality on protesting students at the #Occupy UGC protest march to Parliament on December 9, 2015 were the photographs of bleeding students, with swollen and bruised faces and bandaged heads, and the spray of water cannons.

Print and broadcast media, barring a few exceptions, decided the story wasn’t simply worth covering.  Or, if it did, it was only in the context of traffic disruptions, as the Delhi edition of Hindustan Times (HT) decided on Dec 10, 2015!

On the same day, there was another vigorous protest by youth from Manipur but, curiously, HT decided the news wasn’t worth covering, except in a passing mention in a ‘crime’ report on a stabbing attack on one of the organisers of the protest!

Clearly, there was no attempt to join the dots or even find out if there was anything more to the attack.
The Delhi edition of The Times of India on the same day, that is December 10, decided a photo-story on page 4 would suffice, with a picture of the police beating up students and a caption that also provided the police with its exit option: that the students were throwing stones at the police!

Of course, as this video shows, there isn’t a single stone on the very clean streets of Janpath and nor can one spot a single stone thrower!

What one sees, quite clearly, was a very spirited, but peaceful, march that managed to break one cordon quite easily and effortlessly. When the students proceeded ahead and neared the second cordon, a police vehicle and presumably also, police from the first cordon, which allowed themselves to be pushed aside, begin to close in. And beat up the ambushed students from behind! The police particularly targeted women protestors, shoving their lathis between their thighs and groping them even when they were in the three buses they (the police) deployed to take the students to the police station.
 
It was only this this report by Rahul M, an independent journalist, in The Caravan that gives us a comprehensive account of what actually transpired and why the students were agitating. For the media, the student’ protest over privatization of higher education and the shift in the state’s commitment to universities as centres of higher learning to the WTO-mandated ‘commercial’ ventures are not stories worth giving attention to.
 
This government has clearly decided to ignore the anger of students across the country – whether over the opaque appointment procedures that enabled the saffronisation in the FTII, Pune, the protest over the scrapping of, and subsequent changes in eligibility criteria of the non-NET research fellowships, the ban on the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle in IIT-Madras or the curbs on the beef festival in Osmania University, the sexual harassment in Jadavpur University, suicides of dalit students in the IITs, discrimination against dalit students in other premier institutes, And, if the media follows suit, what does one make of its agenda?
 
 (This writer is a senior and independent journalist. She spoke to some of the protestors at the Parliament Street Police station where the students had been detained after the march)

The post Where is the news? Peaceful students protest faces police brutality in Delhi appeared first on SabrangIndia.